A tentative step toward freedom

David Mkhabela has taken his leave of Soweto. After years of fear and intimidation, of corruption and filth, he has made his escape from that sad black reservoir.

Home now is a fine, modern brick house he has built in a place called Spruitview, known to all as a "model township" for South Africa's black elite.

Here, in a stretch of expensive homes rising from the grass veld 19 miles south of Johannesburg, live the first blacks officially allowed out of the cramped townships - freed from the areas created decades ago as black labor reserves.

So David Mkhabela, his supervisor's salary invested in a new home and a new life, finds now that he has escaped only Soweto, not South Africa. He is the first urban black South African in 75 years to actually own the ground beneath his home, but he has taken only one tentative step on the long and uncharted journey to true liberation.

And in doing so, he has broken with the great black masses and also with his two brothers, both revolutionaries who have suffered greatly at the hands of the white security police.

Mkhabela has invested in apartheid reform, but without illusions. Like other successful blacks, he has cautiously accepted a less onerous form of racial segregation. The white authorities have endorsed Spruitview as the first of several clean, efficient, "upmarket" - and still segregated - black living areas. Blacks who can afford it are moving in.

Some blacks believe that those in Spruitview have somehow abandoned the township resistance movement, but for many the alternatives had become unbearable.

"I had to get out of Soweto. I could no longer survive there," Mkhabela was saying in the cool living room of his new home, 27 miles and a political chasm away from his tiny matchbox house in Soweto outside Johannesburg. He spoke like a man released from prison, but on parole.

As a black man who works as a supervisor for white-owned Anglo American Corp. - the mining and industrial colossus viewed by some blacks as an exploiter of black labor - Mkhabela had become a target. The young township revolutionaries who call themselves "comrades" had threatened him and his family. They demanded that everyone in Soweto honor the many "stayaways" - work boycotts - they call to protest apartheid.

But Mkhabela, who is 40, had an important position and a family to support. He had worked too hard for too long to lose his job over a political protest.

"Those youngsters were quite angry, quite threatening," Mkhabela said. He mentioned their "people's courts," kangaroo courts where township justice is meted out with floggings and sometimes with executions. "They would introduce a new law and you would be guilty of violating it. "

He refused to sacrifice his job. But moving to another cramped, volatile township near Johannesburg was out of the question. Each one, like Soweto, has a housing shortage so acute that the waiting list for homes runs into the thousands.

In late 1986, South Africa offered another of its slowly evolving apartheid reforms. Blacks were given "freehold rights" to own residential land in urban South Africa for the first time since 1913.

Except for the handful of blacks who fell through bureaucratic cracks in rural areas, blacks were not allowed to own property in South Africa under the Natives Land Act of 1913 for fear that property rights would lead to political rights. A black could own a home in a black area, but the land it rested on had to be rented from the government - a policy some blacks called "the bricks but not the dirt. "

With freehold rights now available, a handful of blacks with money have begun to flee the townships for clean, spacious Spruitview. Mkhabela was the first, moving into his 76,000 rand ($36,000) home in January. Of the 100

families who have followed, at least 90 have come from Soweto in search of safety and peace.

The new cars driven by Mkhabela and his neighbors carry a bumper sticker: ''SPRUITVIEW - The New Garden Suburb For Peace and Security. "

Although Spruitview is South Africa's only completed "model township," others are planned. Since Mkhabela got his title in January, more than 400 other blacks have acquired titles to their homes in existing urban townships, according to Alec Weiss, a government housing official in Pretoria.

Spruitview is a centerpiece of the government's "hearts and minds" strategy designed to improve black living conditions while maintaining strict racial segregation. The strategy is coupled with an iron fist policy of smashing both violent and peaceful dissent through the government's looming security apparatus and emergency rule.

The government's deputy minister of economic affairs, T.G. Alant, said recently that freehold rights and other reforms were creating "an affluent black middle class, which serves as an inspiration to other blacks of what can be achieved. "

Those blacks, he said, are a hedge against "the (black) anarchists (who) are bound to totally destroy the existing structures and then capitalize on the chaos. "

In Spruitview, men such as Mkhabela resent being portrayed as government supporters. They regard Spruitview as only one step toward dismantling - rather than modifying - apartheid. They say they differ from the revolutionaries only in tactics and timetables, not in goals. They believe that they will achieve full political rights in their lifetimes.

"Something must replace this system because there is no hope for black people under the present state of affairs," Mkhabela said. "For the government, reform means trying to buy time. For me, it means moving ahead to a better life. We are showing that a black man can do better. He doesn't have to live in a matchbox house. "

Mkhabela has chosen a life far different from that of his defiant brothers. Their divergent paths are one small measure of the divisions within a vast black nation of 26 million.

One brother, Ismail, is an activist in the Azanian People's Organization, the black consciousness movement founded by the black martyr Steve Biko.

Ismail has been detained many times; his wife gave birth to their child while she was in detention. He once told his brother that he did not intend to die of natural causes but as a soldier fighting for black revolution.

Mkhabela's other brother fled Soweto after the 1976 student riots and joined other exiles fighting South Africa from neighboring Botswana.

"My brothers belong to the movement," Mkhabela said. "I highly appreciate their actions. Without their struggle, things would seem normal. And of course nothing is normal for black people in South Africa. "

Mkhabela has struggled in his own way. Twelve years ago, he decided he wanted to work at either Anglo American or IBM after working a series of menial jobs. So day after day, he pestered the two companies. Finally, Anglo offered him a job reserved by custom for blacks: security guard.

He took it. Soon he was demanding to be moved up to something more challenging. "I confronted them by asking if my color was a stumbling block," he said.

Anglo eventually moved him to an entry-level position in the transport department. After seven years with the company, he was promoted to supervisor in charge of licensing company vehicles. He now directs a staff of 19, five of them whites.

"On paper, I am above the whites," Mkhabela said. "But in reality, they don't report to me but to other whites. If you are a black, they move you away

from direct supervision of whites. They have to nurse their feelings. "

He now fears that he has reached his ceiling at the company, despite its declared policy of promoting blacks to traditionally white jobs. "It's frustrating to know you can do your boss' job, but to get constantly shoved sideways while the whites move up. So I make a lot of noise," he said.

In Spruitview, at least, Mkhabela believes that he has taken charge of his own life. His new home and lot are more than double the size of his Soweto matchbox, which cost 1,300 rand ($620). The water, electricity and telephone service are reliable. The roads are paved. The garbage is collected regularly. He no longer worries about crime and political strife.

In his living room, Mkhabela sat on a new sofa next to walls painted a light salmon. The house smelled of new paint and carpets. A color TV and a stereo system had been set up. In the kitchen, a black housekeeper fussed over Mkhabela's 3-year-old daughter, Joan. Out back, black construction workers bought sodas from a small snack shop he runs from his garage.

In Soweto, he said, he could not have run such a shop without paying enormous bribes to black councilmen who dole out franchise rights. In Spruitview, he paid a nominal sum for a trader's license.

But in other ways, not much has changed. His five children still go to poorly run "Bantu" schools reserved for blacks. There are white schools close by, but the Mkhabela children must attend school in cramped Katlehong township down the road. There are mixed-race private schools available, but they are in Johannesburg, too far away.

Mkhabela wants to start a private school in Spruitview, but he has encountered government resistance. The message is clear: Black children should go to black schools. He senses apartheid's walls closing in again.

"If this is a so-called elite area, why shouldn't we have elite schools?" he asked, though he knew the answer.

He sighed and rested his head against the back of the sofa. It was the end of another long day - the hour's drive to work and back, the struggle to complete a new house, the bills to pay. He had too many battles: to raise himself up, to fight the system in his own quiet way.

Anyway, he said softly, it was better than Soweto. He smiled and raised Joan to his lap. He had chosen the right path - he was certain of that. He was certain of something else, too: When his girl was grown, no one would tell her where to live.