Nation's Growing Trade Leads to Close Contacts With Area's Black Officials - A white cab driver recently answered a call to the exclusive Langham Hotel in Johannesburg and was amazed to see the doorman lead a black man to his cab. But the driver shrugged and figured the Langham Hotel knew what it was doing. The well-dressed black man must be one of those foreign diplomats he had read about in the papers. The doorman instructed the driver to take the guest to the airport, and the cab quickly headed that way. A policeman stopped the cab a few blocks later. "Isn't this a first class taxi?" he asked, a euphemistic way of demanding why a white taxi had a black man in the back. The driver looked him in the eye. "This gentleman is a VIP from the Langham Hotel," the driver said. The policeman snapped back to attention and saluted. "Carry on," he said. The cab took its passenger on to the airport. This incident was hardly more than a prick in the enormous bastion of white supremacy and racial apartheid in South Africa. But it's worth recording simply because it could never have happened in South Africa a year or two ago... [This is one of a number of articles on South Africa written by Stanley Meisler, Times bureau chief in Nairobi, Kenya, his headquarters covering sub-Sahara Africa.]

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