Myths of a nation torn apart: Media images of South Africa suggest a mix of Bosnia and the Bronx. But it's not reality, says John Carlin

THE ZULUS and the Afrikaners are clamouring for self-determination, political violence sweeps the townships, the black youth are out of control and South Africa braces itself for ethnic civil war.

THE above is a common perception of the state of the South African nation as portrayed by powerful sectors of the world's media. The perception rests on a set of myths propagated by the old apartheid system and embraced by those who would convey the South African dynamic in a manner digestible to foreign audiences. Make South Africa sound like Bosnia, add a touch of the Bronx, and the news consumer can be persuaded briskly to believe that he or she understands what is going on. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Let us dissect that first paragraph, myth by myth.

The Zulus: Contrary to the idea lodged until very recently in the minds of perfectly intelligent people such as F W de Klerk (and, for that matter, Margaret Thatcher), South Africa's biggest tribal group is not a political monolith. Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi's Inkatha Freedom Party commands the allegiance of some Zulus but not all.

Poll after poll has shown that the majority will vote for Nelson Mandela's African National Congress in the April elections. So when Chief Buthelezi trots out his tame uncle, the Zulu king, and issues a stirring appeal on behalf of the Zulu nation, he is simply resorting to the old scoundrel's trick and seeking refuge in patriotism.

The fact is that most Zulus have no desire for self-determination and would rather be governed from Pretoria by Mr Mandela, who is not a Zulu, than by Chief Buthelezi, who is, from his tribal seat in Ulundi. Which is the main reason why, in consistently the worst political violence South Africa has seen since the mid-Eighties, Zulus continue to kill each other in Natal province. On Sunday morning 20 gunmen armed with AK-47s attacked seven houses in a Natal village and killed 21 people, the youngest a three-year- old boy, the oldest an 80-year-old man. The ANC claimed yesterday that Inkatha had carried out the killings. That may or may not be true. What is true is that both attackers and victims were Zulus.

The Afrikaners: The 50 or so right- wing groupings that claim to speak for the Afrikaner people (whites of Dutch or French Huguenot origin who speak Afrikaans at home) joined forces in May last year in a coalition they call the Afrikaner Volksfront. Its leader is General Constand Viljoen, a former chief of the South African Defence Force. Gen Viljoen says that the Volk want a Volkstaat (an independent homeland) so badly that they are prepared to go to war. What the general fails to mention is that, as with the Zulus, not all Afrikaners support his call for self-determination.

Again, the polls show that the majority of Afrikaners - ordinary people who aspire, for the most part, to no more than a quiet life - are placing their trust not in Gen Viljoen but in Mr de Klerk. Belatedly they have come around to the view, long the bedrock of ANC philosophy, that South Africa belongs to all who live in it and the best thing that could possibly happen now is for the black and white population to strike a historic deal in the hope of achieving a state of peaceful, prosperous and stable co-existence.

Political violence sweeps the townships: Some 80 per cent of the political killings in South Africa since May last year have taken place in two townships south-east of Johannesburg, Tokoza and Katlehong. The rest have occurred in the traditional cockpit of Natal. At least 90 per cent of the townships in South Africa have witnessed no political killings in the last year. The violence in Tokoza and Katlehong - South Africa's Sarajevo - has been frighteningly intense. But Soweto, South Africa's biggest black township, has been quiet. Eighteen months ago Soweto's 4 million inhabitants lived in a state of terror. Gunmen spilt out of the Inkatha-controlled migrant- dwellers' hostels and attacked homes, trains and the mini-buses most people use to get to work. Then the ANC 'comrades' retaliated and a small war began.

But none of this happened in Soweto during 1993. In the townships of the Orange Free State, Northern Transvaal, the Eastern Cape and other huge swathes of territory, it never happened at all. Straightforward crime, of course, is another story. To talk generically, however - as many people do - of 'the townships' as places wracked by political violence is an insult to the vast majority of black South Africans.

The black youth are out of control: This is another insult. To be a black youth in South Africa is not a desirable condition. The national exam results in the black schools were disastrous at the end of last year and employment possibilities for the small minority who performed well are remote. Most black youths depend on the support of their parents, or extended families. Many deploy their excess energies in the cause of the ANC, which usually means making a lot more noise than their elders at Mandela rallies. Quite a few resort to crime and, in places such as Katlehong, young men with guns whose stated purpose it is to defend their communities against Inkatha sometimes turn their weapons on each other. But by the far the greatest number spend their days listening to music, discussing football and pursuing the opposite sex.

Ethnic civil war: Despite the urgings of a certain British school of thought, ethnicity shows no sign of becoming a significant factor in South African politics. Contrary to the experience of many parts of Africa, South Africans (black and white) will not be voting in April with their tribal feet. On the campaign trail Mr Mandela has received as euphoric a response from the Zulus, the Sothos and the Tswanas, as he does from his own tribal group, the Xhosas. Black South Africa will, without tribal exception, vote overwhelmingly for the ANC. As for the Afrikaner tribe, they will fight among themselves, if fight they do, in the same way that they did at the end of the Boer war, when more than 5,000 Afrikaners joined the British army.

The truth is that South Africa does not obey simple nationalist definitions. It obeys simple political definitions. Much more useful to an understanding of what is happening is a grasp of concepts such as left and right, progressive and conservative. Those Zulus who support Inkatha and those Afrikaners who support the Volksfront joined formally since November in the misnamed 'Freedom Alliance', are ultra-conservative right-wingers fearful of political change. The two are bound by their common terror of elections and the threat democracy could pose to their power and privilege.

The ANC, reds-under-the-beds scares notwithstanding, has evolved into an essentially social democrat organisation; F W de Klerk's National Party into something akin to the Tory 'wets', free marketeers aware that without a measure of state intervention in social services, their chances of prevailing on blacks to support them in the future will be limited. What the ANC and the National Party share, in the manner of the Labour and Conservative parties in Britain, is a commitment to the new, non-racial constitution. Inkatha and the Volksfront (whose new coalition was compared recently by a visiting US congressman to a putative alliance between the black civil rights movement and the Ku Klux Klan) share a determination to overthrow the constitution and stop the new South Africa from being born.

Will there be a civil war? It depends on what you call civil war. Pitched battles with tanks, artillery and airplanes, cities under siege, armies in uniform: that will not be seen in South Africa. But Freedom Alliance terrorism is a likelihood. In which case the army, whose high command backs the new Mandela/ De Klerk order, will have to do what it is already doing in Katlehong and step in to keep the peace.

The chances are that it would succeed sufficiently in containing the black and white right to allow for acceptably free and fair elections. It is only in the event of the assassination of Mr Mandela that all bets are off. Then words stronger than 'ethnic civil war' would have to be found to describe the ensuing horror.

(Photograph omitted)