TWO very different icons of black empowerment come together this weekend when South Africa's President Nelson Mandela is scheduled to meet the Rev Louis Farrakhan.
Mr Mandela, who spent 27 years in prison in the name of equality and racial co existence, is courting controversy by agreeing to meet the leader of the Nation of Islam church in the US.
Mr Farrakhan is described by his opponents as a demagogue who preaches racial hatred. In the past he has described Jews and Vietnamese Americans as "bloodsuckers" who made money from black Americans and gave nothing back. He is also said to be virulently anti white.
In 1994, one of his aides was quoted as telling students blacks should massacre whites after they took power in South Africa.
Mr Farrakhan's radical stance and powerful rhetoric have made him a hero to many black Americans. Last October he persuaded hundreds of thousands of blacks to travel to Washington for the "Million Man March" to promote black self reliance.
The most hostile reaction so far to Mr Mandela's decision has come from the white supremacist AWB (Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging) which announced yesterday that the meeting "incontrovertibly shows the vicious anti white nature lying behind the facade of friendliness which masks the ANC's most prominent public figure
It also criticised Mr Mandela for refusing to meet the former Ku Klux Klan leader, Mr David Duke, when he visited South Africa in 1994.
"The ANC refused to have anything to do with a pro white American politician, yet now they are falling over themselves to meet an anti white American politician, much like dung beetles over a pile of horse droppings, said the official AWB statement.
Mr Mandela's African National Congress has been publicly cool about Mr Farrakhan's visit. On Tuesday it released a statement saying it hoped he could learn during his tour why South Africans opposed religious intolerance and oppression of women.
Details of Mr Farrakhan's schedule have not yet been released, but the meeting is expected to take place tomorrow. Mr Farrakhan is visiting South Africa apparently at the invitation of a radical Muslim group and elements of the Pan African Congress as part of a tour of the African continent.
He is expected to arrive in Johannesburg today from Namibia and will travel on to Mozambique and Zimbabwe.
He has already had talks with the Nigerian dictator, Gen Sani Abacha, and Libya's Col Moamar Gadafy. Earlier this week Col Gadafy pledged to support MrFarrakhan in an effort to attack the US from within and create a black American state.
The apartheid regime's "most effective assassin" is prepared to confess his crimes before the forthcoming Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a South African newspaper has reported.
The weekly Mail and Guardian yesterday said Col Eugene de Kock, leader of the disbanded CIO assassination squad, was planning to ask Pretoria's Supreme Court to suspend his trial so he could give a full disclosure to the truth commission.
Mr de Kock faces 121 charges ranging from fraud to murder in a trial that has already lasted several, months. The paper speculated that Mr de Kock's confession could implicate senior politicians and high ranking police and army officers in a wave of violence designed to destabilise the anti apartheid movement.
In Cape Town yesterday, the chairman of the commission, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, announced that its first public hearings would not be held until late March or early April.
When it is up and running, the commission will have the power to hear confessions and grant amnesty for political crimes committed before December 5th, 1993.