
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, November 18, 1993                   TAG: 9311180022
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-16   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: KEMPTON PARK, SOUTH AFRICA                                LENGTH: Short

S. AFRICA OKS CONSTITUTION

After a frantic day of bargaining, the government and African National Congress put the final touches Wednesday on a constitution that ends apartheid by giving blacks equal rights for the first time.

The government and the ANC muscled the proposed agreement through multiparty talks, bringing two years of painstaking negotiations to a dramatic climax.

Final agreement by the 21 parties at the talks came late Wednesday to applause from the weary delegates. A signing ceremony in which party leaders endorsed the constitutional package began soon afterward.

A smiling Nelson Mandela, the ANC leader, shook the hand of President F.W. de Klerk as he walked to his seat for the ceremony.

"The day of liberation has been uppermost in our minds," Mandela, the longtime political prisoner likely to become South Africa's first black president, said earlier on state-run television.

"We are not there yet, but the cornerstone of our efforts to achieve national liberation . . . has been laid down."

Led by de Klerk's National Party and Mandela's ANC, the negotiators' task was to find a peaceful way to transfer power from an affluent but nervous white minority to the oppressed and impoverished black majority.

Mandela and de Klerk got the Nobel Peace Prize last month for leading the negotiations process. Both have said the real prize would be getting through the coming years without bloodshed.

by CNB