THE installation of the multi-racial Transitional Executive Council signals the start of the final stage in the dismantling of institutionalised racial discrimination in South Africa. Few actions could mark the historic shift in South Africa's political and social make up sharply as the inclusion of blacks in a body with the power to veto decisions by President F. W. de Klerk's white government. As the country gears up for the election of a multi-racial parliament in April, it is already effectively under multi-racial rule.
Yet while institutional development has forged ahead, in the all-too-real world where most South Africans live racial hatreds are as strong and tribal rivalries as deadly as ever. The threat of civil war still hangs over the country as conservative whites and blacks once described as moderate refuse to take part. The Zulu Inkatha movement and right-wing Afrikaners are demanding autonomy in their own homelands, while the African National Congress, the main black element in the transitional council, has rejected ethnically based territories as a new version of apartheid.
As South Africa takes its painful steps towards the final disestablishment of apartheid from the state structure, its leaders would dearly like to be able to claim that life for its peoples is now no worse than in any other country where racial tension and discrimination are an unfortunate fact of life. The truth, however, is that South Africa's long history of state-sponsored racism makes its hatreds more acute than either the insidious discrimination prevalent in even the most enlightened Western democracies or the bitter blood feuds of other racially divided nations.
A bloodbath may still be avoided next April. But it will take many years of hard work and determination on all sides to prevent further violence in future.
