A LAND SINGING TWIN ANTHEMS

Once known as Libertas, the presidential mansion in Pretoria is now officially named Mahlamba'ndlopfu (Dawn of a New Era) in Shangaan. The Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vereeniging region, South Africa's industrial heart, is now simply called Gauteng (Place of Gold) in Sotho. The Hendrik Verwoerd Dam (named for the architect of apartheid) has become the Gariep Dam, gariep being an ancient African word for wilderness.

Some might say that in the year since Nelson Mandela became President, only the names have changed in the new South Africa, that the blacks in their shantytowns and the whites in their high-walled suburban homes live no differently than they did before. And, of course, there would be truth to that, for the lives of most South Africans have not altered materially. But anyone who has spent more than an afternoon in the old apartheid South Africa, anyone who has visited even for a week the grim, oppressive, lopsided country run by ironfisted Afrikaners in Homburg hats, anyone who knew it then and sees it now knows the country is utterly altered. A year of freedom has filled blacks and whites alike with pride, with a sense of renewal and, most important, hope.

Yes, it is true that Mandela's government of national unity has so far built fewer than 1,000 of the 1 million houses it promised to construct in five years. It is also true that the unemployment rate among blacks remains at 41% and that the whites still own 75% of the land, although they make up only 13% of the population. But it is not by numbers that the new South Africa must be measured; rather it is by the psychological sea change that this long-troubled land has undergone.

In the run-up to the polling, hundreds were dying in clashes between Mandela's African National Congress and its Zulu rival, the Inkatha Freedom Party. On election eve, bombs set by white extremists shook Johannesburg. Civil war seemed all too possible. Yet one year later, blacks and whites feel released from a 350-year-old burden. "I am excited, relieved," says Phambili Gama, a black engineer in Johannesburg. "Psychologically we feel liberated, even if many economic changes are still to be realized." Beverley Dalton, a white Cape Town public relations executive, puts it more directly: "My world is blacker-and better. The tension has gone out of our lives." Now at national gatherings, A.N.C. leaders can be heard singing the Boers' beloved Die Stem (The Call), while at rugby matches, thick-necked Afrikaans players stand at attention for the black liberation and nationalist hymn Nkosi Sikelel i Afrika (God Bless Africa).

Twin national anthems are emblematic of Mandela's Masakhane campaign (masakhane is an Nguni word meaning "Let us build each other") to achieve national reconciliation. The campaign, in part, is an effort by the A.N.C. to end the culture of protest among blacks that the party once encouraged. The results have been heartening. Before the election, 80% of the residents of Soweto, the teeming black township near Johannesburg, refused to pay their electricity bills. Today nearly 70% pay them. In the 1970s Ezekial Morailane, a school-bus driver, began withholding his rent to the Soweto Council for his matchbox house. Today he pays it regularly and is even working off his debt. "Now that the country is in the hands of the rightful people," he says, "I'll sweep the streets of Johannesburg if they ask me."