Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 10, 1994 TAG: 9404110132
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOHN DANISZEWSKI ASSOCIATED PRESS|
DATELINE: ISHO, SOUTH AFRICA LENGTH: Long
\ For a few minutes, in his 76th year, Nelson Mandela had a glimpse of the life that might have been.
It was when tribal elders in this Ciskeian capital clothed him in the ``isidanga'' - court garb - and handed him a rod of authority. Fellow members of his Xhosa tribe cheered.
With his silvery hair and his taut posture, Mandela on this recent campaign occasion looked like the lordly chief of the Tembu clan he was once destined to become. But as a boy he listened to the tales told around the fire.
Those stories, of the times before the whites came and of the heroic resistance waged by a pantheon of African chiefs, inspired him to a different road.
``I hoped and vowed then that, among the treasures that life might offer me, would be the opportunity to serve my people and make my own humble contribution to their freedom struggles,'' he once recalled.
That treasure was bestowed on him. Instead of settling disputes and tending to clan interests as a chief, Mandela rejected narrow tribalism and became the central player in a much larger drama: the liberation of all black South Africans dominated by whites in the land of their birth.
During the first week of May, after the country's first election in which all races can vote, Mandela is expected to become the first black president of South Africa.
When that happens, this courtly African - described by one acquaintance as a classic ``Edwardian gentleman'' - will be in a position at last to bring about what he has repeated as a mantra during election stops at the squalid black townships the length and breadth of South Africa: ``a better life for our people.
``You should have houses. Your children should have schools where they can go to learn. They must have clinics. They must have transport. They must have flush toilets. This is what we mean when we say we want a better life.''
The aims sound modest. But for black South Africa, achieving them would be a quantum advance. Amid the stock exchanges and glitzy malls of the highly developed white economy, most of the country's 75 percent black majority still live in grinding poverty. More than half are unemployed; half have to fetch their water; only 32 percent have electricity in their homes.
Yet even now, on the threshold of being able to correct the inequities, it is possible to discern in Mandela a certain melancholy, yearning for the comforts of home and family that he denied himself almost all his life.
He became by turns a lawyer, activist, conspirator, outlaw, prisoner, martyr, symbol. He might have been hanged in 1964 after being convicted of a conspiracy to overthrow the state. He was instead condemned to prison for life on Robben Island, South Africa's Alcatraz.
Mandela's first marriage ended in divorce because of the press of his political activities. He lived with his second wife, Winnie, for just two months off and on over a four-year period when he was not on trial, hiding from police or in jail.
A passionate man (at age 65, he would write to her: ``The mere sight of you, even the thought of you, kindles a thousand fires in me.''), he was forbidden to touch Winnie during her prison visits for the first 22 years. He was helpless while the authorities mercilessly hounded her - a painful impotence for a traditional African man. His two baby girls grew to be women during his incarceration, while his mother and his eldest son died and he was forbidden to attend their funerals.
``Wounds that can't be seen are more painful than those that can be seen and cured by a doctor,'' he said while visiting Robben Island as a presidential candidate in February.
But as those 27 years behind bars passed, Mandela became an icon in the country's miserable black settlements. Songs and poems lionized him. He was a messiah, whose coming would mark the Day of Liberation. As the legends grew, his name acquired international stature as well, until ``Free Nelson Mandela'' was a slogan on T-shirts around the world.
In the end, when President F.W. de Klerk decided that 350 years of white domination could not go on, it was he who had to meet Mandela's conditions of legalizing the African National Congress, allowing exiles to return and freeing all political prisoners before Madiba, as he was known in prison, would accept his freedom.
From the moment he walked out on Feb. 11, 1990, Mandela was the unchallenged leader of South Africa's black masses and the effective president-in-waiting.
He emerged seemingly without bitterness toward those who stole his middle age. That's a mystery even to close friends, one of whom recalls him stopping his motorcade on the day of his release to shake hands with a white family.
There is also amazement at how he emerged from prison so immediately ready to lead the ANC as president. He has orchestrated the ANC's negotiations with de Klerk's National Party for the peaceful hand-over to black rule - for which he and de Klerk shared the Nobel Peace Prize last year.
Through patient dialogue, he has blunted and divided opposition from white extremists as well, although the very fringe right wing still considers him the stalking horse for a communist takeover of South Africa and is threatening to fight.
The most significant opposition to Mandela and the ANC is in Natal. There Mangosuthu Buthelezi, leader of the Zulu-nationalist Inkatha Freedom Party, has grudgingly consented to permit polling stations to be set up in the Zulu homeland but has urged his followers not to vote. In the South African context, that could mean mob justice for anyone foolhardy enough to cast a ballot in areas controlled by Inkatha.
Pandemonium and hysteria erupts when Mandela enters a black community. From the tin shacks and hovels the newly enfranchised emerge, sometimes in their underwear, breaking into spontaneous dance. Youths run for miles alongside Mandela's slow-moving motorcades, their mothers struggling to keep up, huge smiles on their faces, until the wails of toddlers left behind compel them to stop.
Mandela, slightly over 6 feet tall, stands on the back of a truck, beaming through crinkled eyes. Loudspeakers carry his sonorous voice, ``So happy to see you. How are you today?''
Among the people, he wears bright African shirts with bold prints, loose over white canvas slacks and tasseled loafers. It's a natty, youthful look, belying his orthopedic socks and swollen ankles and the hearing aid tucked in one ear. But on him it's also regal. The air of an aristocrat has never left him.
In close among the throngs, Nelson Mandela feels at home. He says the need for intimacy harks back to his childhood.
On trial in 1963, Mandela summed himself up with words that are still played at his rallies and that will likely become his epitaph:
``During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and achieve. But, if need be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.''
Rolihlahla (it means ``Stirs Up Trouble'') Mandela was born in a village near Umtata in the rolling Transkei ``native reserve'' on July 18, 1918, into the royal family of the Thembu, the largest Xhosa clan. His father, a chief with four wives, was an adviser to his relative, the paramount chief. Mandela got his English name Nelson from a missionary in the thatched-roof school where he learned his ABCs.
His father died when Mandela was 12, after giving his son to the paramount chief, who was to groom the boy to be his successor.
It was still before the introduction, under apartheid, of the second-class ``Bantu'' education, and Mandela went to a Methodist high school, then Fort Hare College in Alice. Among his fellow students was Oliver Tambo, Mandela's future partner in law and in resistance politics. But their education was interrupted when they were suspended over a student protest.
Returning to the chief's palace, Mandela learned that a wedding was being arranged for him. He left instead. With the chief's retainers still hunting him, Mandela made his way to Johannesburg in 1941. His first job was as a gold mine security guard, armed with a club.
He looked up a fellow Transkeian named Walter Sisulu, already an ANC member, who found Mandela work in his real estate agency and financial help to study for a law degree by correspondence. Apartheid was not yet institutionalized, and Mandela and Tambo formed the country's first black law partnership.
They were among the young Turks who founded the ANC Youth League in 1944. Mandela became Youth League president in 1950 and led the Africanist stream within the ANC - a black-pride way of thinking that was, if not hostile, then indifferent to whites, said Alan Lipman, a white opponent of apartheid who came to know Mandela then.
Rising in influence, he led more than 8,000 volunteers in a Defiance Campaign against apartheid in 1952 and became deputy president of the ANC. His personality stood out even in those days, contemporaries recall.
In 1955, Mandela helped frame the ANC's Freedom Charter, which declared: ``South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white.'' As a result, he and 155 others were charged with treason. By the time all the defendants were acquitted in 1961, the ANC had been declared an illegal organization.
Asked by Chief Albert Lutuli to lead the ANC underground, Mandela became ``the Black Pimpernel'' in the press as he eluded police for 16 months while still organizing a nationwide strike.
During this period, the increasingly harsh government reprisals and the lack of progress in ending apartheid caused a fundamental shift in ANC thinking. Abandoning a half-century of nonviolence, Mandela and his collaborators agreed on a sabotage campaign.
They formed the ANC's armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (``Spear of the Nation''), which exploded its first three bombs on Dec. 16, 1961, the Day of the Vow when white Afrikaners celebrate what they regard as their God-given right to dominate South Africa.
Mandela slipped out of the country and received secret military training in Algeria. After returning, he was snared by police on Aug. 5, 1962, while disguised as the chauffeur for a white sympathizer. He was sent to Robben Island for the first time.
The following year, Mandela was back in court. The police had found the ANC's underground headquarters at a farm in the Johannesburg suburb of Rivonia, and Mandela became Accused No. 1 after documents captured proved his role in launching Umkhonto.
Mandela and his seven co-defendants used the trial to present their cause to the world.
``I do not deny that I planned violence,'' Mandela said from the dock. ``I did not plan it in a spirit of recklessness, nor because I have any love of violence. I have planned it as a result of a calm and sober assessment of the political situation that had arisen after years of tyranny.''
Although they could have been sentenced to death for conspiring to overthrow the state, the judge imposed life sentences. For Mandela, Sisulu and four other nonwhite defendants, that meant hard labor crushing stones and gathering seaweed on Robben Island.
Since his release, Mandela has moved to a large house in Johannesburg's old-money white suburb of Houghton. He lives surrounded by aides and activists, his life organized by a coterie of middle-aged ANC women.
One of his most wrenching moments came in 1992, when he announced to the world that he and Winnie were separating after 34 years. Looking drained, he blamed ``differences on a number of issues'' but added, ``My love for her remains undiminished.''
The separation followed her conviction in the assault and kidnap of four black youths in Soweto in the late 1980s, one of whom was later murdered. Newspapers said that the couple had become incompatible after spending so long a time apart.
A few months later, a purported love letter from Winnie to a 30-year-old man was leaked to the press. Winnie - who was not imprisoned - is still an active ANC politician in her own right, living in a Soweto mansion. When their paths cross in public, the two are cordial but awkward. According to Soweto activist Dr. Nthato Motlana, Mandela now is happiest on the rare days when he can be at his home with their eight grandchildren.
The adulation he receives is sometimes ``very heavy to bear,'' says Mandela. ``If people trust you, you must do something to merit that trust. You must deliver.''
He says he is willing to go on as he has been for as long as the people want. But wistfully he seems to ask whether, after one five-year term as president, he might finally be allowed to lay down his burden.
``I have children and grandchildren who miss me very much,'' he says. ``I will have to consider whether, at 80, it is not time for me to think in terms of them.''
by CNB