Winnie Mandela Woos the Masses : MILITANT AND UNBOWED BY LEGAL AND PERSONAL TROUBLES AND A BREAK-UP WITH HER FAMOUS HUSBAND, SHE REMAINS THE RADICAL VOICE OF SOUTH AFRICA’S TOWNSHIPS

ON A RECENT COLD MORNING, A DOZEN YOUNG BLACK MEN AND WOMEN gathered at the entrance to Duduza, one of apartheid’s forgotten ghettos, to demand electricity, toilets and medicine from the white authorities. Like so many protests in remote corners of South Africa these days, this one seemed doomed to obscurity and failure.

But as the marchers moved toward the center of town, trailed by platoons of policemen in armored vehicles, a speeding, white Mercedes-Benz overtook them. The car was immediately swamped by several hundred blacks, emerging en masse from homes and stores. There were whoops of delight. “ Ululululululululu ,” the women sang. “ Umama wethu !” “ Umama wethu !” “Our mother!”

Winnie Mandela waved from the leather-covered back seat. Then she emerged, a stout figure standing 5-foot-7 in her leather boots, a dazzling smile on her smooth face, and raised her right fist in salute.

The most powerful black woman in South Africa wore a long black wool coat over her mustard jacket, green blouse and black skirt--the black, green and gold of the African National Congress. A telephone pager was clipped to her belt, and perched on her head was a black beret with a single medallion bearing the likeness of her estranged husband, Nelson Mandela. She ran to the front of the crowd, suddenly 500 strong, and linked hands with march leaders. Local ANC marshals, ragged and sockless, fought the crush of well-wishers back with long sticks. “Discipline!” “Discipline!” the marshals cried.

The parade gathered strength as it passed the tin-roofed matchbox houses and the open school doors. An elderly woman broke free to greet Mandela, who smiled politely and clasped the woman’s hand. The throng emerged from the township onto the dry, open veld, 20 miles east of Johannesburg, passing Duduza’s squatter camp, the ghetto’s own ghetto.

“Winnie Mandela, the struggle is behind you,” the marchers sang. “Winnie Mandela, the world is crying for you.” Mandela again raised her fist, bowing her head and smiling shyly. “Our Mama!” they chanted. “Our Mama!”

It was an epochal day for Duduza. Mandela was the first national ANC leader to have accepted an invitation to visit the township, a fact that had not gone unnoticed. “We have been deprived of leadership for so long,” said Chris Mini, an official with Duduza’s ANC chapter. “Comrade Winnie will boost morale, as you can see.”

Local ANC leaders had wanted to march all the way to the white city council in Nigel, a tidy community with plenty of electricity, toilets and medicine four miles away. The Nigel council said no, and it vowed to use force, if necessary, to stop the protesters. But the city agreed to meet the march halfway, atop a bridge, where a city health official, surrounded by 40 riot policemen armed with rifles and tear gas, now waited to accept a letter from its leaders.

But as the marchers approached the police, the leaders changed their minds. They wanted to press on. The police knew better than to unleash tear gas on a march led by a celebrity such as Winnie Mandela. But the white commander stood firm.

“I’m here to enforce the law, Mrs. Mandela,” he said.

“These are not robots, sir,” Mandela responded evenly. Then, sensing a bloody confrontation, she persuaded the march leaders to relent, pointing out that they would accomplish little by arguing with a low-level council official. She handed the memorandum to the nervous council representative.

“We regret very much that this has to be done in the veld like this, sir,” Mandela told him. “The people here are entitled to the facilities in town, just like you. This may cause problems in the future.”

“I’m just an employee,” the man replied weakly. But he promised to obtain a response to the township’s letter.

Mandela turned back to the crowd, leading it in the haunting anthem, “Nkosi Sikelela i’Afrika” (God Bless Africa). The marchers turned and quietly headed back to their township.

Later, Mandela presided over a strategy session at the local ANC leader’s house. “We’ve got to resume the consumer boycott” against shops in the white town, she said, as local activists nodded in agreement. “We must hit them so hard. These people have got to be taught a lesson.”

Later, as she approached her car, she began to sing and clap her hands. Half a dozen women gathered around her. “Women be blessed,” they sang in the language of her Xhosa (KO-sah) people. “They are the anchor of the liberation movement.”

Alex Montoedi, the ANC leader, huddled with Mandela’s driver, offering directions to her next appointment, in another township in trouble. “Take Mandela Drive,” Montoedi said, “and head straight on. . . .”

Mandela quietly watched the township shacks and the downtrodden blacks who live in them pass by her rolled-up window. “Here are our people,” she said finally. “This dusty township is the reality of South Africa. And this is where I belong. I understand the language of these people.”

IT’S DIFFICULT TO MAKE SENSE OF WINNIE MANDELA. OFTEN, SHE SEEMS to be two people. One is a caring mother, tireless political activist and selfless voice of the downtrodden. The other is a bitter and vengeful victim of oppression, a reckless demagogue and a cunning political operative.

In townships such as Duduza, Mandela’s appeal verges on the messianic, and it’s easy to see why. Her life today--as it has been for 32 years--is one tireless campaign from township to township, crisis to crisis. Every day and many nights, she answers pleas for help from oppressed blacks seeking refuge from political violence, leads marches against the white authorities and shouts from stages to rally the masses.

Under her husband, the ANC has tried to move away from street confrontations and into constitutional negotiations with the government of white Afrikaners, or Boers, who, after four decades of ruling a disenfranchised black majority, now say they are ready to relinquish control of the country.

But Winnie Mandela will have none of it. “I have yet to meet a Boer whom I can call a man of integrity ,” she says, choosing the same word that Nelson Mandela has used to describe President Frederik W. de Klerk. “Not with the brutality and viciousness I have known of apartheid,” she adds. “If I said I wasn’t bitter about that, I don’t think I would be normal.”

The Winnie Mandela strategy is simple and time-tested: Make life so uncomfortable for white South Africans that they have no choice but to hand over power to the black majority. The language of protests and confrontation, she believes, is what the white authorities understand. Pressure and more pressure.

Could she ever be a negotiator?

“Oh, pleeeeease,” she says in exasperation. “I know these Afrikaners and they are not capable of negotiations. I can’t be expected to trust any of those men. They only know one language, the language of violence.”

In the townships, those words go down as smoothly as cheap sorghum beer. They help explain the continuing, even growing, popularity of a woman who, in the eyes of much of the world and many in her own organization, has fallen far from grace. That is the enduring paradox of Winnie Mandela. Her influence grows even as her problems--legal, political and personal--mount.

“She has charisma,” says Thandi Modise, a former commander in Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), the guerrilla army of the ANC, and a member of the ANC Women’s League. “It’s something that, you know, like a naughty child, you see them and you start laughing with them. You just can’t help it.”

But a former friend chooses another metaphor. “We call her the porcupine. She’s very nice, but if you get too close you’ll get stung,” says this woman, who’s been close and felt the needles. “And the closer you get, the more you get stung.”

The dark side of Winnie Mandela began to reveal itself in the mid-1980s, when the outlaw stance she adopted seemed to get out of hand. Her home became a refuge for ANC guerrillas, youngsters on the run from police and, she later realized, police informers as well. The collection of young men who sought her shelter, who worshiped her and would do anything she asked, came to be known as the Mandela United Football Club. They dressed in the soccer uniforms she bought them, but they never played a game. Instead, they used the powerful Mandela name to prey on fellow blacks whom they suspected of siding with the white government or criticizing “Mama Winnie.” They left a trail of assault, rape, arson and even murder.

As word spread, Mandela’s Soweto neighborhood became enraged. Residents sought the advice of community and church leaders who, joined by Nelson Mandela from behind prison walls, urged Winnie Mandela to disband her club. But she refused. After all those years of defying authority, she was not about to let anyone tell her what to do.

Then, in 1988, her home was burned to the ground by black youths avenging a rape committed by the soccer club. She moved into a new brick home in a fancier neighborhood of Soweto, and the club followed her, sleeping in ramshackle rooms behind the house.

A few months later, Xoliswa Falati, who was staying at a Methodist church house for wayward youth in Soweto, told Mandela that some young men at the house were being sexually abused by the white pastor there. Mandela, furious, ordered the men removed from the home--for their own safety, she would testify. When the men arrived at Mandela’s house, they later testified, she accused the youngest, 14-year-old Stompie Seipei, of being a police spy and demanded that the others admit to having been sodomized by the pastor. When they balked, she beat them with her fists and a short whip. Then, they told the court, Mandela left and her bodyguards took over.

Three of the men escaped after several weeks. Seipei’s body was found later; he had been beaten to death. The leader of the soccer club, Jerry Richardson, a friend of Mandela, was tried and convicted of murder.

In 1991, Mandela was charged with four counts of kidnaping and assault. During the trial, she denied knowing anything about the beatings, and her driver and Falati supported her story. But many in the community and the ANC believed the white judge who called her an “unblushing liar” before convicting her. She was sentenced to six years in prison and remains free on $70 bail pending an appeal hearing next year.

Last April, the friends who had sworn by Mandela’s alibi recanted. Within days, Nelson Mandela announced that he was formally separating from his wife of 32 years. ANC leaders pressured Winnie Mandela to resign as head of the Social Welfare Department, removing her from Shell House, the ANC’s headquarters in Johannesburg. Now the congress is investigating its Social Welfare Department for attempted fraud and administrative improprieties during the nine months it was run by Mandela.

In what seemed like a final blow to her reputation, South African newspapers last month published a letter she’d allegedly written in March to Dali Mpofu, a black lawyer 28 years her junior. The letter, splashed on the front pages, indicated a long affair between Mandela and Mpofu, whom the ANC had fired as her deputy in the Social Welfare Department. In it, she complained about Mpofu’s romantic liaisons with other women and referred to about $57,000 she had given Mpofu from a private bank account she controls. Mandela has not denied writing the letter, which was signed simply, “It’s me.”

That week Mandela resigned her post in the ANC’s 86-member national executive committee, the organization’s top policy-making body, although she retained her ANC membership card. She also withdrew her membership in the Women’s League, saying “those who have waged a vicious and malicious campaign against me have unfortunately partly succeeded in their aims.”

Indeed, many in the ANC hierarchy regard Mandela as a dangerous, evil woman, an unguided missile careening out of control. She defies ANC orders and thinks she is bigger than the organization she represents; she will stop at nothing to get her way, they say.

“Everyone in the ANC intelligentsia knows Winnie Mandela has a very clear agenda,” says a lawyer with close links to the political left. Like most of her detractors, he doesn’t want to be identified for fear of retribution from her supporters. “She’s clever, and she’s bloody ambitious,” he adds.

Those traits wouldn’t be grounds for attack if Mandela were a man, answer her defenders. ANC leaders have a problem with strong women, they say, pointing to the absence of women in the top rungs of the ANC hierarchy. “They want her to act like a traditional Xhosa woman,” says Nompumelelo Madala, one of Mandela’s closest friends. “They think she should cook a big pot of samp (maize) and beans and sit at home and wait for visitors.”

But Mandela has never needed to conform to such expectations because the most important source of her power has never been in the departments, leagues and committees of the ANC. Instead, it is firmly rooted in the millions of angry, often poorly educated black people who live in places such as Duduza. Their votes may control the country tomorrow, but today they are powerless, impoverished and impatient for change.

They support the ANC but worry that its leaders are negotiating away their future in a headlong rush to grasp power from President De Klerk. Among those blacks, Nelson Mandela is both highly respected and widely ignored. The person they listen to is “Comrade Winnie.”

EVERY FEW WEEKS, WINNIE MANDELA DRIVES TO A SMALL HOUSE IN an old Johannesburg neighborhood to see the woman she calls “Mama.” Mandela was 9 years old when her own mother died. But later, while dating Nelson, she found a surrogate mother in Helen Joseph. Joseph, a frail, gray-haired white woman of 87, is a veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle who spent years as a “listed person,” forbidden by the government from addressing political gatherings, writing for publication or meeting other activists.

Like most everyone else who knew Winnie and Nelson Mandela in the late 1950s, Helen Joseph at first considered the relationship a mismatch. Nelson was a well-known figure in the anti-apartheid movement, a lawyer on trial for treason. A father of three young children, he also was in the midst of a divorce. Winnie, 16 years younger, had just moved from her rural home. Her father was a history teacher; her late mother was, in Mandela’s words, “a religious fanatic” who would lock her and a sister in a room and force them to pray aloud. She was beginning her first job as a social worker at Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto and knew little about politics. But she was undeniably pretty, and Nelson was smitten. “I don’t think any of us saw what a courageous fighter she would become,” Joseph says.

The Mandelas were married in 1958. Nelson Mandela and his co-defendants were acquitted in the treason trial three years later, but he soon went underground. Winnie saw him only occasionally then, escorted late at night to his hiding places. In 1962, Nelson was arrested. He was tried, convicted and sentenced to life in prison. It would be 22 years before the prison authorities allowed them to touch each other again, and more than 27 years--half her life--before he would be free.

Few women in South Africa have endured more and complained less than Winnie Mandela. Left alone 30 years ago with little money and two young daughters to raise, she was harassed endlessly by the white authorities. She was arrested countless times and strapped with “banning orders” that forced her inside her home after dark and prevented her from speaking publicly, meeting with other anti-apartheid activists or even entering any school.

George Bizos, the Mandela family attorney, remembers that “we managed to keep her out of jail for the most part.” But Mandela was detained for 18 months in the 1970s, in solitary confinement without either charge or trial. She remembers passing the time by watching ants march across her cell floor.

At times, sitting in prison, Nelson Mandela wondered if the noble cause of black liberation was worth the cost to his family. In a 1985 letter to his wife, he asked himself whether “any kind of commitment can ever be sufficient excuse for abandoning a young and inexperienced woman in a pitiless desert, literally throwing her into the hands of highwaymen; a wonderful woman without her pillar and support at times of need. That agony tortures me. . . .”

Winnie’s response was surprising: “Contrary to your speculation, I do not think I would have had the fiber to bear it all if you had been with me.”

Indeed, it was his absence that taught her to fight back, surprising many of Nelson’s colleagues who once questioned her courage. When one police officer arrested her at home in the middle of the night, he made the mistake of refusing to allow her to dress first. Winnie Mandela took a swing and knocked him to the floor.

In 1977, the authorities again paid a late-night visit to the Mandela home. Mandela was arrested, her belongings thrown onto the back of a truck, and she was banished to a four-room house without water or electricity in a township outside Brandfort, 200 miles from Soweto in the conservative Orange Free State.

Mandela spent the next eight years in Brandfort, where she started a clinic for the local township and caused trouble for the authorities by ignoring whites-only signs at stores in town. Her clinic and house were fire-bombed three times. After the last attack, in 1985, she packed her belongings and drove back to Soweto, brashly defying the government.

The police demanded that she return to Brandfort, but she refused. And the government, then in the midst of a public relations effort to stave off international sanctions, gave up. Back in Soweto, Mandela was a new woman. Brandfort had hardened her. “That,” says Helen Joseph, “was her coming of age.”

THE EIGHT-BEDROOM MANDELA mansion, surrounded by a 12-foot red-brick wall, rests atop a rocky hill in the “Beverly Hills” section of Soweto, the vast township of 2.5 million blacks on the outskirts of Johannesburg. Tourists frequently scramble onto a vacant lot nearby and train their video cameras on the front door, hoping for a glimpse of the Mandelas.

Mandela was criticized when she had it built in 1986, with proceeds from her autobiography, and for four years it sat empty. Some blacks doubted that a man of the people like Nelson Mandela would ever agree to live in such a palace. But the Mandelas moved into the home together in 1990 when it became clear that their old four-room house was a security risk.

Nelson moved out last year, before the formal separation, and now lives alone in a large home in one of Johannesburg’s most expensive white suburbs. But a large sitting room of the couple’s old home still is stuffed with gifts sent to them from around the world. Winnie Mandela calls this room “the United Nations,” and a look around suggests the beginnings of a presidential museum. There are layers of jewelry, carvings, photos, banners, paintings, statues, swords, medals, busts, pottery, chests, mounted animal trophies, leopard skins, drawings and gold keys. A framed poster for “Wave,” an American cable-TV movie on the Watts riots, bears hand-written plaudits from actors James Earl Jones, Cicely Tyson and Blair Underwood. “Dear Mr. and Mrs. Nelson Mandela,” Jones wrote, “I wish you much success in your wonderful country. It means a lot to everybody.”

Down a half-flight of stairs are two conference rooms and a suite of offices. The bedrooms are upstairs, behind smoked-glass windows. Mandela has given refuge there to two young women--a 19-year-old who saw her family slain by assassins in Sharpeville in April and a 13-year-old orphan whose father, a guerrilla commander, died last year. Mandela also frequently hosts her daughters--Zindzi, who works for a South African charity called Operation Hunger, and Zenani, a recent Boston University graduate--and her seven grandchildren.

Vuyisile Mafalala, Mandela’s personal assistant, greeted me at the house one day with the observation: “I think she is in a good mood today. She will talk to you.”

Winnie Mandela, at age 58, looks a decade and a half younger. Her charm and generosity are legendary, but so are her impatience, her arrogance and her temper. She has a steel surface hardened by three decades of battles with symbols of authority and a towering ego fed by her coterie of admirers.

A member of Mandela’s household staff privately complains: “This one doesn’t appreciate anything. We all want to leave. Everything has changed since the old man’s moved out.”

Perhaps the saddest story of Mandela’s life has been the breakup of her marriage. These two attractive and intelligent people lived a heroic life of Big Screen dimensions: Deeply and passionately in love, they sacrificed the best years of their lives in the cause of black liberation. But with their life goal nearly reached, they are not walking hand in hand into the sunset.

When Nelson Mandela announced their separation, he cited “tensions owing to differences on a number of issues in recent months.” But he still sounded besotted. “My love for her remains undiminished. I personally shall never regret the life Comrade Nomzamo and I tried to share together,” he said, using his wife’s African first name.

Two days later, Winnie Mandela said her husband “has been the focus of my life and my love throughout our marriage and continues to be so.”

The rumored affair with Dali Mpofu, who had been part of Mandela’s legal team in her kidnaping and assault trial, was one factor in the split. The letter leaked to newspapers by Mandela’s enemies left little doubt of the affair, despite earlier denials by both Mpofu and Mandela.

But the Mandelas had never had an ordinary marriage. Nelson Mandela’s first priority always had been to end apartheid. Family came second. And during their first four years together, Nelson was either on trial, on the run from the authorities or preoccupied with politics. Their youngest daughter was conceived during a clandestine meeting at an ANC safehouse.

“I’ve never really known what married life is,” Winnie Mandela says, reflecting on her marriage publicly for the first time since the separation. “A happy family--father and mother and children--sitting around the table, going on holiday together. I’ve never really had those moments.”

When Nelson Mandela was freed in 1990, the couple attempted to create that traditional household. Winnie Mandela laid out her husband’s clothes each day, prepared his cholesterol-free breakfast and made sure he swallowed his medication. But that didn’t last long.

She accompanied her husband to the United States and Europe, leaving the country for the first time only to find herself standing uncomfortably in his shadow. When she returned, she plunged back into her own political work. “I’m my own person,” she says. “I wasn’t made by him.”

On those rare moments when the Mandelas were together, they disagreed strongly on political strategy. And the difference in their ages had begun to show as well. Friends say that although Nelson respected his wife’s independence, he would have preferred a more traditional wife.

“I think his perception of a woman is a woman of 30 years ago, in the kitchen,” she says. “He left me as a little girl. And I’ve always been that little girl to him, even when I visited him in prison.” And she says her husband has treated her more like a daughter, lumping her in with their own daughters. “The generation gap is so big,” she says.

Even with the marriage all but over, Nelson Mandela remains deeply attached to his wife. Like a guilt-ridden father, he feels responsible for her past and present difficulties. And he still is the one person she can count on. “Comrade Nomzamo has and can continue to rely on my unstinting support during these trying moments in her life,” he said after the breakup.

She says allegations that she had affairs during her husband’s imprisonment and after his release are part of a government plot to hurt her husband and, by extension, the ANC. “All you should know,” she says, “is that I did wait for 27 years, and that is sufficient response. I waited for him.

If there was any truth in the silly things they’ve been saying, why would I have waited? Why would I wait 27 years for a man behind bars when I was so much younger and could have taken my things and gone home to my family? It’s really enough to insult one’s intelligence.”

Life around the Mandela home hasn’t changed that much since “Madiba” moved out, Mandela says, using her husband’s clan name. Even before the separation, the ANC president would regularly rise before dawn, work out on his exercise bicycle and arrive at work early. At home, meetings occupied his time. Family dinners were rare.

“I’m not saying it wasn’t good to have him home,” Mandela says. “But even when he was here, it was never possible to see him.”

Within weeks of Nelson Mandela’s release, the family had realized that “Tata,” as the grandchildren call him, did not belong to them.

“The grandchildren looked forward to his release, but they never prepared themselves for what ultimately happened,” Winnie Mandela says. “I’ve heard them say that they were better off with him in prison, because they could go and visit him and spend some time with him.

“Now they find a situation where their grandfather has come out to the world, to the country and not to the family, which is very sad.”

AN HOUR AFTER MIDNIGHT on a recent Saturday, a vanload of worried men from a Soweto squatter camp arrives at the Mandela mansion and demands to see Winnie Mandela. Police officers are roaming the camp, the men say, and already have shot an elderly man to death.

Mandela puts an overcoat over her bedclothes and wakes her friend, Sally Peterson, who is sleeping in the guest room. Then she telephones the Soweto police commander. “People are being harassed by the police,” Mandela tells him. “Can you please withdraw your men? I am going there now.”

The commander promises to look into it, and Mandela and her friend are driven to the camp. When they arrive, the police are gone and the crisis has passed. But Mandela remains for two hours, listening to residents.

The next day she is in Qwa Qwa, a tiny, self-governing black homeland, speaking at a rally honoring Nelson Mandela’s 74th birthday and meeting the homeland leader to demand housing for a squatter settlement.

Two days later, a dozen young men and women show up at the regional office of the Women’s League in Johannesburg, asking to see Winnie Mandela. They are refugees from the fighting that followed the June massacre of 40 blacks in Boipatong township. They have spent two nights in the lobby of Shell House but have not been offered so much as a blanket.

“Winnie has been looking after us since 1986,” says David Pule Magoposhane, 22, one of the refugees. “Whenever we’ve had a problem, we always come to her. She’s cared for us.”

Mandela persuades another Women’s League member to house the refugees for a few weeks. She gives her colleague money to buy supplies and telephones relief agencies to arrange for food.

Although temporarily suspended from the Women’s League, Mandela continues to use the regional office as her base, stopping by daily after college classes. (She is studying part time for a bachelor’s degree in international relations and anthropology.)

Mandela has chosen to ignore the suspension. “What suspension?” she asks. “There is no suspension.”

The suspension had stemmed from an unprecedented protest march by ANC members on ANC headquarters. In May, a few of Mandela’s friends, convinced that she had been forced to resign as head of Social Welfare, rounded up hundreds of her supporters to deliver a protest letter. The ANC leaders in Shell House were not amused. They suspended Mandela and 19 other members of the regional Women’s League leadership corps, pending an internal investigation.

Mandela has been unrepentant. If protests against the ANC become illegal, she says, “the ANC will have the kind of constitution that is worse than the Boers. This whole ridiculous nonsense is quite disgraceful.

“We have fought for this freedom so hard,” she adds. “No one is going to prostitute the constitution of the ANC. Not even the ANC itself.”

NEWSPAPER COLUMNISTS, political analysts and others in the South African intelligentsia tend to either exaggerate or understate Winnie Mandela’s following. Pro-government newspapers play up Mandela’s fiery rhetoric, hoping to frighten moderate whites, Asians and mixed-race Coloreds away from the ANC. Liberal white-run newspapers, on the other hand, either ignore her or claim that her appeal is limited to uneducated blacks who are easily manipulated. The Weekly Mail, a respected anti-apartheid newspaper in Johannesburg, recently said Mandela’s stature as an anti-apartheid campaigner was a myth created by foreign governments and reporters in love with the Mandela name.

The truth? Well, the truth is that Winnie and Nelson Mandela ride in separate cars on the same train. Nelson is the statesman. Winnie is the warrior. Nelson forgives his white captors, is willing to trust President De Klerk and thinks he can lead blacks out of poverty and repression through negotiation; the ANC recently said it was ready to return to the bargaining table with De Klerk. Winnie harbors deep resentment toward her white tormentors, will never trust De Klerk and wants to keep pressure on the government through protests.

Anti-apartheid leaders cheered her in the ‘60s and ‘70s for her willingness to buck authority by any means necessary. But today she bucks their authority--and the politicians who have taken over the ANC don’t like it. Warriors such as Winnie Mandela have become an embarrassment. No longer does the ANC need liberators to topple the white government. Now it needs men and women of quiet reason to lead their angry black constituents into the more complex arena of negotiations, elections and political tolerance.

But Mandela never forgets that each step on the road away from apartheid has been taken under pressure. She views De Klerk as a man who believes that apartheid was not wrong; it was just a policy that didn’t work. The economy was suffering from world sanctions and the white psyche was suffering from sports isolation. It was time to try something new.

Even today, she reminds moderates, De Klerk has yet to take the final, inevitable steps demanded by the ANC and world powers. His government is prepared to unlock its exclusive hold on power and even extend the vote to the 29 million blacks, who outnumber whites nearly six to one. But he is not prepared to turn the key over to a majority-rule government without built-in protection for “minorities.”

She does not agree with Nelson Mandela and most ANC leaders who believe that now is the time to lay down their arms and engage the white government in negotiations. The moderate ANC leaders make a good case: They argue that the congress will not be able to help blacks until it negotiates a share of the power. But those arguments don’t convince many in the grass roots, who believe the government has a double agenda--fomenting black violence, which has claimed nearly 8,000 lives since De Klerk assumed power in 1989, while talking with the ANC.

Winnie Mandela appeals to the dissatisfaction of those masses: They see her as their singular voice within the middle-class ANC hierarchy.

Finally, Mandela’s is a battle for the soul of the ANC. She has been careful not to directly criticize Nelson Mandela, who remains the most popular black leader in the nation. But she has been critical of his moderate advisers, calling them “small-minded people” who are willing to forget the horrendous past and sacrifice generations of liberation struggle for well-paid positions of power in a future ANC-controlled government.

The infighting has been fierce. She contends that some ANC leaders in Shell House have lost contact with the grass roots in their rush to sample change in the country, to buy homes in formerly white neighborhoods, drive new cars, appear on national TV talk shows and take expense-paid business trips around the world. Shell House “is alienated from the masses, which is not such a healthy sign, not a good sign at all,” Mandela says.

Critics in the ANC fire back that she is an ambitious and power-hungry revolutionary who hopes to one day use her sway over the masses in a bid for control of the ANC.

Mandela, in private conversation, heaps scorn on her critics. Of a prominent black anti-apartheid leader in the United States who criticized her more than a year ago, Mandela says: “You tell him that I am looking forward to the day when we will deal with fakes like him. . . .”

But, a moment later, Mandela shrugs off the criticism. She has no dreams of cabinet positions in an ANC government, she says. “All these hallucinations about power . . . . I’m not really interested,” she says. “I’m really a back-room person. I’m more at home on the ground. And we’ll be having these squatter camps for as long as I’ll be alive.”

She says her biggest worry is what will happen after the ANC comes to power. “We are going to inherit all the sickness, all the disease of apartheid,” she says. “And it’s going to take generations to heal that disease.” If the ANC doesn’t listen to the masses soon, she says, it will be in trouble.

ANC leaders may be uncomfortable with Winnie Mandela. But they cannot afford to alienate her constituents. Just days after she resigned from the ANC Women’s League, leaders of the league’s Johannesburg region voted unanimously to reject her resignation as their chairwoman.

“This is one lesson her critics can’t seem to learn,” says Mpofu. “By now they should know that if they try to destroy her, it just gives her another lease on life.”

In fact, though, “I’ve never aspired to be a diplomat,” Mandela says. “If I woke up tomorrow and found that everybody agreed with me, I would look at myself twice in the mirror,” she adds, laughing. “I would think that there was something drastically wrong.”