Wowed by Winnie : Activism: No matter the criticism in South Africa, Winnie Mandela is winning nothing but adulation on U.S. tour with her husband.

When it looked as if Nelson Mandela’s appearance at Yankee Stadium might end without his wife being given a turn to speak, the 50,000 people filling the arena quickly let organizers know what they thought of that possibility.

“We want Winnie! We want Winnie!” they began chanting lustily. At last, the doe-eyed, round-faced woman with a backbone of steel rose and addressed the crowd, leading off her remarks with the anti-apartheid movement’s Zulu rallying cry, “Amandla!”-- “Power!”

“We weren’t about to let her get away without saying something,” said Iesha Sekou, a 32-year-old clothing designer from Harlem, recalling that moment Thursday at the Bronx baseball field. “She’s a great role model, particularly for African-American women. She is just as important to me as Nelson Mandela.”

For almost three decades, as her husband languished behind bars as a political prisoner in South Africa, Winnie Mandela kept the flame of his anti-apartheid beliefs alive, enduring police raids, detentions, banning orders, smear campaigns and banishment in support of the black liberation cause in her country.

Until her husband’s release from prison four months ago, she was the Mandela most people in this country knew best. It was she who commanded headlines with her defiance of the South African government and her refusal to be silenced by authorities.

Now, on the first visit of the Mandelas to the United States, Americans are eager to pay tribute to the woman many view as a symbol of endurance and resistance to racial injustice on a par with her husband.

The crowds at Yankee Stadium are not alone in their adulation. From the moment she arrived in this country with her husband last week, stepping off a plane at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport in a striking African costume of hand-woven cloth, she has been greeted with paeans of praise by overwhelming numbers of people.

“I am impressed by the enormous amount of love and respect there is for this woman,” said Linda Goode Bryant, a senior economic policy analyst for the borough Manhattan who is active in black cultural and political circles in New York.

Americans, in fact, seem to hold her in higher esteem than many of her own compatriots back home, where she has come under increasing criticism in recent years for reportedly endorsing the killing of blacks who collaborate with the Pretoria government and for allegedly taking part in the killing of a young black activist.

But “at this point,” Bryant said, “people here are not dealing with what her critics in South Africa are saying. Most people here seem to feel that a woman who has had the kind of presence and impact she has had is credible, and they will go with her first” over any of her detractors.

At the taping Friday morning of an interview with syndicated talk show host Phil Donahue, members of the studio audience seemed to try to outdo one another in their expressions of admiration.

In her comments to Donahue, Mandela denied having condoned “necklacing”--the killing of government collaborators by placing gasoline-soaked tires around their necks and lighting them--and rebuffed suggestions that she played a role in the beating death of a young activist at the hands of her bodyguards.

As she has in other settings during her visit to America, she also vowed to continue the struggle against apartheid and declared that she had far less faith than her husband in the expressed desires of the national government to move toward equal rights for black South Africans.

“My beloved sister, Winnie Mandela, every time I hear you speak you bring tears to my eyes,” said one black man in a typical encomium from the audience. “You as a black woman . . . have been blessed by God, to go through what you have went through. We know the pain that you have suffered, and you have been anointed by God to do what you are doing.”

One New Yorker, her eyes brimming with tears and her voice choking with emotion, said she had found a whole new identity after seeing the Mandelas at Yankee Stadium the night before.

“I am proud to be not an Afro-American, not an African-American--I am a proud African woman. And when I look in your eyes, I see myself. . . . I see pride and love.”

So lavish was the praise at the “Donahue” taping, in fact, that one black journalist in the audience was prompted to remark in an aside to a black colleague: “These folks aren’t here to ask questions. They’re here to testify.”

In Harlem, the Mandelas spoke at an outdoor rally drawing more than 80,000 people to the streets around the square at the historic intersection of West 125th Street and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard. In her speech there, her unflinching militancy stood in sharp contrast with Nelson Mandela’s more diplomatic and statesmanlike pose.

Referring to the huge segregated township near Johannesburg that has been a center of black political activity in South Africa and is home to the Mandelas, she dubbed Harlem the “Soweto of America.” She called on black Americans to join the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa if negotiations with the Pretoria government break down and blacks have to “go back to the bush and fight the white man.”

“I admire her courage,” said Lauren Gumbs, 24, an assistant television producer who was in the crowd. “She was really her husband’s mouthpiece for so many years when he was not allowed to speak.”

“I think she’s definitely as imposing and important a figure as her husband,” said Sarah Lowe, 33, a white Brooklyn resident who teaches art history. “I see her, in fact, as his logical successor” in the African National Congress.

Winnie Mandela was 22 and had just landed her first job as a social worker when she met Nelson Mandela in Johannesburg in 1956. He was a dashing lawyer and firebrand revolutionary 16 years her senior.

In 1958, after divorcing his first wife, he proposed marriage to the bright-eyed, ambitious woman who was born Nomzamo Winnifred Madikizela in the Transkei region of South Africa.

His sophisticated friends deplored his choice, regarding her as a flighty female too beautiful to be a revolutionary’s wife.

But she turned out to be of stronger mettle than anyone could have imagined.

Four years after their marriage, he was convicted of sabotage and sentenced to life imprisonment. She raised two daughters and supported her husband’s cause in the face of continual harassment and persecution by the South African government.

She was jailed several times, including a 17-month stretch in solitary confinement. She spent six years under banning orders that prevented her from talking with more than three people at a time.

In 1977, in an effort to silence her, authorities banished her to a rural community hundreds of miles away from her home where she was forced to live in a three-room shack with no electricity or running water.

But she refused to be subdued.

She became a one-woman resistance campaign, flouting segregationist laws, launching community social programs and turning her house into a medical clinic.

She won an international following for her work. Foreign diplomats and journalists eagerly sought her out. Universities in the United States and Europe honored her with doctoral degrees.

But five years ago, after authorities finally permitted her to return home, her image started to undergo a reversal. She was quoted as making a statement that seemed to condone “necklacing”--a statement she maintains was taken out of context.

“No sane person would ever approve of that,” she said in her interview on “Donahue.”

Her independence and often high-handed manner drew the wrath of many of her husband’s colleagues in the African National Congress. They complained that she was becoming a law unto herself and besmirching the Mandela name.

In 1986, she added fuel to the controversy over her free-wheeling ways by building a $250,000 home amid the shacks of Soweto.

When her husband was released in February after 27 years in prison, the couple took up residence in the modest home they had lived in as newlyweds. But they recently moved into the larger house, saying that it provided greater security.

Last year, she became embroiled in the biggest controversy of her career after her bodyguards, a group of young activists who call themselves the Mandela United soccer club, were linked to the beating death of a 14-year-old black activist.

The African National Congress took the unusual step of ostracizing her publicly after the incident. Last month, the team’s coach was convicted of murder in the case, in which Winnie Mandela never was charged or called to testify, although her name came up during the trial.

Her husband has stood by her, however, defending her as a victim of “the most scandalous persecution” by the government.

Her admirers here tend to agree with him. Clarence Dawkins, a 52-year-old travel agent who resides in East Harlem, expresses a widespread sentiment. He blames her troubles back home on people “who want to do her dirty.”

“It’s women who keep the men strong,” he said in her defense. “She could have run off when (her husband) was in prison, but she didn’t. She kept the fight going.”

After her husband was freed from prison, Winnie Mandela said she was grateful to have him home and was ready to return to being a homemaker and doting wife.

But in a response to a question by a journalist at the “Donahue” taping, she seemed to indicate that she would not fade into the background.

“I am a servant of my people,” she said when asked what role she saw herself playing now that her husband was freed. “Whenever I am called upon by those people . . . who think they regard me as their leader--whenever they call me, I am there.”

If her American admirers have anything to say about it, she certainly would remain in the limelight. “There is an equality in her partnership with her husband that you rarely see in the black male-black female dynamic in this country when it comes to leadership,” said Bryant, the Manhattan economic analyst.

Times staff writers Edwin Chen, John J. Goldman, Scott Kraft and Tracy Wilkinson contributed to this report.