South Africa, a new chapter. The perestroika of the black continent may be jammed, and pessimists do not exclude a wave of violence, but it could also engender a model, a sort of "anomalous" laboratory capable of arousing the world's interest. De Clerck, Mandela, Buthelezi (leader of 7 million Zulus), each with a different role and language, already seem to be the possible troika called to guide a very strange state, almost completely lacking in affinity with the other African states.

It will be - at any rate in the intentions and if all goes well - a democratic, equalitarian, developed, federal, multiethnic and multiracial nation (in a real sense, given that these last two adjective often hide empty words). Myth, utopia? Maybe. What is certain is that there are only a few remnants of the "wall of Pretoria", and even less nostalgics: groups of delirious white extremism and no less anti-historic hymns to armed struggle on the part of the African National Congress, the party of Mandela and of the Xhosa tribe (50% of the population).

The majority of whites, blacks, half-breeds, Indians, are instead already looking beyond, toward the new South Africa. Cautious in mending the lacerations of the past-present (which the international public opinion knows in detail) and equally so in preserving that extraordinary heritage which is the South Africa of the present-future, with all the qualities which are still not acknowledged it.

And even we, more or less passionate observers of a "South Africa case", which becomes more interesting the more we study it, are always on the border between a pragmatic photography of tomorrow's South African potentialities, and the tragical, perhaps impossible attempts to justify or explain the past: attempts which most of the time turn into gigantic ideological-anthropological riots, even among the companions of political and religious faith who usually get on very well. It is a rather obvious fact that talking about South Africa conducts to a riot, not only because digging beneath reality the "perfect scheme" projected by the media turns out to be fake ("white slavocrat master against humanitarian Uncle Tom), but also because the South African issue deeply affects both our deepest roots of "whites" and the most updated, burning problems of the contemporary Western societies, and especially the European ones.

Revenge is a dish to be served cold. The say seemed to be perfectly fitting during the conversation between our Italian parliamentary delegation and an authoritative representative of the De Clerck government.

The ironic attitude of the minister well adapts to the "cold dish": "We have been informed of the violences occurred in Florence against black immigrants. This is a mistake, it is necessary to cohabit. We cohabit, and 99% of the victims of the clashes in South Africa have been caused by the bloody conflicts between black tribes, especially the Zulu and the Xhosa tribes. We have read about the immigration restrictions and of the policy of severe controls at the Italian borders. We can understand, but we have neither restrictions nor semi-close borders; millions of Angolans and Mozambicans work in South Africa, and as many would want to work and live in our country. You see, like the Italian citizen, the South African citizen (black or white) no longer wants to be a miner or a waiter. Also, we must acknowledge a serious problem concerning the violations of human rights: some kilometres of electrified barbed wire running along the Mozambique-South Africa border cause hundreds of deaths among the black populatio

n. Persons, these, who are not running away from the South African hell toward the Mozambican paradise, but in the opposite direction. As far as the reality of our country is concerned, we are asking only that you come and see it: go to the worst places, where there is the deepest misery and poverty of the black population, and compare it with any African large city or even with a neighbourhood with a large black population in European or U.S. metropolitan areas. And on a Friday afternoon, sit on a bridge overlooking the highways of Johannesburg or Durban or Cape Town and watch the millions of families leaving for the week-end, driving to holiday resorts. Of will, of course, immediately provide for the overcoming of any emergency state, we will sit at the negotiations table, we have taken the road of democratization, we are considering a federalist solution for the whole of austral Africa, to include, apart from ourselves, also Angola, Mozambique, Zambia, Zimbabwe. It is the basis of the development for a co

ntinent drowning in starvation and poverty. And not because of our fault".

Of course, past and future cannot be divided in South Africa. The history of some thousand Boers, Dutch reformers, French Huguenots and Piedmontese Waldenses put with force on the ships of the Dutch Indies Company to find escape from the Catholic persecution, pioneers, at Cape Africa, of a completely unhabited promised land running inland for thousand and thousand of kilometres, is still today part of the history of today's South Africa, with the history of those whites on the tip of the black continent. "Yes, it is monstrous. For our fathers, our protestant fathers, black people were creatures of God, but inferior to us. Thus they were to be fed, educated, provided with a job and made to develop. Horrible, is it not, for you Catholics...You who have no more problems of apartheid in South America because the natives have disappeared. And this, whether you like it or not, is the only country of Africa in which not one black person starves, where there is education and work for all, where the opponents are no

longer put in prison or killed, the only country in which the black man and the black woman can vote. And if you say that tomorrow's South Africa can be a hope, ask yourselves if this would have been possible without yesterday's South Africa. One thing that is certain is that this is also our land. We are not Italians of Libya or French of Algeria or English of India. For 400 years we have been whites of South Africa, of a land that was uninhabited, and whence we expelled no one. We arrived here swearing that no Church would have succeeded in persecuting us, and that we would have honoured God with our work. Now we don't want to go back. This is our only "homeland".

Disquieting South Africa. What destiny awaits it, or rather, what future awaits it?

To understand it, to try, at any rate, to determine it, is not only necessary to finally find a peaceful solution to the South African issue. Its fascination is of a more intimate nature: it is a decisive question for Europe (we hope in the federal United States of Europe), which will soon be forced to look at its African neighbour, that is, to a continent dominated by bloody dictatorships which inflict starvation and totalitarianism to its population.

Which are the leading classes that we intend to choose as our African interlocutors? The Mobutus and Siad Barres, with whom the Italian partitocracy successfully "cooperates", champions of democracy as compared to the "slavocrat" Pretoria regime?

It is a decisive question also for the problems that deeply agitate our country, the black minority of a white Italy, and of the Europe of the united Deutchmark, where not only the "separation from the official policy" creates a Le Pen or a Bossi or the autonomists-nationalists.

To decline the words federalism, multiethnic and multiracial, fill them with a concrete meaning, is a problem of dramatic urgency. We have started to do so, asking for the end of the anachronistic and pharisaic "sanctions" against the De Clerck government, preparing, for the coming autumn, an important moment of reflection on the South Africa-Europe relation, in its different aspects, which both the representatives of the government of Pretoria and of the African National Congress should take part in. Our South African friends, of any race and colour, will excuse us for this selfish use of the South African tangle in the attempt to undo the problems of our country as well. It is our way of helping both them and ourselves. In the mean time, is they exist, may the God of the first colonizers of the Cape and the Zulu God of the savannahs protect the perestroika of the black continent.