“We aren’t heading for a revolution in our country, we are already in the midst of one,” says the stern, silver-haired churchman as he glances at the acacias and bougainvilleas blooming outside the window of his study. “And by that I mean it’s a revolution of ideas, a revolution of our system of values. We are forced — even if we don’t like it — we are simply forced to join hands and to share power. We can’t go on any longer as we did for the past 300 years. We’ve got to change.” Those words would not be particularly surprising if they came from one of the liberal reformers who have long opposed apartheid, South Africa’s poisonous system of racial segregation. But they come from Johan Heyns, the new leader of the Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk , for many years one of apartheid’s principal pillars. The church has traditionally provided God-fearing Afrikaners with powerful scriptural support $ for the system by insisting that separation of the races represents the will of the Almighty. As South African whites head toward their first general election in six years on May 6, Heyns’ warning is clear proof that the fortress of apartheid, which looks so monolithic to the outside world, is showing signs of cracks. It is also an indication that the once united Afrikaners, die volk, the white tribe, who number only 3 million of the country’s nearly 35 million* inhabitants but grimly assert their claim to political power, stand united no longer. State President P.W. Botha’s Nationalists are expected to win next week’s election handily , but the violence and bloodshed that are leading up to that election make the casting of white ballots almost an irrelevance in the crisis that is facing the country. If the majority were allowed to vote, according to a poll by Johannesburg’s largest black newspaper, the Sowetan, the winner by a substantial margin would be Nelson Mandela, an imprisoned leader of the outlawed African National Congress whose wife Winnie has become an international symbol of protest. Barred from the ballot, the blacks turned to another kind of action last week in one of the worst outbursts of violence since a state of emergency was declared last June. The new bloodshed began when a hand grenade came sailing out of the back of a truck as it sped past a police parade ground in Soweto, the huge black township outside Johannesburg. The blast killed one black trainee and wounded 64 others. Six hours later, a bomb exploded under a parked car in the white suburb of Mayfair, shattering windows and starting a fire. Much worse lay ahead. The center of conflict was the six-week-old strike by 18,000 railway workers. Officials of the government-run South African Transport Services suddenly announced that any striker who did not return to work on Wednesday would be fired. When the deadline arrived, only 2,000 workmen showed up at their jobs; the other 16,000 were told that the company had “terminated their contracts.”
