The author is a recent graduate now living and working in South Africa.

PRETORIA, SOUTH AFRICA--In the evenings, Pretoria looks a great deal like Washington, D.C. A few tall buildings in the center of the city house South Africa's civil service, Pretoria's major industry. The Voortrekker Monument an enormous memorial to the Afrikaaners who walked from the coast into South Africa's heartland in the 1830s, stands over Pretoria just as the Washington monument watches over Washington. Around the city, white residential areas look just like Washington's suburbs: neat houses with well-tended gardens look out over beautifully laid-out streets lined with graceful jacaranda trees.

And, like the suburbs of Washington, Pretoria is completely white at night. A few black teenagers, dressed in ragged shorts and jaunty caps, sell the afternoon newspapers to passersby--only the editions designated for whites, of course. A few black housemaids live in the servants' quarters that must by law be attached to every house in white zones; a few waiters work inside Pretoria until just before the last buses go out to the black townships. But, for the most part, nighttime Pretoria seems to have accomplished the basic aim of apartheid: complete separation of the races. At night, when workers are no longer needed, the blacks disappear, leaving the wealth of the city proper to their white employers.

From a restaurant at the top of one of Pretoria's new sky-scrapers you can see a group of lights, blinking outside the city limits. This is the black residential area--where the blacks return at night, to tiny crowded houses and coal stoves. If they are lucky enough to have the right kind of pass, they can live with their families; if they are even luckier, their house might have electricity. If they are unlucky, they live in single-sex hostels, or illegally in squatter compounds, in fear of the dawn pass raids that could send them back to rot on the bantustans, where there are few jobs and little fertile land.

A tall new apartment building stands on a ridge just outside Pretoria, overlooking the main route the blacks take into the city early each morning, before work starts. I am told it houses policemen and their families. South African whites are on the alert these days. If any trouble starts, the police will be able to move right in, with tear gas machines designed especially for South African crowds, and, if that fails to disperse "them," automatic weapons.

***

As a white American, I find it easy to slip into oblivion in South Africa. Much of the countryside, at least around Pretoria, looks much more like the U.S. than Africa. The cities look like smaller versions of our own, and small towns in the Transvaal look just like the Midwest, complete with Kentucky Fried Chicken and Burger King. It looks like home, the part of South Africa where the white population lives--so peaceful, so comfortable and modern. I find it easy to relax, to forget what this standard of living is built on.

Until I walk into a restroom and am greeted by a sign: Ladies--Whites Only.

Most of these signs--what the South Africans call "petty apartheid"--have been removed in the last few years, as white South Africa tries hard to give its drooping image a facelift. But enough remains to remind you that apartheid exists, that it is not a figment of some fevered radical's exaggeration, that beneath Pretoria's familiar exterior there is something very wrong indeed.

Apartheid doesn't seem real until you are forced to recognize it; the 18 million blacks who live in South Africa barely intrude on the white outsider's consciousness, until you hear a liberal white South African talk about the boy who tends the garden and realize the boy is 50 years old. Or a friendly Afrikaaner tells you, "We built this country," adding proudly, "If it wasn't for us, there would be nothing here but huts"--refusing to recognize that it was cheap black labor that did the building. Or a liberal white says, "Really, you can't imagine how many of them have told me they wouldn't want to be ruled by their own people." And you realize the only black she has ever talked to at length is her maid.

Or you read about Thornhill, a resettlement camp for blacks who are in the process of being removed from the townships outside white cities to the Ciskei bantustand. Last month, a typhoid epidemic of about 130 cases broke out among Thornhill's 10,000-odd residents. The camp's medical facilities were expanded to meet the emergency: Thornhill now boasts a full-time staff nurse and a six-bed hospital. From the country that brought you Dr. Barnhard and his heart transplants...

It is the disparity between the way the whites and blacks live that makes South Africa so jarring, I suppose. The difference between the comfortable suburbs and the shanty towns exists in many countries; there is a big difference between Chevy Chase and Washington's inner city, too. But elsewhere it is not enforced by law, and elsewhere, the affluent society would have some awareness of how the other three-quarters live. Whites need a special permit to visit black townships, for instance, just as blacks need passes to go into white areas. And elsewhere, the system is not so all-inclusive; in South Africa, even black education is designed to produce servants.

(I remember, as I crane my neck to see the black township areas from the highway as we drive past, that some Harvard official--was it Larry Stevens?--was reported to have said last year that parts of Soweto were not so dreadful, that they had paved roads and telephones. I can't figure out where they took him. Most of Soweto has no electricity, much less paved roads; in fact, the township's administrative board is currently conducting a survey to determine whether Soweto residents want electricity. Hard to believe a survey is really necessary...)

***

The blindness--the refusal by so many South African whites to realize that black South Africans have needs and desires just as the whites do--is perhaps the most disturbing element of the gap between the races. The complete failure to understand that the black woman who works as the family maid might like running water in the servants' quarters, or that the blacks' real problem in South Africa is not that they are always having babies.