South Africans are basking in international popularity. Only since the April elections brought them respectability have they begun to realise Just how isolated their country had become because of apartheid. For decades South African diplomats had to stand outside world organisations and look in. After five months in Southern Africa^ Gemini News Service's correspondent reflects on the change.

SOUTH Africans can still hardly bekgve how popular they have become internationally sfaac* the election* that brought Nelson Mandela to power. From being shunned as a nation and regarded Individ ually. black and white, as either poiltlcaUy unclean or unacceptable, they are *ud denly welcome from one end of the world to the other.

Only now are the whites finding out how isolated they had become in the’ last 40 ^ara and how Uttte they had been aware of the way the world works in the 1990* They were locked out of the mainstream for so tong that most people Were living In an ever rtAre narrow and imagl nary world fixed sotnewhere back in the early Sixties.

Even South African diplomats are still discovering how much contact they had lost. Having to operate outside the United Nations, the Commonwealth. the Organisation of African Unity and a host of other bodies over such a tong period' meant a whole generation has grodm .up with Uttte practical knowledge of how the modern International community works. Whole network* were denied them.

• On the other hand, many of the top figures in the African National Ccmgress had steadily grown more worldly-wise than members of the National Party adminiatration. They haf been circulating for years in UN. Commonwealth and OAU circles — and been taken into their confidence — planning for the day when they would finally take power.

But until that day came they. too. were operating In a form of isolation, usually forced to work in the corridors instead of in the conference rooms, and In some cases not even admitted to the corrl dor*.,

Only now, therefore, IS the effectiveness of the international campaign of sanctions and Isolation against South Africa coming to light. The formal sanctions, the boycotts and economic squeeze were merely the more visible part of the long fight against apartheid.

on all rUght

Realisation of just how cutoff — and how disliked In many . cases — South Africans had become and the exciting discovery of what opportunities are opening up to them in a world they hardly knew existed is one explanation for U)e whites' apparently easy acceptance of 'black rule.

Another, simpler, explanation Ues in the discovery, that they had in their nddst for so long a world leader of rar* quality, a man who, to paraphrase Kipling, can talk with crowds and keep h|s virtue, walk with kings and keep the common touch.

If he does nothing else in

the remaining years of his life Nelson Mandela ha* put himself in the gallery of greats of the 20th Century, alongside giants as profoundly Influential as Mahatma Gandhi, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. Few whites on the right would admit tt, but a sense of shame undoubtedly exists that by locking him up for nearly three decades they took away the best years of his -life. His behaviour towards them since his release is humbling.

Now most whites are wishing that he was ten years younger. They worry about the

time when he h*9 to step down, although many are in-creaeihgly impressed by the quality of those around Mandela — people like Thabo Mbeki, the Vice-President, Tokyo Sexwale, Chief Minister of the most, important region (Pretori a - W1 Is water sr and -Vereeniglng). and Cyril Ramaphosa, general secretary of the African National Congress.

There is a sense of wonder among all South Africans that they have got to where they are tn relative peace. Althou^i most whites had come to terms with change before the election, having at last recog- • nlsed that there was no other way. they were deeply apprehensive about what would happen during the election and even more so when polling ended and the result* began to become known.

Many had viaiona not only of violence but of biack servant* withdrawing their labour, of shops being shut for days, of the country coming.to a standstill. They stocked up thetr freexers and got ready for a siege-

It was all totally different from what they had Imagined. It was more peaceful during and after the election than it had been for years. People began to realise how much they had been misled and in the end how much they had misled themselves.

It had several years back dawned on them that the apartheid policy had led the country up a blind alley, but now they began to wonder why they had not taken the leap 20 years earlier. So much suffering and bitterness might have been avoided.

People *tlll talk apprehen sively about a honeymoon period and wonder how long it will last. They answer is that this ha* been no ordinary electoral change: not just one party taking over from another but a one-off leap across the fence.

There is no going back, and in so many people * mind* muat lie regret and a feeling of guilt about the years that were loot when so much could have been achieved and so many lives saved Therein, however, lies the hope of a permanently more settled situation in South Africa — and in much of Africa beyond.

DEREK INGRAM was editor of Gemini News Service for 27 years. He is at the end qf a prolonged stay tn Southern Africa, during which he was Media Adviser to the European Union Election Unit tn South Africa sand a Commonwealth Observer for the Malawi elections.