Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 27, 1994                   TAG: 9404270106
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA                                LENGTH: Medium

WILL RIGHTS BRING NEW WRONGS?

The failures elsewhere in Africa haunt the birth of a free South Africa. The question that preoccupies many whites and not a few blacks as they approach the country's first free elections this week is whether, after the euphoria is over, South Africa will decline into the division and misery that seem to be the curse of the continent.

South Africa is different, answer the optimists, and they are right. But it is also in some ways the same, counter the pessimists.

Here are some of the reasons for hope and despair. South Africa is the richest nation in Africa, but rich is not enough. Other African countries were blessed with gold and diamonds, and the wealth was squandered.

South Africa invested its mineral wealth to create an industrial society that manufactures steel and automobiles and computers, and produces abundant, cheap electricity.

The infrastructure is generally up to world standards: Highways and ports, railroads and airports, banks and insurance companies. Cellular telephones.

Blacks paid a fearsome price to build this industrial machine. Their families were sundered by a migrant labor system, their labor was exploited, their hopes of advancement were denied.

But Francis Wilson, a professor of economics at the University of Cape Town, speculates that industry has also contributed to political stability.

As blacks from around the country were drawn into the industrial heartland around Johannesburg seeking jobs, they also encountered each other, and learned a kind of coexistence that is mirrored in the country's recent, consensus-oriented politics.

As in other African countries, whites have maintained a monopoly on the skills that run the industry, the farms and the civil service. But elsewhere, the whites were relatively few and they fled when colonialism ended, taking their talents and capital. Here, whites are 5 million out of 40 million, and most of them are staying - and playing a major role in the transition.

``Every time independence came in the rest of the Africa, the whites fled to the nearest colonial country - from Kenya to Zambia, from Zambia to Rhodesia,'' said Eugene Nyati of the Center for African Studies. ``Now they have nowhere else to run. We are going to retain a whole lot of them. This is a luxury other African countries did not have.''

While belligerents like white Afrikaner Resistance Movement leader Eugene Terre'Blanche command little sympathy among whites and probably do not pose a threat to the next government, they could become South Africa's Ku Klux Klan. Through acts of terror and bullying of blacks, they could incite a backlash.