Mandela takes fight to last Boer frontier: Afrikaner diehards beat the war drums

A CHUNKILY built white man in a baseball cap strolled past Bothaville post office with a bag of groceries in his right hand and a black automatic tucked into a holster on his left hip. A dozen blacks were standing in a queue outside the post office, waiting to use the public phone. No one gave the man with the gun a second glance.

It was three o'clock on Friday afternoon, the sun was beating down, God was in his heaven and all seemed right with the Bothaville world. Half a mile east of the town centre lived the 4,500 whites; two miles west, the 45,000 blacks. The white residential area was all large, spacious homes, wide, empty streets and rolling lawns. Birds sang in the trees. In Khotsong, the black township, there were no birds nor trees, nor lawns. The houses were small and brown, the roads narrow, dusty, unpaved.

Bothaville, named after the Afrikaner farmer who founded the town in 1891, is in the Orange Free State, in the heart of the country, 150 miles south-west of Johannesburg. At first glance, it is the land the new South Africa forgot. In truth, it is the land the old South Africa remembers too well. Here is where diehard Afrikaners, 'bitter-enders', plan to draw the line against democracy and establish their independent Volkstaat. Here the answer will be provided to the only significant question remaining in South African politics: whether the white right will go to war. Already the signs are that it may.

Three weeks ago the African National Congress office in Bothaville was bombed. In the past two months 11 bombings have been recorded in the Free State, 16 in neighbouring Western Transvaal. So far no one has been killed, but almost all the targets have been associated in one way or another with the ANC. On Thursday, for example, a bomb exploded outside the home of a farmer who recently converted to the ANC.

When Johan Potgieter woke up on Friday morning the thought struck him that he too might soon find himself on the receiving end of a right-wing bomb. But he had made up his mind. Nelson Mandela was coming to town. He, as the town clerk of Bothaville, had been specially invited by the ANC president to attend an election campaign rally in Khotsong that morning, and he would go.

Mr Mandela made a brief stop at the bombed ANC office in town before proceeding to the township. The government is as aware as the ANC that Mr Mandela's assassination is the single event that would guarantee South Africa's collapse into chaos, so he arrived in an armour-plated Mercedes, escorted by a convoy headed by two police cars.

'What the right doesn't realise,' Mr Mandela said in a conversation at the ANC office, 'is that so far it is only blacks who have been dying in the political violence. If this continues we will be forced to take counter-measures, and both blacks and whites will be dying.'

At Khotsong's small football stadium, amid scenes of cheerful pandemonium, the whole township turned up to catch a glimpse of the man most of black South Africa has come to see as a living god. On the podium, three rows behind Mr Mandela, sat Mr Potgieter, the only man in the township wearing a dark suit and tie.

Half-way through his speech Mr Mandela turned to him and asked him to stand up. This man, Mr Mandela told the crowd, was not a member of the ANC. But as the manager of the local town council he was doing his duty and working in the interests of the whole community, black and white. 'That,' he said, 'is the hope of the future.' The crowd cheered.

An hour later, as Khotsong still basked in the after-glow of its greatest moment, Mr Potgieter was back in his air-conditioned office in town. Why had he shown up at the rally?

'I thought about it long and hard last night and I decided I had to make a stand. I believe in the new South Africa, you see. I've always thought apartheid was a filthy thing. These people who want to keep things the way they are, or get their Afrikaner Volkstaat, are guided only by selfishness. We whites have had it so easy under apartheid. They don't want to lose that. So what they do - and it's the majority of whites in Bothaville - is they shut their minds to the outside world, they hear what they want to hear and they believe in fantasies like the Volkstaat.'

Chris Venter, a Conservative Party town councillor, is one of these believers. An accountant, white-haired, in his early sixties, he was gentle, rather withdrawn. But he communicated an unswerving resolve to see his dream of a Volkstaat come to pass.

No one, however, has even got as far as drawing up a map of the Afrikaner state. How did he know Bothaville would be accommodated? He smiled, a little embarrassed. 'Our leaders are attending to that.'

But here in Bothaville whites were outnumbered by blacks by 10 to one? 'Yes, I see this is a problem. But we will find a way. If there is a Volkstaat, and there will be a Volkstaat, then whites obviously will have the voting rights because this is their territory and they will govern it. But this is not an antagonistic view of Khotsong. We will assist the blacks to govern themselves.'

Could it work? 'It's workable. It can be done.' How? 'Our leaders are attending to that.' But had he seen the response to Mr Mandela a few hours earlier? 'Yes. I must say I was surprised. I had expected riots.' Hadn't that told him that a momentum for democracy had developed among the black community, which had never existed in the tranquil apartheid past? Would it not require force to impose a Volkstaat? Mr Venter blushed from his neck to the roots of his hair.

His leaders were talking of war, were they not? 'Yes . . . But that's being attended to - at the highest level. We have to wait and see, but I have no fear. We will succeed. At the moment we're putting on pressure.' Like the bombs in the ANC offices? He blushed again. 'We're putting on pressure. And we hope for some sort of agreement with the government and the ANC. But you ask about war. Yes, our leaders are attending to that and, yes, it still looms.'