African National Congress

Clement Keto's life is a tale of the struggle of black citizens in two countries. The nationally recognized scholar and historian of African American culture - just selected for Who's Who in the World - sees contrasts between the struggles of blacks for equality in the United States and in South Africa, his native land. Apartheid's hold on black South Africans is different from the forms of injustice that black Americans faced when they waged their battle for civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s, said Keto, a professor of African American history at Temple University, in a recent interview at his Sicklerville home.

Beauty Jooste remembers the day Nelson Mandela got out of prison in sweet, vivid detail: "We took the train into the city to hear him speak on the Grand Parade, and we were dancing and singing. " Everything seemed possible that glorious day three years ago. "We would be free, and we would be equal," said Josste, 28, a shop clerk who is classified as a mixed-race "colored" under South African race laws. "And we would be happy. " But then the whole process started to bog down.

Prison camps run by the African National Congress in four African nations in the mid- to late 1980s were brutal, disease-ridden cesspools where dissidents were routinely beaten, tortured and sometimes killed, according to a report released yesterday by Amnesty International. "This pattern of gross abuse was allowed to go unchecked for many years, not only by the ANC's leadership in exile, but also by the governments of the African states, who allowed the ANC to set up bases and prisons on their territory," the human rights group's report concluded.

The excesses of South Africa's security apparatus have long been known - the terror its troopers inflicted on the black townships, the death of prisoners in detention, the cattle prods, whips and water cannon, the torture and assassination. All of it in futile support of the unsupportable, the apartheid system that has fallen formally (if not totally) as President F. W. deKlerk and his one-time prisoner, African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela, struggle to shape a new future.

Rock Newman, Riddick Bowe's manager, had just begun to relate the details of a conversation he'd had with African National Congress president Nelson Mandela earlier in the day when Pierre Coetzer's party walked out of yesterday's press conference to hype tomorrow's World Boxing Association heavyweight elimination bout between the top-rated Coetzer and No. 2-rated Bowe. Coetzer's promoter, Cedric Kushner, said Coetzer, a white South African, and his manager-trainer, Alan Toweel Sr., had decided beforehand that they would leave if any mention were made of South Africa's national policy of apartheid, or racial separation.

Athol Fugard, looking a bit like John the Baptist as played by Willie Nelson, if Willie Nelson had taken better care of himself, stroked his dirty- gray beard and let a deep network of wrinkles spread across his tawny face. "I am very aware that the days of apartheid have passed," said the man who has been hailed on both sides of the Atlantic as the greatest living playwright in the English language. Fugard is not sure how it will end - through continuing negotiations between the white government and the African National Congress, or through a revolt he is certain their failure would produce.

While everyone here was all gaga yesterday over the moviemaking of actor- comedian Eddie Murphy, a top official of the African National Congress visiting the Capitol did not go entirely unnoticed. Sindiso Mfenyana, administrative secretary to ANC President Nelson Mandela, was kicked off the set of Murphy's movie. "Hey, you're not supposed to be here," someone from the production crew said as Mfenyana walked through the Rotunda, according to a Casey administration official who accompanied Mfenyana.

Just one day before the reopening of historic constitutional talks, the South African government and the African National Congress appear unable to agree on the shape and powers of an interim government that would transfer power from whites to a multiracial democracy. Despite five months of closed-door talks, and breakthroughs in other key areas, the two sides have yet to agree on this most important issue - and now only a single, 11th-hour bargaining session remains this afternoon to resolve the dilemma.

President F.W. de Klerk's first rally to attract nonwhites to his ruling National Party degenerated into a gravel-tossing, name-calling mess yesterday, but not before thousands of blacks and mixed-race "coloreds" had turned out in "F.W. " T-shirts and buttons to cheer the head of the party that invented apartheid. De Klerk stood on a wobbly platform inside a jam-packed tent in this "colored" township while thousands of supporters cheered merrily and several dozen African National Congress (ANC)

Never had South Africa's white electorate faced such a stark choice - to shovel away the corpse of apartheid or try, one last time, to revive the monster on its slab. Had it voted to turn back the clock - rejecting State President F.W. de Klerk's steadfast call to move forward - the long-suffering nation might have plunged into chaos or, worse, the civil war that Nelson Mandela warned of. But in one of those uncommon defining moments in history - and in what may have been the final gasp of legitimacy for hard-line white supremacists - Mr. de Klerk won overwhelming support this week to proceed with the task of undoing a system of legal oppression that had become as untenable, finally, as it was immoral at its inception in 1948.