TV Reviews : An In-Depth Report on South African Muddle

In “The Struggle for South Africa,� BBC journalist David Harrison lets no one off the hook in his painstaking, 90-minute account of South Africa’s latest phase of inner turmoil (at 9 tonight on Channel 28, at 10 on Channel 50). This is video reporting that fulfills “Frontline’s� name.

It is also reporting that will give left and right equal amounts of fidgeting, and the unopinionated middle with much to chew on. Harrison manages to survey every significant layer of South African political life, and succinctly maps out the complex webs of developing alliances and conflicts (maps, of the graphic kind, are about the only missing element).

At the eye of the storm are President F.W. de Klerk and the African National Congress’ leader, Nelson Mandela, who just revealed that they have been conducting secret peace talks since August. The government/ANC deal--ANC legalization, with ANC suspension of its armed struggle--has not only led to a potential rapprochement between whites and blacks, but also to a heightening of rivalries between the ANC and the more conservative Inkatha movement, between the Xhosa and Zulu tribes, and between De Klerk’s liberalized National Party and a growing militant right wing.

Harrison grills Mandela and Inkatha’s Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi with equal pressure on their inability to curb their violent “young lions,� whose impatience with the promise of change has turned into a blood bath that Mandela suggests the government could stop if it wanted to.

De Klerk, meanwhile, is trying to woo black voters and build dialogue with Mandela while assuaging his white base, whose extremists may make America’s paramilitary right look like a weekend hunting party.

This is a dangerous game all around, but Harrison isn’t concerned only with the key players. He concludes pondering a disturbing future, where a generation of unemployable black youth riding the wave of “revolution now, education later� may end up in a post-apartheid hell.