ANC Appoints Mandela as Its Deputy President : South Africa: The group plans to return and set up its headquarters ‘without delay.’

The African National Congress named recently freed black leader Nelson R. Mandela its deputy president and announced Friday that the movement will set up its headquarters in South Africa for the first time in 30 years “without delay.”

The ANC also announced that it will contact the white-led government in Pretoria immediately to fix a date for the first talks between the two sides on obstacles still standing in the way of formal negotiations on a new constitution to end South Africa’s racial conflict.

The announcements came at the end of a two-day meeting of the ANC’s 35-member National Executive Committee and effectively put Mandela, who was released from a South African prison Feb. 11, at the head of Africa’s oldest liberation movement to guide it through a period he has described as “the most crucial in our history.”

Mandela’s appointment as deputy president sidesteps the issue of addressing the 23-year presidency of Oliver Tambo, 72, who suffered a stroke last year and remains under care in a Stockholm clinic.

Mandela, whose friendship with Tambo dates back to the early 1940s, is expected to visit the ailing ANC president in Sweden before wrapping up his 17-day foreign tour.

“My future role will be determined by the National Executive,” Mandela said, deflecting questions about whether he would lead the ANC delegation in talks with the government of South African President Frederik W. de Klerk. “All I can say is that I am prepared to serve in any role the National Executive instructs me to fulfill.”

Two other ANC officials sentenced in 1964 to life imprisonment with Mandela, Govan Mbeki and former ANC Secretary General Walter Sisulu, also were restored to seats on the NEC, according to a statement read after the meeting by ANC acting President Alfred Nzo. Mbeki was freed from a South Africa prison in 1987 and Sisulu last October.

Following De Klerk’s bold racial reform initiatives announced Feb. 2, including promising Mandela’s release and lifting a 30-year ban on the ANC, the ANC’s administrative body announced that it would hold a national congress in South Africa on Dec. 16--the 29th anniversary of the launching of the organization’s military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation).

Among the decisions made at the two-day meeting here was that “the headquarters office of the ANC will be opened in Johannesburg without delay,” as well as other regional offices.