South Africa

By SCOTT MACLEOD JOHANNESBURG

When State President F.W. de Klerk speaks of his vision of a new South Africa, the country's voteless 26 million blacks can be forgiven for being skeptical. The reform policies of De Klerk's predecessor, P.W. Botha, unleashed disappointment and nearly three years of violent unrest before grinding to a halt. But one of the most vocal critics of De Klerk's reluctance to abolish apartheid is a prominent Afrikaner who sat only a few feet behind him on inauguration day last month: his elder brother Willem.

A wild-eyed liberal by the standards of his family and its Dutch settler forebears, Willem de Klerk publicly -- and constantly -- urges that apartheid be replaced by black majority rule. A former Dutch Reformed pastor and editor who now teaches journalism at Rand Afrikaans University, he helped establish the liberal opposition Democratic Party in April. Although his brother's career was at stake, Willem voted for the Democrats in September's election. After the ballots were counted, F.W.'s National Party barely retained its four-decade grip on power.

Despite the broedertwis (Afrikaans for a brotherly falling out), F.W., 53, and Willem, 61, retain great affection for each other. They see each other once a month, often at the Pretoria home of their 86-year-old mother, and speak on the phone weekly. Two days before last month's election, F.W. asked, "Don't you want to consider voting Nationalist and making it public?" Recalls Willem: "Then he said, 'That's only a joke between us.' He tries to persuade me, and I try to persuade him. We agree to disagree."

The De Klerk family tree is deeply rooted in politics. A great-grandfather sat in the now defunct Senate, and Uncle Johannes Strijdom served as Prime Minister from 1954 to 1958. The family often vacationed at Strijdom's summer estate in the Kruger National Park. The brothers' indomitably conservative father Jan de Klerk played a pivotal role in the Nationalists' dramatic victory in 1948 as the party's secretary in the Transvaal. F.W. was only twelve at the time, and his father's passion for electoral politics made an indelible impression on him.

Willem, influenced by the less strident opinions of his mother's family, began veering leftward while editing a Calvinist monthly, Word and Deed, in the mid-1950s. "I gained this insight that apartheid is not a just dispensation, not a solution for South Africa, not founded in morality, not common sense," he recalls. He began speaking out against such National Party measures for entrenching apartheid as the Group Areas Act, the Population Registration Act and the move to give blacks voting rights in so-called black homelands rather than in South Africa proper. He has committed what many Afrikaners consider an act of treason by holding discussions with officials of the outlawed African National Congress, which calls for the end of white rule.

Willem's opinions became so intolerable to conservatives that in 1987 the owners of the Afrikaans newspaper Rapport forced him to resign as editor. On the other hand, F.W., a lawyer by training, remained a conformist. He entered parliament in 1972, became a political boss in the Transvaal and slowly moved up the ladder to become leader of the National Party last February and then State President. "He identified very strongly with my father," Willem says. "I can see in him the same kinds of attitudes. He is a very strongly bound Afrikaner establishment man."

Currently, the brothers' biggest disagreement concerns the principles underpinning the country's next constitution. F.W. now accepts the idea that blacks must be given the right to vote in South Africa, but he advocates a political system featuring "group rights" along racial lines as a means of safeguarding the interests of whites, who would be outnumbered at the polls. Among the "rights" would be segregated schools and neighborhoods, as well as possibly a white body in Parliament that could veto black initiatives. Willem would permit only a transitional form of limited group rights before a nonracial democracy was established. "The accent on race groups will not be accepted by the majority of South Africans," says he, "and will not be accepted by the world."

Willem says he is encouraged by F.W.'s inaugural promise to consider easing the 1986 state of emergency and begin releasing political prisoners, possibly including black nationalist leader Nelson Mandela. "Under the pressure of the realities of South Africa, there has been a development in F.W.'s political philosophy in the last two or three years in the direction of more open- minded, liberal values," he says. "Afrikaner supremacy is out of the question, and one must adapt and find solutions."

In recent weeks, Willem has written letters and sent faxes to his brother urging him to launch a dialogue soon with leaders of the A.N.C. He has suggested to F.W. that he announce that South Africa plans "to get rid of apartheid in the next ten years." Observes Willem: "My brother acknowledges that to succeed, he must introduce solutions. The dynamics of finding a solution will definitely move him."

Willem has no illusions about the competing pressures coming from other Afrikaners, who constitute only 9% of the citizenry. "He must be very cautious to take his people with him," he says. "The Afrikaner has accepted the fact that he is outnumbered. But he is afraid that his political power, his security, the capitalist system, will be threatened under a black government." Whether his influence will push F.W. further along toward the abolition of apartheid, neither Willem nor anybody else can say.