But Chris Hani was the kind of militant black that hard-line whites hate and fear the most, and last Saturday morning a white man allegedly killed him. Hani had just bought a newspaper at a local supermarket and was returning to his house in a conservative, middle-class suburb of Johannesburg. He had given his bodyguards the day off. As he got out of his car, eyewitnesses said, a white man approached and fired four pistol shots into him at close range. Hani died almost instantly, blood pumping from his shattered head. The gunman got into a red car and drove off. The police arrested a suspect, identifying him as Januzu Jakub Wallus, 40, a South African citizen who emigrated from Poland in 1981. There was no immediate explanation of the killer’s motive or sponsorship, if any. “I think somebody or some group is hellbent on sabotaging the negotiation process,” said Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, whose efforts against apartheid brought him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984. “Someone doesn’t want us to have a new South Africa.”

Hani was killed only 10 days after the resumption of talks on a new constitution. In recent weeks he had been a strong voice of relative moderation in the peace process. He endorsed the power-sharing deal worked out by negotiators for the multiracial ANC and white President F. W. de Klerk. That tentative agreement would schedule one person, one vote elections for the first half of 1994, create a multiracial government of national unity giving de Klerk’s National Party a proportionate share of power and effectively postpone black-majority rule until the end of the 1990s. “It was not easy to accept this, [and] it’s not the deal that I would have wanted,” Hani said in an interview with NEWSWEEK last month (box). “[But] it is the most realistic and reasonable approach.” A week before he died, he urged the radical Pan-Africanist Congress to abandon its armed struggle, a step the ANC took, with Hani’s approval, in 1991. “I don’t accept people calling for war,” he said, because the white oppressors … are actually talking to us."

On the night after Hani’s murder, there were reports of unrest in Khayelitsha, a black township outside Cape Town. Elsewhere, black and white leaders called for calm. De Klerk urged “all leaders to show maximum restraint in the face of this act,” and the ANC asked its followers not to take revenge. The political timetable could be disrupted if widespread racial violence results from Hani’s murder. “It’s clearly designed to spike the whole process once again,” said Joe Slovo, the white elder statesman of the Communist Party.

The assassination also creates a leadership crisis in both the Communist Party and the ANC. Slovo, the longtime Communist leader, is suffering from bone-marrow cancer; he handed over control to Hani in December 1991, after the party failed to come up with any other candidate of stature. The ANC has several contenders to eventually succeed the 74-year-old Mandela. They include Cyril Ramaphosa, 40, the movement’s secretary-general, whose power base is in the labor unions, and Thabo Mbeki, 50, the ANC’s chief diplomat. But both of them lack Hani’s credibility as a fighter and his ardent following in the most explosive segment of black South African politics, the angry and often violent young men on the dusty streets of communities like Soweto.

He created his own legend in Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), the ANC’s military wing. In exile, Hani fought against white-ruled Rhodesia, served two years in prison in Botswana on a weapons-possession rap and then moved to Lesotho, where for seven years he ran a network that infiltrated guerrillas into South Africa. He personally recruited many of the young fighters who moved up in the ranks of the guerrilla army, and eventually he became its chief of staff. Returning to South Africa after the 1990 legalization of the ANC, he called for an end to the fighting and moved ahead on parallel tracks in the leadership of the ANC and its militant ally, the Communist Party. When he accepted the Communist leadership, he was criticized by many whites, and some in the West, who are alarmed by the party’s continued existence. But it had a long history of fighting apartheid and advocating multiracialism. Hani rejuvenated the 45,000-member organization and said it would support multiparty democracy.

Meanwhile, he seemed to rule out any role for himself in a transitional government, which is sure to face severe difficulties. Instead, Hani cultivated grass-roots support for an eventual presidential bid as a populist candidate who could rail against the failures and misguided policies of a coalition government-and the ANC moderates who serve in it. His death may benefit the moderates in the long run. Or it may throw new support to other militants, such as the volatile Winnie Mandela, Nelson’s estranged wife. Hani was seen as the best hope by many in the lost generation of teenagers and young adults who have stoked the black-on-black fighting in the townships. Now they will turn to someone else-and quite possibly someone worse.