A Country Where There Is No Status Quo : South Africa: The true radicals are political centrists De Klerk and Mandela, in their willingness to shift and change.

To care about current events in South Africa is to ride an emotional roller coaster. There is plenty of good news coming out of this nation in transition from racist repression to non-racial democracy, but plenty of bad news, too.

Multi-party negotiations successfully incorporate even the extreme left and right, but political violence and assassination are daily occurrences. The pass laws and public-accommodation restrictions have fallen away quickly and smoothly, but the homicide rate has doubled in three years and may now be the world’s highest.

Some of the most imaginative politicians in the world practice in South Africa, but so do hacks who are armed and dangerous. The situation cannot be described as fragile--or the negotiations would have collapsed months ago--but the process is in constant jeopardy. Few doubt the truth of the current slogan: “South Africa isn’t for sissies.”

Among the many things that the foreign visitor finds remarkable in South Africa now, three stand out with special force: the amount of change that has already happened, the degree to which the center of the political spectrum is amenable to further changes and the deep positive commitment that most of the parties to the negotiations have to South Africa as a homeland.

It is difficult to overstate the extent to which South Africans recognize how much of the shape of government is subject to change. And this has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. There is continuity, of course, in social and economic relations in 1993, and widespread recognition that the poor will still be poor next year and beyond.

Politically, however, South Africa is a country where there is no status quo. The defining importance of the current government is as a transition. While the shape of the transitional government to be has not been determined, the anticipation of change is so pervasive that the current government only holds power in consultation with the representatives of long-excluded minorities. The influence of democratic principles on government power is a present reality, not just a future prospect. Most white South Africans admit the legitimacy of this; they read anxiously about how the African National Congress (which has no formal role in the current government) feels about the future of the Kruger Game Park and the Grand Prix motor race. Discussing the transition has made it begin. And the present power of the ANC is one of the most palpable realities of the current season.

With so much in the future subject to negotiation, it has also become apparent that the real radicals in today’s South Africa are the parties and politicians of the political center. Both Frederik W. de Klerk and Nelson Mandela show a consistent willingness to consider radical changes and to shift positions, in contrast to more ideological politicians. They are genuine adversaries rather than collaborators, but the pace of current negotiations is the product of their joint commitment to the negotiation of basic change. There is an air of creativity and unpredictability in the events at the center of the South African political spectrum.

By contrast, the extreme right and extreme left are violent, intransigent and terribly predictable. Almost anybody in South Africa can fire an AK-47 these days, and there are pockets of the landscape where gunfire still masquerades as political policy. The extreme left often parallels white racist groups like the Afrikaner Resistance Movement in attacks on negotiations.

But violent rejection is no less powerful a force because it is unconstructive. Any tour of current capitals that includes Bombay, Sarajevo and Tehran bears testimony to the political power of negative thinking. So why does hope persist in Cape Town and Johannesburg? In part, the persistence of negotiation is the result of the commitment and flexibility of Mandela and De Klerk. Many have received Nobel Prizes for less than what these two have already accomplished, whatever the eventual outcome. In each crisis, they seem to have the historical sense of founding fathers.

But it is more than leadership that supports the negotiations. Most of the parties recognize that South Africa is the true home of all of the major factions at the table. Perhaps this is one byproduct of the transparently phony black “homelands” of apartheid. Citizens of all races and stations are thus united by a positive sense of homeland in the negotiations, and this is acknowledged to an extent that is not present in other hot spots around the world. The great hope of 1993 is that South Africans love their magnificent and troubled country enough to learn to share it.