COLUMN ONE : Markets Open to S. Africa : More of its African neighbors have sought to do business with Pretoria since it began dismantling apartheid. Diplomatic ties, though, may have to wait.

NAIROBI, Kenya —  Executives from government-owned Kenya Airways emerged from a secret meeting in Johannesburg several months ago with a big prize--a ground-breaking agreement to resume reciprocal flights between Nairobi and Johannesburg by the flagship carriers of both countries, after a gap of 27 years.

But on the way home the officials had to stop first in Gaborone, the capital of Botswana, to have their passports stamped with a Botswana visa. The reason: It is illegal under Kenya law to fly directly to Nairobi from South Africa.

It still is illegal, and that bureaucratic complication well reflects the complexities and pitfalls facing South Africa and its black-ruled neighbors as they begin to look ahead to new diplomatic and economic relations in a post-apartheid era.

The change has already begun. Since he became South Africa’s president in September, 1989, and began dismantling institutional apartheid, Frederik W. de Klerk has received red-carpet treatment on visits to six sub-Saharan African countries: Mozambique, Zaire, Zambia, Madagascar, Senegal and Ivory Coast. South Africa has opened new trade offices in Togo and Zaire to supplement those it already had in Swaziland, Lesotho, Namibia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique.

The ruling party of Ivory Coast at its annual congress last summer approved opening diplomatic relations sometime in the next few months. And Madagascar President Didier Ratsiraka, who as a young seaman was barred on racial grounds from coming ashore at a South African port in 1962, has agreed to reciprocal air flights and liberalized trade links with South Africa.

These events all mark an astonishing evolution in the atmosphere prevailing until last year.

In the period of black independence, the only African government that maintained consistent diplomatic relations with South Africa is Malawi, whose autocratic and contrary President H. Kamuzu Banda has always contended that despite their political differences with the white regime, African countries are better off talking with Pretoria than ignoring it.

That’s a viewpoint that may derive from Malawi’s vulnerability to the policy whims of neighboring South Africa, which financed the construction of a new Malawi capital but also caused it losses of $50 million a year when Malawi’s rail access through Mozambique to Indian Ocean ports was destroyed in a civil war between that country’s government and South African-backed guerrillas.

But if top-level diplomatic relations with most black-ruled countries are still far off, already the air seems to be seeping out of the anti-South Africa balloon in many places.

In August, for instance, Zambian President Kenneth D. Kaunda, a stalwart foe of apartheid whose country was home to leaders of the African National Congress during their long years of exile from South Africa, lifted a decades-old ban on Zambia’s using South African ports for imports and exports. At the same time Zambia moved to alleviate its critical fuel shortage by importing South African gasoline.

“As a result of what is now happening in South Africa, we have gained greater respectability,” says Neil van Heerden, South Africa’s director general of foreign affairs. The scene is set, he adds, “for us to take up our role as an important African country.”

There are potential benefits on both sides. South Africa stands to profit from supplying goods and services to a market until now closed to it, except informally.

Black African countries have less to sell to their southern neighbor, but they could gain development aid and technical assistance to replace what may disappear as Western donors turn more attention to Eastern Europe. They might also gain something that has proven elusive for 30 years--substantial outside investment in their economies, this time from South African businesses looking for new investment opportunities.

South Africans, for example, are among the bidders for one bank currently up for sale in Madagascar.

The prospects of integrating Africa’s largest and most powerful economy into a region that otherwise accounts for less than 2% of all world trade has many businessmen in Africa salivating over the prospects of getting lucrative agency licenses to sell South African goods in their own countries.

“The potential is enormous,” says Edward V. K. Jaycox, the World Bank’s regional vice president for Africa. “If this part of the world became acceptable partners, it would be a real economic event, important on the world scale.”

A commercial officer in a European embassy here opined, “Any (African) businessman worth his salt will look at it as worth his while to get down there” to line up distribution and joint-venture deals with South African companies.

Many African businessmen have already braved travel restrictions and official disapproval to visit South Africa. Among them is the head of Kenya Breweries, who reportedly returned from his visit wide-eyed at the prospect of importing South African brewing technology into his Tusker Beer plants.

With an economy that grows and manufactures many European-grade products, South Africa could conceivably replace Europe and America as the chief source of industrial and consumer items, according to many businessmen working in Africa.

“The whole of this area will stop looking to London and start looking to Johannesburg” for imported goods, says one East African businessman.

These include anything from military hardware, necessarily an industrial specialty of sanction-beset South Africa, to automobile assembly kits for plants in Zimbabwe and Kenya and fruits and vegetables that grow better in South Africa’s temperate climate than in the tropical zone girdling the rest of the continent. South African wines, barred by trade sanctions from European and American shops, are world-class.

“A lot of things that Ivoirians consider indispensable to their lives, like scrunchy apples, salad greens that don’t grow here and wine, are cheaper coming from South Africa than from France,” says one diplomat in Abidjan, the capital of affluent Ivory Coast.

Accordingly, planning in many countries for post-apartheid relations with South Africa has been going on for far longer than their governments admit.

Kenya Airways’s preparation for flights to Johannesburg began as long as a year ago, sources say. The airline’s purchase of three Boeing 757 aircraft, to be delivered in January, was predicated partly on its ability to use two of them to service the new Johannesburg route.

The World Bank’s Jaycox says that not only the group of so-called front-line states in southern Africa, but also the African National Congress and the Pan-African Congress, have asked his institution to draw up economic forecasts based on a new relationship between black-ruled Africa and South Africa.

But whether South Africa will be able to export prosperity to its neighbors is open to question. Although some analysts suggest that South African manufacturers might open satellite plants in neighboring countries to take advantage of their cheaper labor, others note that these businesses will be under pressure to first raise black South Africa’s standard of living by creating more jobs at home, not abroad.

So South African industry might view black Africa largely as an untapped market for its exports. The net result of increased South African involvement in Africa’s economy could be harmful competition from its better-equipped and more efficient manufacturers and growers.

A major victim could be Zimbabwe, whose once-impressive industrial structure, built during its own period of isolated white-minority rule in the 1960s and 1970s--is falling apart from old age and the total absence of outside investment during its 10 years of black-ruled independence.

“Manufacturing in Zimbabwe will crash,” says one businessman with extensive experience in Africa, “because they can’t compete with the efficiencies down south.”

For all that, South Africa’s apparent interest in reuniting with the rest of its continent is based on more than just economics. One of the enduring self-images of the Afrikaners of South Africa is that they are a white African “tribe,” a view that underscores the group’s discomfort at being so politically isolated.

“Yes, I am an African,” De Klerk said last month during his state visit to Senegal. “My family fought in the first war in Africa against colonialism (the Boer War), and I don’t want to go anywhere else in my life.”

But the road to genuine political and economic cooperation will be marked by large potholes; most business leaders and politicians knowledgeable about improving ties choose to speak off the record, for political animosity to the South African regime remains potent in black-ruled Africa.

“There’s lots of exploration going on now, but lots of countries are constrained because they want their policies and actions to remain in harmony with black South Africans,” says Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, a prominent African banker.

Anyone seeking a hint of the pitfalls still confronting South Africa’s desire to become a regional player needs look no farther than the Kenya-South Africa airline agreement.

The arrangement was announced in Nairobi on Oct. 4, with twice-weekly flights set to begin Saturday. Travel agents began booking South African tourists into Kenyan lodges, and seats on the first flights from South Africa quickly filled up. Then African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela passed through Nairobi’s airport Oct. 14 in transit. He called an airport press conference to blast the Kenyan government for what amounted to prematurely lifting sanctions.

Eleven days later, Kenya President Daniel Arap Moi, presumably cognizant that the ANC could be ruling South Africa some day soon, unilaterally suspended the airline deal until South Africa “dismantles” apartheid.

Kenya Airways officials privately acknowledge that they or the government should have informed the ANC well in advance of the impending deal, in the hopes of defusing any opposition. Business leaders and others in Nairobi now regard the affair as a damaging lost opportunity to secure South African goodwill and trade concessions.

“It would be good to be first into South Africa,” says one leading East African businessman. “You certainly don’t want to be last.”

The Weekly Review, Kenya’s most authoritative news publication, estimated the potential lost revenue for Kenya Airways at nearly $23 million a year.

Perhaps the sector with the most to lose is tourism. Kenyan travel agents estimated that easing travel restrictions could bring as many as 200,000 South Africans annually to Kenyan game parks and, even more inviting, its beach resorts. That would make South Africa the biggest source of tourists in Kenya and increase total visits, which in 1988 came to 680,000 and brought $400 million into the country, by nearly 30%.

Prospects for reinstating the flight agreement are unclear right now--the suspension has still not been publicly acknowledged in Johannesburg--but Kenyan travel professionals say the important thing is to establish the flights in time to attract beachgoers during the South African winter, beginning in April or May.

Across Africa, open links with South Africa will bring to the surface plenty of activity that has been going on quietly for as long as South Africa has been a political pariah.

Sub-Saharan Africa’s covert trade with South Africa has always been the continent’s worst-kept secret. In even the remotest up-country shops in Ivory Coast, for instance, it is possible to buy a can of Coca-Cola with the legend “Keep South Africa Tidy” embossed on the top. The labels of some consumer goods found on the shelves in Zimbabwe supermarkets are written in Afrikaans.

Other ties are more subtle. Every Friday, a new, generally full Zambia Airways plane takes off from Johannesburg for Lusaka, Zambia, and then continues to New York. Few passengers ever get on or off the flight in Lusaka, and it is considered largely a Zambia-assisted subterfuge allowing South Africans to evade an American ban on direct flights to the United States from Johannesburg.

Of the 10 countries in the so-called Southern African Development Coordination Conference (SADCC), a band of staunch anti-apartheid South African neighbors, only two--Tanzania and Angola--officially bar all South African goods. About 30% of the SADCC countries’ total imports came from South Africa in 1986, the latest year for which statistics are available. The share of SADCC exports going to South Africa, 7%, exceeds the 4% that represents trade among the conference members themselves.

About 32% of all South Africa’s manufacture exports go north to black-ruled Africa, says Kent Durr, the South African minister of trade and industry, and the figure is growing. The South African government contends that of the 51 member nations of the Organization of African Unity, only one, Libya, has no economic link with South Africa whatsoever. But only 13 of those countries acknowledge having any ties.

Ivory Coast is perhaps one of the best examples of how a country can maintain informal partnerships with South Africa. The country’s main airport at Abidjan has for years been one of the few permitted refueling stops for South African Airways planes on the way to Europe.

Ivory Coast might be one of South Africa’s most important diplomatic catches because President Felix Houphouet-Boigny is considered the doyen of African leaders, particularly in the set of former French colonies in West Africa.

Houphouet has never been a strict observer of political and economic sanctions against the apartheid regime. For instance, South African Foreign Minister Roelof F. (Pik) Botha was among the honored guests in September at the consecration of Houphouet’s massive new Roman Catholic basilica by Pope John Paul II.

But diplomats and other political observers believe that Houphouet’s opening of official ties with South Africa will be a signal to other African leaders that it is safe to move ahead on trade and diplomatic ties.

“Once Houphouet’s done it,” says a diplomatic observer in Abidjan, “quite a few others will come scurrying in his wake.”

Times staff writer Scott Kraft, in Johannesburg, contributed to this article.