COLUMN ONE : Learning to Stand a Step Back : For Winnie Mandela, the abrupt transition from keeper of her husband’s flame to doting housewife hasn’t been easy.

She began the day by selecting the right shirt and tie for her elderly husband. Then she made the bed, laid out his cholesterol-free breakfast, made sure he swallowed his medication and shooed him onto the patio for meetings while she fielded phone calls and planned lunch.

Altogether, it was a fairly typical day for a South African housewife, but a whole new kind of life for Winnie Mandela.

“I’ve never known what the nucleus of a family was,” she said in a recent interview. “So to me, I just got married--and not to the struggle this time, but to a man. Now I feel I am a human being again.”

During 31 years of marriage to black nationalist leader Nelson R. Mandela, Nomzamo Winnifred Madikizela’s life has never been this ordinary.

She reared their two daughters through relentless police raids, detentions, interrogations, banning orders and banishment. She defied the South African authorities at every turn and once knocked a policeman to the ground for refusing to allow her to change clothes before being taken to jail.

But in recent years she has been criticized by her husband’s African National Congress for building a palatial home, ostracized by anti-apartheid leaders for surrounding herself with a band of young thugs and linked in court papers to the beating death of a young activist.

Now she has been rescued from her critics by her husband’s freedom. And she has a new role in the liberation struggle: taking care of its leader in the small home in Soweto where their marriage began.

She admits it took a while to get the hang of it.

“I think he wore one suit three days running,” she said, laughing. “I was so overwhelmed by the whole situation that I’d just been changing the shirts and underwear.”

Mandela was on trial for treason when they married in 1958. Although he was acquitted on that charge, he soon went underground, where he remained until his arrest in 1961 and subsequent imprisonment for life. Winnie Mandela once summed up their three years together by saying that “life with him was life without him.”

“We never really had that kind of life with a routine, where a husband had to be looked after,” she said. She welcomes the change because in African cultural tradition, taking care of a husband and children is the most exalted role a woman can have. But, she acknowledged, “it’s not easy.”

Looking after Mandela, 71, who is 18 years older than she, is especially difficult “because he can’t lift a finger,” she said.

“He can’t even rinse a glass he’s been drinking water from,” she said. “He doesn’t have time, and in prison they never let him do that. Major Swart did everything for him.”

Major Swart was one of the guards who prepared Mandela’s meals in the three-bedroom house on the grounds of Victor Verster prison, where Mandela was moved after a 1988 bout with tuberculosis.

“He was having superb meals there,” she said, “and he’s always threatening us all that he’ll recall Major Swart. Those men really served him.”

Mandela’s diet is prescribed by doctors and is strictly no-frills. He takes medication, and she tries to see that he continues his exercises.

“He needs to breathe, to walk around in open spaces and to relax, which is not possible here,” she said.

Winnie Mandela has been sharing the tribal responsibilities that have fallen on her husband, who, as a Xhosa chief in the royal house of Tembu, is called on to make important decisions for his clan.

On one recent day, she greeted elders who had brought a cow to celebrate Mandela’s freedom. She chatted with the men as the animal strained at its rope, and later she prepared a traditional Xhosa feast for Mandela’s clan to thank their ancestors for watching over Mandela during his 27 years in prison.

Winnie was a 23-year-old social worker when she married Mandela, already a well-known lawyer and ANC leader. Their early days were difficult because “out of necessity, you become a non-person; you have no independent views,” she remembered.

When Mandela went to jail, she was forced into the limelight.

“In a sense, that was welcome because we ceased to be in his shadow,” she said. “I became a human being in my own right, and I could have my own impact.”

But it also brought her a life of loneliness and government dirty tricks.

“Her life has been a difficult one,” said lawyer George Bizos, a family friend who helped defend Mandela in court in 1964. “On the whole, we managed to keep Winnie out of prison, but there were all sorts of attempts to jail her on all sorts of ridiculous charges.”

Mandela’s imprisonment freed the fiercely independent streak in his wife. On one occasion she was tried for slapping a policeman who had come to arrest her for violating the pass laws, which restricted the movement of blacks.

“I told her to walk into court like a lady, not like an Amazon,” Bizos remembered. She was acquitted on the grounds that she was entitled to resist being dragged out of her bedroom when not properly dressed.

She was later banished to a small township 300 miles from Soweto. But eight years later, in 1985, she defied that order by returning home. The police evicted her and arrested her several times before allowing her to stay.

Her strong will, her tendency to speak off the cuff and her unwillingness to bend to the wishes of the ANC soon began to irritate anti-apartheid leaders. Among other things, she was criticized for building a $250,000 home amid the shacks of Soweto in 1986, giving the government ammunition in its effort to undermine the credibility of the ANC. The house remains vacant today.

Then, last year, anti-apartheid leaders took the unusual step of ostracizing her publicly when she and her “soccer club,” a group of young bodyguards who stayed at her home, were linked to the beating death of a teen-age black activist. She refused ANC orders to get rid of “my boys,” as she called them. The murder trial of one of those bodyguards is scheduled for May, and her alleged involvement in beatings at her home may be an issue in the case.

In the month since her husband’s release, she has assumed a low profile, making no speeches and granting few interviews. An ANC spokesman said flatly that she “has no official position in the movement, and she won’t have one.”

But she is still Mandela’s wife, with daily access to the most powerful man in the ANC. And Mandela’s devotion to her has never wavered.

In a letter from prison several years ago, Mandela admitted having agonized over abandoning “this young and inexperienced woman in a pitiless desert, literally throwing her into the hands of highwaymen.”

After his release, Mandela said his wife’s troubles had long been a source of anguish to him.

“My wife has been under all sorts of pressure, and it is not a nice feeling for a man to see his family struggling, without security, without the dignity of the head of the family around,” Mandela said.

Winnie Mandela believes that most of that is behind her now. Of her fall from grace in anti-apartheid circles, she said, “I hardly even remember that.” She blames it on the government, which she says was trying to destroy her husband’s reputation by destroying her.

“I was never really the target,” she said.

And after three decades of a high-profile fight against apartheid, she said, she is now ready to return to Mandela’s shadow.

“I’ll always be just next to him, to take that step he is unable to take,” she said. “Maybe one day I will have to carry a larger part of his load. We cannot deny that he is not a young man. I would love to help ease that burden. After all, I’ve carried that cross for 27 years.”

For now, though, she is grateful to have her husband back home.

“To have someone who loves you so much, someone who worries about you, who cares what you’re wearing, how you slept, how you feel. . . . I’m not used to that sort of thing,” she said.

“He’s such a comfort to all of us in the family. We feel so protected, so relieved. And even though we know he belongs to the nation and can never really be totally ours, he is there as a father figure. And in our culture, that goes a long way.”

Zindziswana, the Mandelas’ 29-year-old daughter, interrupted the interview with a question for her mother: “Do you have my passport?”

“No, your father is looking into that,” her mother responded.

A moment later, Winnie Mandela turned to the reporter and said: “That is perhaps one of my greatest reliefs. I can now say to my children, ‘Go and see your father about your problem.’ There is nothing so relieving as that.”

Then she went back into the house to prepare her husband’s lunch.