Dispatches

By PETER HAWTHORNE/in Cape Town

In 1966 Hendrik Verwoerd, the mastermind of apartheid, died by an assassin's hand on the floor of South Africa's House of Assembly (the scuffle marks are still visible), and his bronze bust continues to glower from its plinth in the old entrance hall. One imagines he would never have countenanced the vibrant scene last week, as the House opened its new session complete with tribal dress in the back benches. But Verwoerdian notions about decorum, among other topics, no longer hold sway in a government whose face has changed dramatically overnight. Parliament, with its stuffy, Westminster-style affectations, has already begun to adapt.

Members are no longer bound by the old suit-collar-and tie-dress code: colorful, flowing African robes now stand out among the charcoal and the pinstripes, and one white A.N.C. member has been seen sporting a Nehru jacket. The A.N.C.'s Frene Ginwala, an Indian lawyer who is the nation's first female Speaker, took her seat last week in a sari rather than the usual House of Lords-style robe and trimmings.

There are ceremonial differences too. When new President Nelson Mandela enters the House, he is preceded by a loinclothed, jackal-skinned imbongi -- a traditional Xhosa praise singer. And in a multiracial assembly that represents 11 languages, several religions and any number of different churches, the traditional opening prayer -- once led by a minister of religion -- is out, replaced by a minute of silence for personal meditation.

"Every day," notes a seasoned member of the press gallery, "new ground is - being broken." This has included actual applause in response to speeches -- no longer only a dignified "Hear, hear" (in Afrikaans, Hoor, hoor) -- and the occasional ululation, if not from the floor, then from the public gallery. M.P. Jurie Mentz, a white member of the Inkatha Freedom Party team, delivered his maiden speech entirely in Zulu, and the I.F.P. leader, Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, followed him in impeccable English.

Although President Mandela has made it clear that his government will respect the past, that it needs to be remembered in order to remind South Africans of their long and bitter road to democracy, this deference has not been extended to certain symbolic trappings of the old order. At the opening of Parliament last week, a ceremonial golden mace embellished with a frieze of circled ox wagons -- symbolic of the struggle of Afrikaner nationalists -- was conspicuously absent. An official muttered something about "a technical problem," though others think it will not be long before the mace, along with other totems of the old order (perhaps the hallway statues and portraits of die-hard white-supremacist heads of government), is relegated to the ash heap of history. Or maybe, less dramatically, to a museum.

Meanwhile, in the members' private dining room, once the hallowed preserve of Afrikaner nationalists, pride of place now goes to the A.N.C. All members will soon be eating off new dishes. The old ones, bearing the seals of almost 75 years of racist government, are for sale -- souvenirs of a once unthinkable transformation.