Mandela’s Visit Directed at Keeping U.S. Sanctions : Apartheid: Organizers hope his tour will influence Bush not to lift curbs because of South African reforms.

As New York girded for a boisterous hero’s welcome today for Nelson Mandela, organizers of the black leader’s 12-day American tour said Tuesday that the visit is aimed at forcing President Bush and congressional leaders to maintain sanctions against South Africa despite recent reforms there.

“We are here to challenge those who would say apartheid is dead or dying,” said Zwelakhe Sisulu, Mandela’s press aide. “To those who say that, we say please give us the corpse. We want to bury it once and for all.”

“There are more people dying in our country now than at any time in the past decade,” added Sisulu, a journalist who was released from a South African jail last year after three years in detention without charge.

Randall Robinson, one of the tour’s organizers, told a packed news conference here Tuesday that Mandela’s heralded visit, and the receptions planned from New York to Los Angeles, will pressure Bush to take a tougher stand on South Africa--or risk the wrath of black America. Bush has suggested that the United States might consider lifting sanctions to reward South Africa for opening up political expression and luring black leaders to the negotiating table.

“I think it will definitely put him (Bush) on the spot, and that is where he needs to be,” Robinson said.

“It would be disastrous for Bush and Congress to . . . lift sanctions prematurely,” said Robinson, executive director of TransAfrica, a lobbying group in Washington. “Any direction toward reform (by the South African government) would stop immediately.”

Mandela’s appeal for support logged a victory in Canada on Tuesday. At the end of his three-day visit there, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney pledged to keep economic sanctions against South Africa in place and also promised $4.25 million to help resettle some of the estimated 50,000 South African exiles.

In Toronto on Tuesday, Mandela visited Central Technical School, where he asked Canadian students to raise funds to help black youth in South Africa. His speech began more than an hour late because Mandela needed “a little rest,” a member of his entourage said.

Some of Mandela’s aides expressed concern Tuesday that Mandela seemed tired on the eve of his eight-city, coast-to-coast U.S. journey.

“A lot of us (are) concerned,” said one member of Mandela’s advance team. “After all, he’s not a 17-year-old.”

Mandela, who will be 72 next month, has taken on a grueling schedule since his Feb. 11 release from 27 years in South African prisons. He underwent surgery last month to remove a benign cyst on his bladder, and signs of fatigue have become evident recently.

Citing exhaustion, he canceled meetings in Switzerland and Canada in recent days.

As deputy president of the ANC, he has spearheaded its preliminary talks with the government of President Frederik W. de Klerk and shouldered the bulk of the ANC’s overseas travel, visiting two dozen countries in Europe and Africa.

Mandela’s American trip, like most of his other journeys, is designed to pump up support for the ANC as it begins direct talks with the white minority-led government. U.S. sanctions against South Africa, passed by Congress over President Ronald Reagan’s veto in 1986, have been among the stiffest that Pretoria has faced, and Mandela credits those and other sanctions with forcing De Klerk to institute a series of reforms.

Mandela’s motorcade, expected to be one of the largest in city history, will move from New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport to a high school in Brooklyn, where he will talk with students, and then on to the tip of Manhattan for a ticker-tape parade along lower Broadway.

Times staff writers Edwin Chen and John J. Goldman contributed to this story.