Next Step : South Africa’s Path to a New Constitution Proves Bumpy : * Apartheid laws have been repealed, but much more must still be done before blacks can attain voting rights.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa —  A few days ago, the African National Congress moved into fancy new offices with dozens of secretaries, fax machines and expansive views 22 stories above downtown Johannesburg.

Long gone were the scruffy headquarters in Zambia, where the ANC once conducted business by telex and met foreign visitors at a local pub. Closed, too, were the prison cells on Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela taught generations of ANC cadres about liberation politics.

“You can’t say nothing has changed in South Africa,” said Thabo Mbeki, the ANC’s foreign affairs chief, as he awaited his next visitor--Pretoria’s new ambassador to Italy. “Look at us here!”

“But,” Mbeki added, pausing to smile through his black beard, “nothing has changed, really.”

South Africa, for so long a bastion of racism brutally ruled by 5 million whites, is changing so rapidly under President Frederik W. de Klerk that hardly anyone--certainly not the ANC and not even the government--can keep up.

But, as Mbeki suggests, much remains to be done before the 28 million blacks attain the right to vote in the country of their birth.

The repeal of hundreds of apartheid laws in Parliament last month and the ANC’s first national conference inside South Africa last week have marked the end of the first phase of the transition from the old South Africa to the new South Africa.

Now the country prepares to begin the important, and more difficult, task of writing a new constitution.

But the country that Mbeki, Mandela and the ANC expect to soon rule is today a confusing, contradictory place--one where apartheid laws are removed but discrimination remains, and where the future looks as smooth as the freeways one day and as potholed as a dusty township street the next.

The ANC, the organization with the broadest support among blacks, says De Klerk still has some work to do before the decks are clean and formal constitutional negotiations can begin. The ANC refuses to talk about a constitution until the last political prisoners are free, an estimated 40,000 exiles are allowed to return without fear of prosecution, violence is brought under control, and the last remnants of apartheid security laws are removed.

Nevertheless, both the government and the ANC say they are in a hurry. The government wants a constitution before 1994, when it will be forced under current law to call new white elections, which it might lose. And the ANC wants to move quickly to grab power and begin undoing the legacy of 43 years of apartheid.

Mandela, the ANC’s new president, told delegates to last week’s convention in Durban that the ANC must prepare for talks “sooner rather than later,” and he urged his colleagues to draw up a political platform to contest the country’s first multiracial election.

ANC delegates responded by electing a pro-negotiations team to its highest offices.

If a few final hurdles are removed, the next step on South Africa’s road to democracy will be a multi-party conference, during which all black and white leaders with proven support will sit down together for the first time. Their agenda: to agree on basic principles of a new constitution, how that basic law will be drafted, and who will rule in the meantime. The conference could begin by the end of the year.

A sticking point, though, is the township violence. Over the past year, more than 3,000 blacks have died in fighting between supporters of the ANC and supporters of the Inkatha Freedom Party, headed by Zulu Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi.

In Natal Province, Buthelezi’s home base, where the fighting began several years ago, the war has been waged by Zulus against Zulus. When the trouble spread to Johannesburg-area townships last year, though, it pitted ANC supporters of various ethnic backgrounds against Zulu migrant workers from Natal who live in squalid dormitories, known as hostels.

The ANC has charged that the government’s own security forces, which include many right-wing whites opposed to De Klerk’s reforms, are behind the fighting, either through active support for Inkatha or a reluctance to take the steps necessary to stop it.

Even as the ANC staged its historic conference, the violence continued. The wife, daughter and grandson of one ANC delegate were killed in an attack on their house in the Vaal Triangle, south of Johannesburg. Witnesses said the attackers came from a nearby Zulu hostel.

ANC delegates responded by ordering their leaders to refuse to participate in the multi-party conference until De Klerk acts strongly to stem the violence. Until that happens, they said, they cannot be assured of De Klerk’s sincerity.

The government contends the violence is the result of political positioning in the townships, exacerbated by the uncertainty of the transition to a new constitution. And it believes that the sooner constitutional negotiations begin, the sooner the conflict will end.

“We are tied to one another. We have a common destiny,” said Tertius Delport, one of the government’s deputy ministers of constitutional affairs. “We’re either going to swim together or sink together. There’s no way we can say the blacks will survive without the whites.”

To protest De Klerk’s alleged inaction on violence, the ANC suspended preliminary talks with the government on constitutional matters in May, although several other joint working groups still are functioning.

Both the ANC, with its Communist Party and other allies, and the government agree on the need for a multi-party conference. Among others who have said they will be willing to participate are Buthelezi’s Inkatha Freedom Party, which claims 2.2 million members, and the liberal white Democratic Party.

The right-wing white Conservative Party has refused to join the talks, demanding that the government and the ANC first agree to the right of the white Afrikaner to self-determination in his own, autonomous land. The Conservatives say that demand is non-negotiable. Both the government and the ANC have indicated a willingness to discuss those demands--but only at the negotiating table.

On the political left, the Pan-Africanist Congress and the Azanian People’s Organization, which have wide support among black intellectuals, also have refused to attend multi-party talks.

They see the conference as an attempt by self-appointed black and white leaders to write a constitution. Their demand is also said to be non-negotiable: government agreement that a new constitution be written by a constituent assembly chosen in a multiracial, one-person one-vote election.

The ANC also believes in a constituent assembly, but is willing to discuss the issue at the multi-party conference. ANC officials point out that neighboring Namibia, which won its independence from South Africa in 1990, successfully used such a body to draw up its constitution.

But the government objects strongly to the constituent assembly, which would almost certainly give blacks, who outnumber whites 5-to-1, control over the final document.

Roelof Meyer, a deputy minister of constitutional development and one of the government’s key negotiators, says the constituent assembly won’t work in South Africa. He contends that such an election would rule out the give-and-take necessary for negotiations and would also worsen the current wave of political violence.

“Any election at this point, before political positions have been sorted out, would come at a great risk,” Meyer said.

The government prefers that a constitution be written by acknowledged leaders, such as De Klerk, ANC President Nelson Mandela, and Buthelezi, and then submitted to all voters, blacks as well as whites, in a referendum.

The government and the ANC also disagree about who will run the country while the constitution is being negotiated. While the government wants to remain in place during the transition, the ANC advocates an interim government of black and white political forces in the country.

Meyer contends that an interim government would be a recipe for chaos.

“There is no way the existing constitution can just be abolished,” Meyer said. And he added that De Klerk was not about to relinquish power to anyone before a new constitution is written.

However, Meyer said the government is willing to grant black leaders, who have no vote in South Africa, a transitional role in governing the country. The exact nature of that role, though, would have to be determined during the multi-party conference, Meyer added.

Some ANC officials have said the organization might be flexible on its demand for an interim government, but only if a neutral body, which included blacks, were set up to oversee the security forces and elections.

Chris Hani, chief of staff of the ANC’s military wing, said last week that the interim government was “not an absolute non-negotiable” demand. “The ANC is not going to prescribe to other groups,” he added. “We’re going there (to multi-party talks) with open minds.”

Although the government might agree to bring blacks into positions of power, such as Cabinet posts, most analysts doubt that De Klerk would agree to give up control of the security forces. Such a move could drive worried whites away from De Klerk’s ruling National Party into the ranks of the right wing.

Those disagreements have caused some ANC leaders to doubt whether De Klerk is sincere about relinquishing power, and Mandela himself has expressed private regrets for referring to De Klerk as “a man of integrity.” De Klerk is known to believe that his party can retain much of its power in a new South Africa by teaming up with the growing number of blacks and whites who share its fear of the ANC and the ANC’s ally, the Communist Party.

The ANC also is concerned that De Klerk’s growing international popularity, and crumbling sanctions, have given the president the upper hand even before talks begin. During their conference, ANC leaders decided that one of their top priorities in the coming months will be to step up pressure on De Klerk with mass protests.

The ANC plans to focus those efforts on areas where legal racial discrimination remains, such as education. Most schools in South Africa remain segregated and the government still spends four times as much, per pupil, educating whites as it does educating blacks.

ANC members recently attempted, without success, to occupy empty white schools, which the government refuses to open to black pupils. But more attempts are planned.