South African President F.W. de Klerk plunged his country into chaos a week ago Friday by announcing the legalization of Black opposition groups, the imminent release of African National Congress (ANC) leader Nelson R. Mandela and the lifting of restrictions on anti-apartheid organizations.

These actions, experts agree, will force a major rethinking of the apartheid system--a system that has let the privileged white minority of five million rule a country of 28 million Blacks for more than 300 years.

But those same experts are less certain about when--and even if--that rethinking will help South Africa's Blacks. For now, they say, the only certain thing is more chaos.

Nobody denies that the recent announcements are significant and mark a major step forward for one of the modern world's most oppressive regimes.

"This is the first time in the long history of South Africa that the whites have acknowledged that their best chance is to negotiate openly with Africans," says Robert I. Rotberg, a professor of history and political science at Tufts University. "What they have done is move South Africa from way out in the outfield to closer to home plate"

Pragmatism, Not Sudden Morality

But since the government's prime motivating factor seems to be pragmatism, and not a sudden moral awakening, the experts say the government may still be very unwilling to accept Black majority rule.

"South Africa has entered a period of transition which will be short and whose outcome will be in doubt because it can go in two different directions," says Robert M. Price, a political science scholar from the University of California at Berkeley.

Price, who has just completed a book entitled South Africa: The Process of Politcal Transformation, says "it is highly unlikely that the government has reached that point yet on the crucial question [of letting the Black majority rule]. The state president was highly ambiguous."

Given that reluctance to surrender a three century-old monopoly on power, the white government instead may seek a compromise, experts say. One proposal would divide the population into racial and ethnic "blocks," which would control their own affairs and leave a powerful central authority controlled by the whites.

"The only way this will be resolved is if the major parties sit around a table and rewrite the country's constitution completely," says David B. Abernethy '59, who directs Stanford's Center for African Studies.

For any compromise to be reached, Abernethy says, the concerned parties will have to agree on who may participate in negotiations--a tough task in itself. Right now, the major players include the ANC, the Pan-Africanist Congress, the United Democratic Front and Inkatha--a 1.5 million member group led by Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi of the Zulu nation.

ANC's members--their presence now legal in South Africa--are expected to return to the country as early as July, in order to participate in negotiations with the government in Pretoria. And many expect the group, with Mandela back at the helm, to take the lead in voicing the Blacks' concerns.

But Mandela will have his hands full trying to keep the varying groups together, and that may prove to be one of the biggest obstacles South African Blacks face in their battle for freedom.

"Inkatha may be the most difficult for Mandela because it is a very powerful movement in Natal," says Abernethy. "It is possible that Natal would secede from South Africa.

H. Leroy Vail, who is an associate professor of history at Harvard, says the ANC itself might even split.

"There will be real politics in the Black community that there has not been before--not the facade of unity the people think of when they think of the ANC," Vail says.

Of course, some--like Abernethy--see the potential spintering as the positive side-effect of democratization.

But even Abernethy admits the Blacks are in a no-win position: If they stay together, they are accused of inflexibility. If they splinter, they are accused of lacking a cohesive vision.

"If a movement stays together, it is seen as authoritarian and without diversity," Abernethy says. "Or the notion is that the Africans can never get together."

All of which might make most scholars skeptical about the prospects for real reform in South Africa. But "as we have learned from went on in Eastern Europe," Vail says, "you can never tell what is going to happen tomorrow."

"I worry about being optimistic," Rotberg says, "but after a long drought, it has begun to sprinkle."