Mandela Takes Charisma on the Road for Peace

Late one afternoon, with black leaders threatening to pull out of the South African peace process, Nelson Mandela caught a flight to Cape Town for an urgent meeting with the nation’s white president.

Mandela and his aides desperately needed time on the plane to prepare, but as they brought out their briefcases, a small pilgrimage began.

One by one, children came forward for Mandela’s autograph. As his staff looked on helplessly, a line of children, most of them white, stretched down the aisle.

“Work was impossible,” a frustrated colleague, Ahmed Kathrada, remembers. “I kept trying to tell him, ‘Just sign your name.’ But he had to chat with each little child.”

When the line finally dwindled, the pilot invited Mandela into the cockpit. As usual, Mandela obliged.

In the four months since his release from prison, where he served 27 years of a life sentence, Nelson Mandela has been feted as a folk hero from Cape Town to Cairo and showered with thousands of honors, invitations from world leaders and requests for interviews.

Whether acknowledging an ovation at a London rock concert or shaking hands with a hotel porter in Johannesburg, the 71-year-old black leader has shown the stamina of a politician on the hustings and the natural, self-effacing charm of a man born to lead.

In these days before Mandela’s arrival in the United States on Wednesday for a 12-day visit, he has emerged as an international pitchman for the African National Congress, the most prominent of South Africa’s anti-apartheid organizations. But back home he plays an even more important role--holding together the prospects for racial peace with personal, high-level diplomacy.

While his closest associates from prison struggle to adjust to life outside, Mandela acts as if he has been preparing for these days for most of his years behind bars.

“He hasn’t made any special effort to adjust; he’s just fitted in as if it was the most normal thing,” said Kathrada, who is the ANC’s publicity director.

But Mandela has taken on a grueling schedule. In four major overseas journeys since Feb. 11, he has visited more than 15 countries in Africa and Europe, addressing dozens of rallies and news conferences. Everywhere he goes, Mandela marvels at the warmth of his reception and regularly confounds his security men by wading into the crowds to talk at length with people who have come out for a glimpse of the man whose name is synonymous with black liberation.

Being with Mandela on the road “is like traveling with Elvis,” says Joe Slovo, a member of the ANC’s national executive committee.

The travel, the demands on his time and the crucial day-to-day decisions facing Mandela and the ANC in South Africa have already taken their toll.

Mandela, who will be 72 in July, checked into a Johannesburg hospital earlier this month for a week of bed rest and some minor surgery. A week later, he canceled an afternoon of meetings in Switzerland because of exhaustion. His health, despite high blood pressure, is considered excellent for a man of his years. Few younger men could maintain Mandela’s travel and speaking schedule, which rivals that of the Pope.

“We always knew that when we got out (of prison), there would be a demand to see Nelson,” says Kathrada, who was sentenced with Mandela in 1964 and released last October. “But we didn’t really sit down to think. We were all swept into this situation.”

Mandela, deputy president of the ANC, has been caught up in the process of getting black-white negotiations off the ground, and he has personally intervened in several crises that could have derailed those talks.

When hospital workers went on strike at Soweto’s giant Baragwanath Hospital last month, bringing operations to a halt, Mandela called President Frederik W. de Klerk. Within days, the workers were offered more money, and the Health Ministry announced plans to open unused wings of white hospitals to all races.

A few weeks later, Mandela spent several hours with Law and Order Minister Adriaan Vlok to head off a bloody racial confrontation in Welkom, where a black township was under threat from right-wing white vigilantes.

South Africa’s future depends to a large degree on Mandela’s willingness to meet with his former jailers and on the mutual respect that has been built up between Mandela and De Klerk, who has been in office only 10 months.

Mandela was sentenced to life in prison for sabotage and conspiracy to overthrow the state, and he was vilified by the government for years as the most dangerous man in South Africa. But now the government sees him as a reasonable leader with whom it can do business.

“He is an important person, and the fact that we have a reasonable understanding with him on certain issues is a positive,” said Stoffel van der Merwe, a Cabinet minister and member of De Klerk’s negotiating team. “But it is also clear that on some very important issues for the future we don’t see eye to eye.”

For his part, Mandela says he respects De Klerk and believes that the president sincerely wants to end apartheid, South Africa’s system of racial segregation, to give the 27-million black majority a vote and to create racial harmony in the country. Since February, De Klerk has met most of the ANC’s conditions for negotiating with the government, and he is preparing to address the last one--releasing political prisoners from South African prisons and granting amnesty to activists returning from exile, where the ANC has had its headquarters for 30 years.

In the process of announcing these reforms, De Klerk has angered hundreds of thousands of conservative whites, who have adopted the protest tools of the oppressed blacks and carried out rallies and marches to express their fears of a black government.

Mandela, facing pressure from radical youths who deeply distrust the government, is pushing De Klerk for more and faster changes to justify the ANC’s decision to meet with the government. And he has been urging foreign governments to keep the pressure on Pretoria by maintaining sanctions until apartheid is abolished.

But Mandela has also lauded De Klerk, describing him as the first white South African president to “at least have the courage to say that apartheid is evil and to sit down and talk with the ANC.”

The peace process leaves Mandela little time for other important business of the ANC, which is beginning the massive task of re-establishing itself inside South Africa after three decades as an outlaw. As ANC deputy president, Mandela is its most important leader. ANC President Oliver Tambo, Mandela’s former law partner, is recovering from a stroke.

The ANC has opened regional recruiting offices across the country, and its national headquarters now occupies an entire floor in a downtown Johannesburg high-rise, next to the white-run banks and mining companies that form the basis of South Africa’s economy.

Walter Sisulu, who heads the ANC’s internal operations, has an office across from Mandela’s there. Mandela keeps office hours on the rare days he is in town, yet the two colleagues, close associates before and during their years in prison, rarely see each other these days.

“Sometimes I just have to barge into his office, no matter who he has in there, to discuss something,” says Sisulu, 77.

In these hectic times, Mandela’s long years in prison seem especially remote. When he walked free on that Sunday afternoon in February, he left behind a quietly reflective routine. He was being kept in a three-bedroom home on prison grounds in lush wine country near Cape Town, and he began each day with two hours of vigorous exercise. He was reading extensively, writing in a journal and occasionally receiving visits from government ministers and, in the last months, from anti-apartheid activists as well.

Sisulu describes the difference between prison and freedom for himself and Mandela this way: “I was sleeping in jail. Now I have no time to rest.”

Mandela was a respected 40-year-old lawyer when he went underground in the late 1950s to help form the ANC military wing. At his trial, he defended that decision, saying that the authorities, by refusing to talk with the ANC and attempting to put down all peaceful protests with force, had left blacks no choice but to resort to a campaign of sabotage.

During the early years in prison, Mandela and his colleagues were forced to pound rocks and shower in icy seawater on Robben Island, the penal colony in the Atlantic Ocean off Cape Town. Mandela’s wife, Winnie, and their children were denied permission to visit for nearly a decade, and letters were restricted and heavily censored. His wife was constantly harassed by the authorities, detained and banished from her home in Soweto to a rural township far away.

Although Mandela was well-known in South Africa, he was not the international figure he is today. The black consciousness movement in South Africa, not the African National Congress, was the pre-eminent anti-apartheid group in the 1970s, and it wasn’t until the 1980s that worldwide calls for Mandela’s release grew thunderous.

The son of a Xhosa chief, Mandela had always had a regal air of self-confidence. He was treated by fellow inmates, even those from competing organizations, as a leader worthy of respect. Even white prison workers broke with tradition and referred to him as “Mr. Mandela.” Prison became a kind of anti-apartheid college: Several generations of activists fell under Mandela’s ministry, learning the ideological basis for the freedom struggle.

Meanwhile, successive white leaders wrestled with the question of what to do with him. They worried that if he died in prison, the black masses might erupt in violence. But if he were released, he might lead a black revolution. For years, senior government officials went to visit the man who was rapidly becoming the world’s most famous prisoner.

When Mandela emerged from prison, South Africa--and the world--had changed markedly. His country was taking the first significant steps to peace in its history.

And Nelson Mandela, now gray-haired, was known everywhere.