HIS OR HERS?

The New South Africa: 'We must acknowledge', says Winnie Mandela, 'that the rainbow nation is still a dream.' Nelson's dream, the world's dream but not hers. And that may still matter. Report by Bill Keller

On a blistering day in April, the tribal royalty of the Xhosa people have assembled in the former colonial outpost of Umtata to ponder the question of where they fit in South Africa's novice democracy. The chiefs are lawyers and businessmen, and they wear suits and ties. Some arrive from the rutted remoteness of their villages in Mercedes-Benzes equipped with cellular telephones. But make no mistake. Many in this audience were at least passive collaborators in the apartheid system of racial separation.

It seems an incongruous venue for Winnie Mandela, who was among apartheid's most courageous victims and is often portrayed as among the most fervent of South Africa's revolutionaries. But she shares an important bond with the chiefs who have packed the wooden seats and upper galleries of what was, under apartheid, the parliament of an ostensibly independent black homeland - both Mrs Mandela and the chiefs feel alienated from a new order they regard as the captive of white values and interests.

She steps to the microphone wearing a West African djellaba of embroidered blue cotton, raising her fist to shouts and ululation. Speaking in Xhosa, she quickly warms up the crowd with paeans to the importance of the chiefs and gibes at the handful of reporters who have shown up "looking for a provocation". Then she announces that she has chosen not to write a new speech for the occasion. Instead, she will recycle one that riled the Establishment two weeks earlier. The chiefs murmur in delighted anticipation as she adjusts her reading glasses and switches into her bookish, irony-soaked English.

The heart of the speech recounts the humiliation of Xhosa chiefs and Zulu kings under the rapacious rule of British colonialists. In exquisite detail she recalls how the forebears of her audience were displaced, imprisoned, betrayed and slaughtered. She likens the British to Nazis and wonders why to this day there has been neither compensation nor apology. It is a shrewd and rattling speech, with a sting in the tail. For where was President Mandela on the very day Winnie Mandela first delivered this indictment of British atrocities? He, whose government treats African royalty as "a nuisance and albatross", was lavishly entertaining the white queen, Elizabeth II of Britain and the Commonwealth.

Nelson Mandela is about the closest thing the world has yet produced to a heartfelt non-racialist; she is a divider, a polariser, vividly aware that non-racialism is still more a wish than a reality. Nelson Mandela is loved; she is more often feared, a volcano of grudges and vendettas.

She represents the serious possibility that the healing Nelsonian dream will not happen, that Africa will not be denied. In a sense, the mystery of South Africa is why more blacks are not like her.There is little in her life, or theirs, that would encourage faith in fruitful co-existence with the white man.

Her father, Columbus Madikizela, spurned his hereditary position as a tribal counsellor to become a missionary schoolteacher. He dressed in Western fashion, but seethed with resentment of white domination. To his students, including Winnie, he preached that whites were little better than predators. Her paternal grandmother was even more vociferous in her scorn for whites - a prejudice she brandished constantly against Winnie's mother, a red-haired, blue-eyed beauty, who clearly had some white ancestors. Winnie seems to have inherited the bitterness along with the beauty.

At 60, she remains a handsome woman, tall and stylish, with large, arresting eyes and an aristocratic nose, high-boned cheeks and flawless skin. She has a manner that manages to be at once utterly poised and slightly flirtatious. As a young woman, she was, by all accounts, quite overpowering.

Nelson Mandela says he first noticed her standing at a bus stop in Soweto, where she was employed as a social worker. He had no idea who she was, but was instantly infatuated. A week later, they were introduced. The following day, he invited her to lunch and, after an eye-watering meal of Indian curry, they went for a stroll in the countryside, where he announced he wanted to marry her.

He was 16 years older than her, married and the father of three. (His first marriage was unravelling. He spoke about irreconcilable differences: his wife had become devoted to the Jehovah's Witnesses, a sect that prohibits political involvement.) Nelson was also on trial for treason. Winnie found him irresistible.

In her own recollections, she describes him more as a father figure than a lover. "If you are looking for some kind of romance, you won't find it," she told an interviewer years ago. Long before he was separated from her by the state, she accepted that he was married first to the movement. "Even at that stage, life with him was a life without him," she recalled. And then for two decades she would never get closer to him than the glass divider in a prison visiting room.

His life in prison was, at least, predictable, and he was constantly busy with the conspiratorial activities of his fellow inmates. Her torments - arrests, banishments, interrogations, predawn searches, lost jobs, separation from her children - were subject to the cruelest whimsy, and endured without any reliable support.

"She was a woman all alone in a hostile world peopled by the secret police and their networks of informers," noted Jon Qwelane, an editor and radio talk-show host who defends Winnie as a product of the pathology of apartheid.

If prison matured her husband into a consummate politician but it had quite the opposite effect on her. Looking back on her first extended prison stint, 17 months of solitary confinement, she told a television interviewer, "It is, in fact, what changed me - what brutalised me so much that I knew what it is to hate."

Thabo Mbeki, Nelson Mandela's deputy president and heir apparent, thinks the key to understanding Mrs Mandela is the fact that she did not grow up in the strong, nonracial, disciplined culture of the ANC. She married into it.Her loyal friends, like Peter Mokaba, the militant-talking former head of the ANC Youth League, say the ANC abandoned her in her time of trial. It is equally true that she abandoned it. Resettled in the vast black metropolis outside Johannesburg, she set up her own office, built her own following, spoke her own mind.

In Soweto, Mrs Mandela opened her house to teenage gang members, organizing the infamous Mandela United Football Club. Ostensibly a soccer team intended to keep youngsters out of trouble, it became a band of thugs who terrorized the township. By 1991, four members of the club had been convicted of murder.

The most notorious case, that of the 14-year-old resistance hero, Stompie Seipei, became Mrs Mandela's Chappaquiddick.

She had Stompie and three other boys kidnapped from the home of a white minister she suspected of sexually molesting his charges. In a back room of her house, her football club beat the boys to extract testimony against the minister; the "coach" of Mandela United later slit Stompie's throat, a crime that landed him on Death Row.

Two witnesses said Mrs Mandela personally whipped the four youths, punched them and slapped them and said they were unfit to live, but the state, could not make that charge stick. Some witnesses who had given police evidence against Mrs Mandela simply disappeared. Others nervously changed their stories on the stand. Mrs Mandela's two co-defendants, Xoliswa Falati and John Morgan, later told reporters they had perjured themselves to protect Mrs Mandela. She was ultimately acquitted of all but the kidnapping, and thereafter proclaimed the entire case a political witch-hunt.

Last August, Mrs Mandela took the floor of Parliament to deliver her postscript on the case. Curiously, some listeners took it as an apology, but in fact it was a carefully crafted exercise in self-exoneration. Stompie, she said was a casualty of apartheid and the passions it aroused."My deepest regret is that I failed Stompie - that I was unable to protect him from the anarchy of those times."

The kidnapping left Mrs Mandela an outcast, forced to resign her posts in the movement and separated from her husband. It also curdled what had been a fairly warm relationship with the liberal press into a fierce and mutual animosity.They reveled in her shady business deals and profiled her new courtiers, people remote from the idealism of the movement. Prominent among those was a white socialite with a conviction for illicit diamond purchases who, after Mrs Mandela was redeemed and in Parliament, bought a suburban manor for her to use. The scandals were legitimate news, of course, but the coverage carried an unmistakable presumption of guilt.

The vitriolic reporting confirmed her sense of a conspiracy against her, and she shut herself off. She does not give interviews any more, although her personal charm has always been one of her most effective weapons. Even John Carlin, the former Johannesburg correspondent for The Independent and one of Mrs Mandela's toughest critics, admits that he was "absolutely, helplessly beguiled" in his one interview with her, in 1990. "She was regal and coquettish at the same time," he recalls, "I forgot all about Stompie the moment she entered the room."

In the five years since Nelson Mandela was freed from prison, the Mandela' fairy-tale marriage has deteriorated into a painful estrangement.

Zindzi Mandela, one of the couple's two grown-up daughters, recently said in a magazine interview that after Mr. Mandela's release from prison in 1990, her parents' love could not endure the pressures of freedom.

"They grew further and further apart.They never could talk things over. From the day my father was free, we had to share him with the rest of the world. It sounds cynical but since he is free, we see less of him than before."

She described her father now as a lonely figure, often dining by himself at the long table in his presidential

mansion, showering his grandchildren with the love he could never bestow on his own children. When husband and wife meet in public, whether at a comrade's funeral or a daughter's wedding, he turns coldly away from her.

"My father and mother don't see each other anymore. They never visit me at the same time. They don't speak to me about their problems. As if they don't exist for each other."

She predicts they will divorce, largely because Mr. Mandela's allies in the ANC wish it.

. She is a problem he evades. He is haunted still by a sense of guilt at putting service to the country ahead of his family. Besides, it is his nature to co-opt potential enemies. The new coalition Government, he told John Carlin a month after his inauguration, was "full of people whose hands were dripping with blood." Was Winnie any worse than them?

It took, several acts of defiance from Winnie and a police briefing on her alleged criminal conduct to convince him finally that his own authority would suffer ifshe was seen as above the law and party discipline.

None of this seems to matter in the wretched settlements where the poorest South Africans live. Throughout her official travails, she has always remained in constant demand to lend her charisma to a local protest, a township funeral a grass-roots project. Unlike other liberation celebrities who were absorbed with the new tricks of Government,she turned up. In the squatter camps outside Johannesburg or Cape Town or Port Elizabeth you find her visitations mythologized as devotedly as the apparitions at Lourdes or Fatima.

The first time I watched her was two years ago as she worked Phola Park, a rough ghetto of scrap shanties that she adopted as her showplace. "uMamawethu!" the shack-dwellers shouted as she led a band of potential donors on a tour. "Our mother!"

"Winnie does everything for us," one woman told me as she watched the entourage. "Winnie is our Government."

As has been the case with her comrades in the liberation struggle, her neighbors in Soweto, her admirers in the press and her own husband, time has brought some disillusionment to Phola Park. It is hard now, two years later, to find anything tangible she delivered to the poor. In fact, police claim Phola Park is one of four destitute black communities Mrs Mandela tried to bilk by selling her influence to procure government contracts for a friendly developer.

"The only things she has brought to Phola Park are promises," says one local leader of the residents' committee that govems the camp.

But like many populists, Mrs Mandela is largely immune in the eyes of the lowliest to the reproaches of distant authority figures, even her husband. She came when no one else did, she thrilled them with simple promises and her status as a benefactor is unassailable.

"The President is working in concert with Mrs Mandela" insists Mongameh Tapile, 23 and jobless, dismissing as gossip the news that had trickled down to his cockeyed shack in Phola Park.

"The leaders all see through her now," sighs another official of the residents' committee. "But the people still think she can do no wrong."

This black underclass is the core of Mrs Mandela's constituency, but not the limit of it. She has followers among black intellectuals and businessmen who resent the way whites make the rules of the economy and dominate the social discourse, and who enjoy the way she makes whites squirm. She is a favourite of restive, prospectless youth, especially vigilantes of the township "self-defense units," who are convinced Mrs Mandela stuck up for them when movement fuddy-duddies wanted them disarmed. The former guerrillas of the ANC underground army, many of them now integrated into a new national defense force, are an important source of support. A union leader told me she is much admired by the legions of unskilled migrant workers who dig South Africa's gold and coal. Women, except those who know her well, treat her as an icon.

Ultimately Mrs Mandela's most formidable constituency may be none of these, but the burgeoning black middle class, who are the first to feel their upward path blocked by the entrenched privilege of whites.

Her strategy has been to make herself the embodiment of the ANC, to make her own campmgn for vindication - her own sense of a victim's entitlement - an extension of the liberation movement. No one who has watched her before a crowd can doubt that she is very good at it.

A year before her recent performance in Umtata, I saw her make a campaign speech to a worshipful audience of nurses at Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto. It was two weeks before South Africa's first free elections, and Mrs Mandela was nearing the zenith of an amazing personal and political comeback. An appeals court had reduced her six-year jail sentence for kidnapping to a fine. Shunned by the liberation elite, she had fought her way back to become president of the African National Congress Women's League, and a member of the party's Parliamentary slate.

To an outsider, it seemed an occasion for a victor's grace and magnanimity. But her speech was filled with venom. She railed about her own persecution by "hostile fascist judges" and "the gutter media," and enemies "clothed in the sheepskin of our liberation movement." On the eve of a political miracle, her theme was unremitting vengefulness.

"We are aware of the noble pronouncements of the wise," she said, her voice rancid with sarcasm,"which state: 'We will forgive, but never forget.' Perhaps 'that [forgiveness] will come with time to our lips, but not before genuine justice is meted outside of apartheid courts in a true, democratic South Africa."

Some of the party comrades sharing the stage fidgeted uneasily in their chairs. But the audience, her audience, roared its delight.

The fact is, her compound of class bitterness and racial resentment touches a sore place in South African hearts that Nelson Mandela has tried to put off-limits.

"We talk of a rainbow nation, in a country that remains dichotomized between black and white," she told the chiefs in Umtata. "We must acknowledge that the rainbow in fact is still a dream."

What the West loves about Mr. Mandela - his embrace of liberal Western values - still sits uneasily with many South Africans, who, now that the unifying cause of apartheid is removed, see even their beloved ANC as a bit too cosmopolitan, too European.

"That is the perception the majority of people in South Africa hold," said Phathekile Holomisa, the leader of the chiefs who played host to Mrs Mandela. "Democracy as it has always been practiced in the white community in this country, and in the West, is designed only to insure that the interests of whites are not jeopardized."

Mrs Mandela is self-absorbed and no great organizer. There is a self destructive quality in her penchant for

bad company and intemperate remarks. Within the ANC fraternity, she is isolated now, except for a small circle of populists who feel themselves similarly endangered. She may soon be indicted. But she will not be chastened, and she cannot be ignored.

For Mrs Mandela or a like-minded opportunist, to have a serious chance of reorienting the ANC from Mr. Mandela's policies of reconciliation and business-friendly economics toward her own instinct for recrimination and redistribution would require at least two circumstances. One is the failure of the moderate course adopted by her husband's Government. South African blacks show every sign of being willing to wait a few years, and their expectations are realistic. But if the delivery of houses and jobs and schools gets bogged down, if the poor majority begin to feel deceived and disillusioned, they will be increasingly open to Mrs Mandela's message of racial and economic resentment. The other requirement for the rise of an anti-Mandela would be the absence of a Mandela, the only figure whose authority is beyond question.

But he is 76 years old to her 60, and although Mrs Mandela recently found out she had diabetes while Mr. Mandela responds to queries about his health by boasting that he would "like to challenge Mike Tyson," the actuarial odds are long in her favor. Of the two men with the best chance to lead South Africa in the future, it is not clear either would be a match for Mrs Mandela

Thabo Mbeki, the currtent favorite to succeed Mr. Mandela is more inclined- to compromise with her. He cultivated her support, and that of others in the populist camp, in his campaign to become deputy president, and has argued for going easy on her. In an Mbeki Government, her influence would probably increase.

Cyril Ramaphosa, secretary general of the ANC and a longer shot to become President, is a strong internal critic of Mrs Mandela but is dismissive of her potential. "Yes, our people want to identify themselves with people like Winnie Mandela who have suffered but have also triumphed, who are seen as fighters," he allowed in an interview.

But as for representing a potent alternative force, he said: "No, no, she doesn't. Clearly not. There is a temptation in the ANC for people to want to be populist. But the traditions that have evolved in the ANC keep most people walking along the straight and narrow path of party policy."

Perhaps. But another ANC insider, who has been a union leader, party fund-raiser and journalist, warns that victorious movements can break down when their unifying cause is accomplished and more primal instincts arise. just as Governments in northern Africa under estimated the potential of Islamic fundamentalism, he contends, leaders in the ANC may under estimate the potential of an Africanist, anti-Western challenge. "Winnie touches something that is not unfamiliar to me," he admitted "She is a demagogue, yes, but she is a very good demagogue."

In the meantime, Mrs Mandela however much she terrifies whites and rattles her own party, plays an indispensable role, by reminding the Governnent of the obligations it has yet to meet. In power, she would probably be a disaster for South Africa. At the edge of power, she keeps the leaders honest, and convinces the downtrodden that their case is being put.

"Some of you may well ask," she told the poor in one shack-dwellers' ghetto recently, while campaigning to register ANC voters for local elections in November, "why should we continue supporting you when so little has changed? When inequalities remain? When there is no reduction in the shackland population? When unemployment has barely abated? When those without houses remain without houses? When those who had no electricity and water yesterday continue to have no electricity and water today? These people may ask, why vote again when voting does not get you what you hoped it would get you?"

These are uncomfortable questions, but merely asking them is not an act of insurrection. It is an act of accountability.

"The Government can become so elitist, and concentrate on elitist interests," Mrs Mandela said. "To help the Government, you must constantly hold its attention."