Complete apartheid reigns at the winery of fictional Jock Silberstein: white wine is bottled by colored girls in white uniforms while red wine is bottled by white girls in brown uniforms. Jock Silberstein is a creation of Etienne Leroux, an Afrikaner novelist who explores sex, evil and decadence, and sometimes treats Afrikaners and apartheid with mocking irony. By doing so, Leroux and André P. Brink, another Afrikaner novelist who is like him, desert the traditional way of the pastoral, patriotic and puritanical Afrikaans novel. The Afrikaner literary set in South Africa likes to describe the new novels of Leroux and Brink as "the renaissance in Afrikaans prose.” That’s overblowing it, but the novels do have significance, for politics as well as art.

Afrikaner nationalists have long looked on their language, which comes from 17th-century Dutch, as more than a means of expression; to them, it is an end in itself. Using Afrikaans glorifies nationalism. Extreme nationalist Afrikaners, convinced that Leroux and Brink use it in a way that soils Afrikaner nationalism, now condemn the two writers as traitors to their culture.

After the Boer War, Afrikaners, descendants of the early Dutch settlers, tried to avenge the humiliation and indignities of their defeat by intensifying their belief in the worth of their own culture. They removed their sons from the Boy Scouts and put them into the Voortrekkers. They patronized Afrikaner banks, attended weekly meetings of the Afrikaans cultural society, voted for a political party, the Nationalist Party, that preached the need to keep Afrikaner culture pure and isolated. They became a people who, according to one conceit, lived in a house that had mirrors instead of windows.

Afrikaans became the second official language, replacing Dutch. Afrikaners founded the first Afrikaans newspaper, translated the Bible into Afrikaans, wrote textbooks in Afrikaans, and began teaching their children in Afrikaans at school.

Novelists who wrote in the language were patriots more than artists, and their work showed it. They glorified Afrikanerdom and the Boer War, dwelt on rural and village life, and wrote heroic sagas with unsullied Afrkaner heroes.

Leroux and Brink reacted against this when they began writing in the early 1960s. They wrote in Afrikaans not because it was patriotic to do so but because it was their native language and therefore the best means of expressing their feelings and ideas. Calling themselves the sestigers (Afrikaans for “the men of the sixties”), Leroux and Brink were influenced more by the literary fashions of Europe and America than by the glory of the Boer War.

This new approach, especially its frankness about sex, shocked an Afrikaner society dominated by the Calvinist Dutch Reformed Church, a society that bans, under its obscenity laws, publications like Playboy or Valley of the Dolls. Leroux and Brink have stepped very carefully. Their sex scenes, in fact, seem tame by any standard except that of the Afrikaners.

South Africa also bans books which the government deems politically offensive. Leroux and Brink have not written any diatribes against apartheid. Their publishers, Human and Rousseau of Cape Town, insist that they are nonpolitical writers. Yet that is true only up to a point for, like almost everything else in South Africa, their books cannot help reflecting some aspect of race and politics. Leroux and Brink, however, deal with these matters in special, undogmatic and quiet ways.

So far, only two of their novels have been translated into English. The first and most important is Leroux’s Seven Days at the Silbersteins, published in Afrikaans in 1962 and in English in the United States last year. In tones of symbolism and decadence that recall Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, the novel is a story of a fall from innocence. The family of a young Afrikaner, Henry Van Eeden, engage him to marry Salome, a daughter of the Silbersteins, wealthy Jewish owners of a Cape vineyard. He had never met the girl when he arrives at Welgevonden, the Silberstein estate, to spend seven days with his designated in-laws.

In the first six days, he experiences six dances: of the rich, the artists and the farmers, then a wild integrated masquerade, a dance of the intellectuals, and a Walpurgisnacht. By then, he has begun to experience his fall: “the loss of grace, the birth of consciousness, the twilight state of realization, the curse of reason.” On the final day, he meets Salome.

The fourth day is devoted to apartheid, a subject that Leroux treats with his special irony. At night, the Silbersteins stage their wild, frenzied, multiracial masquerade for Henry, a party followed by rioting and fire in the native village of the plantation. It takes Henry’s future father-in-law, Jock Silberstein, until noon of the next day to restore order. Henry then joins the dance of the intellectuals who, unaware of any disorder, are concerned with less real aspects of apartheid. “Tell me, Doctor, if an albino is born of native parents, could you describe someone like him as a native?,” a journalist asks a social anthropologist.

The second novel is Brink’s The Ambassador (1963). Greatly inferior to Leroux’s book, it reads like an exercise by a college student who nas read too much in James Joyce and fills his notebooks with streams of consciousness. It is trite and wooden. The book’s faults as a novel, however, are related to its significance as a breakthrough in Afrikaans writing. Brink has made a studied attempt to get away from the old Afrikaans prose and write a modern novel. His hero is a stolid, solid Afrikaner cliché, South Africa’s ambassador to France, who succumbs to love in Paris and, at 56, discovers that, ach, he has never really lived before. Sex is celebrated and adherence to South African duty is ridiculed. This is old stuff, but not in Afrikaans.

The significance of the new Afrikaans writing may be more political than literary. From an artistic view, Leroux, though not Brink, can probably join English writers like Alan Paton and Nadine Gordimer on any list of distinguished South African novelists. Non-Afrikaans readers will be better able to judge this in the next year or so when the rest of Leroux’s novels are translated into English. From a political view, however, the significance is clearer. Writers like Leroux and Brink reflect and intensify the forces in South Africa that are pushing the white supremacist Afrikaner out of his isolation and into a modern world.

In fact, a public controversy over Seven Days at the Silbersteins first made the rest of South Africa aware that there were splits among white Afrikaners; that all did not think alike. In 1964, the South African Academy of Arts and Sciences, an organization of distinguished Afrikaners, awarded its annual Hertzog Literary Prize to Leroux for the novel. This enraged extreme nationalists in the academy. They protested publicly and spent the next three years trying to take over the academy’s governing committee.

The extremists failed, but their battle caught public attention. South Africans noticed that extreme and liberal Afrikaners were fighting also over other issues. Newspapers began to call one group the verkramptes or “the cramped, constricted ones,” and the other the verligtes or “the enlightened ones.” The fight between verligtes and verkramptes, the most significant political development in South Africa in a decade, was brought into the light. South Africans suddenly realized that new ideas and fresh doubts had infiltrated some of the thinking of a small group of the dominant white Afrikaners.

In the last twenty years, two forces have cracked the monolithic isolation and dourness of Afrikanerdom. The first is urbanization. The Boers have come to the cities and been caught in all the traps of industrial society. This has made the Afrikaner more educated, more sophisticated, more aware of the rest of the world. A few Afrikaners have become capitalists and industrial managers and been forced to face the contradictions of a policy of apartheid in an industrialized economy.

The second force is success. After twenty years of control over South Africa and of defiance of the United Nations, the Afrikaner nationalist hardly feels the need any more to shore up his inner strength by intensifying his identity with fellow Afrikaners. He can afford to relax a bit, think for himself, even test a few new ideas. As a result, in the words of one well-known Afrikaner judge: “We are beginning to realize that we can’t isolate ourselves, that we can’t stop the world and get off, that we must change.”

Actually, only a few Afrikaners have changed, at least to the point where it matters. But their presence and influence have frightened extreme nationalists into vitriolic attacks on what they consider a new and dangerous threat to the purity of their culture. Besides denouncing novels, the extremists have centered their attacks on Prime Minister John Vorster’s entertainment of black leaders and diplomats from other countries, the encouragement of immigration of foreign whites, and the agreement to assemble a single Olympic team from members of different races.

Measured against South Africa’s racial problems, these are piddling issues. If the verkramptes and verligtes are fighting only about sexy novels, black diplomats, Greek immigrants and colored sprinters, their rift is insignificant. But, when you talk in private with verligtes about the future, it becomes clear that the gap between them and other Afrikaner nationalists is wide and perhaps significant.

The verligtes believe in a sincere, thorough and speedy implementation of the Bantustan policy set down by the late Prime Minister Hendrik F. Verwoerd. To them, unlike other Afrikaners, the Bantustans are not a sham designed to divert the world’s attention from apartheid. Verligtes want South Africa to develop the Bantustans or African tribal homelands and give them independence. At the same time, they want the government to end racial discrimination in the rest of the country, the so-called white areas.

On the surface, these views are neither startling nor acceptable. But the significance of the verligtes lies less in what they believe now than in what they may come to believe later. They are practical and thoughtful men who intend to face up to all the implications and contradictions of their convictions. In the years ahead, the verligtes will probably go through two crises that could determine whether they will ever become a force for change.

The first crisis will come when evidence and logic force verligtes to realize that the Bantustans, as set up now, will never work. Some verligtes understand this already and are talking about partition, perhaps giving Africans half of South Africa, including some industrial areas.

Furthermore, verligtes will have to realize that no matter how you divide South Africa, the so-called white areas will always have sizable permanent African populations. Africans, who may even be in the majority, will demand the vote as well as an end to social discrimination in these areas. Verligtes will either accept the implications or give up and withdraw into white supremacy.

The second crisis will come from the calumny that traditional Afrikanerdom will heap upon the upstarts. Even if verligtes believe in partition and the African vote, their beliefs will be meaningless if they are afraid to express them. So far, their record has been poor. They have refrained from saying what they really believe and contented themselves instead with making fun of the verkramptes. This caution probably comes from the realization that most other Afrikaner voters care nothing about Bantustans or Africans. Their creed is white supremacy.

Change is in the air in South Africa. But the timidity of the verligtes and the strength of their opposition may shackle modern men in the long run, turning them into a small class of intellectuals who talk dreamily of change and do nothing. If so, South Africa will lose one of its last slim chances for a peaceful way out of its racial binds.

Mr. Meisler, Africa correspondent of the Los Angeles Times, is a frequent contributor to The Nation.