S. African Magazine Criticizes Life Style : Mandela’s New Home: Fit for a Queen?

Winnie Mandela, anti-apartheid activist and the wife of the imprisoned African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela, came under criticism here over the weekend for a big house she is building in Soweto, the black satellite city outside Johannesburg.

Calling Mandela “the new royalty,” the leftist Johannesburg magazine Frontline used the architect-designed, lavishly appointed, two-story house to attack her life style and question her political commitment.

“The house is by far the grandest house in Soweto, and people are divided over it,” the white-owned magazine’s deputy editor, Nomavenda Mathiane, wrote in the latest issue of Frontline, bringing into the open what had long been township gossip but setting off a nasty political squabble in the process.

“Some say it is right that the future president (Nelson Mandela) should live so,” Mathiane reported, “but others say that it is wrong for leaders who represent the poor to live like kings.”

“Fit for a queen,” the Johannesburg newspaper Sunday Star declared, giving its readers a room-by-room tour together with a photograph of a house that, by white standards in South Africa, would be very comfortable and that is luxurious beyond the imagination of the blacks living just across the street in four-room “matchbox” houses typical of Soweto.

Built in Soweto’s “Beverly Hills” section, the house has been under construction for nearly a year, and its modern design and quality put to shame even the luxurious homes built in the past five years by black professionals and businessmen in Soweto’s new upper-class neighborhoods.

With five bedrooms, a family room and several bathrooms upstairs, the new Mandela house of reddish brown brick has a living room, dining room, two studies and a conference room downstairs, according to construction workers. They told of walk-in closets as big as their bedrooms at home, tiles of Italian marble, fireplaces, balconies and servants’ quarters. Extensive landscaping and a swimming pool are planned, the workers said.

The price of it all is secret.

Is the new house, not far from the red-brick “matchbox” in Soweto’s Orlando West section that has been the Mandela family home for nearly 40 years, “to be the new state house?” Frontline asked. “In whose name is it owned? Where is the money coming from?”

“Many people have become uneasy that Mrs. Mandela is taking her role as ‘first lady’ too heavily,” Mathiane wrote, questioning Mandela’s political activities as much as the construction of the new house. “While people are sympathetic with the suffering Mrs. Mandela has been through, and are very much in support of her stand for liberation, there are many who seek answers to these questions.”

The article brought a sharp retort from Mandela, who said that “enemies of the people” are trying to sow divisions among blacks.

Mandela has long been a favorite topic of township gossip, which has focused equally on her political activities and her private life. What people want to know about Mandela, Mathiane said, “Is she still an ordinary mortal at heart?”

The new house, nearly finished, is being built in anticipation of her husband’s release from Cape Town’s Pollsmoor Prison, where he is serving a life sentence for sabotage, she said, and it has been financed out of the royalties earned by her autobiography, “Part of My Soul Went With Him,” which was published last year and promptly banned here.

“There are concerned fellow South Africans who believe that our leaders deserve even better than what I have done for Mandela,” she said in a statement, declining to respond to further questions Sunday. “They formed a trust that has built Mandela’s house.”

She said that the trustees for the project include Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, who has a home nearby, and the Rev. Allan Boesak, president of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches and another anti-apartheid campaigner.