Blood, Bitterness and The Ballot : Amid Unending Violence, Political Chaos and Voter Confusion, Nelson Mandela and Frederik De Klerk Campaign for the Presidency, and a New South Africa

The sky is cloudless and the summer sun is scorching. Thousands of blacks have packed a soccer stadium in Maokeng, a dusty sprawl of matchbox homes and tin-roofed shanties. Beside the field, a crowd is squashed inside a chain-link fence, and crying children are passed back over a sea of heads to safety. Other people hang on trees and fences, or cling to lampposts. The rickety stands are jammed, and above them on the roof, dozens of youths are doing the toyi-toyi, the stomping, high-kicking dance of liberation. Suddenly, half the tin roof rips and collapses, dumping shrieking dancers onto the people and benches below. Wailing ambulances and honking trucks soon carry 30 bruised and bloodied people to the hospital. The survivors simply move onto the other half of the roof and the frenzied war dance continues.

Then pandemonium sweeps the stadium. Nelson Mandela is approaching! The next president! Perched in the back of a pickup truck, the legendary leader of the African National Congress waves and grins as the ecstatic mob surges around his feet. Their hands reach up, hoping for a touch; one grizzled, gray-haired man appears to weep at the sight. “He is like a god,” the man says before he is swept away in the crush of the crowd. As Mandela mounts the stage, they wave their fists and roar in delight. Amandla! Power!

Mandela tells of his last visit to this township outside Kroonstad in January, 1952. “I collided with a young boy on his bicycle, a white boy, with my car. He wasn’t hurt, but I stopped my car. A drunk police sergeant, a white man, came up.” He switches from English to Afrikaans for the punch-line. “He said, ‘Kaffir, I’m gonna make you shit!’ I said, ‘Sergeant, when I do that, I don’t need instructions from a drunken white sergeant.’ I was expecting to be assaulted, the coward that I am. But it seemed to deflate him. And that made me braver.” A broad grin crinkles his face as wild cheers and laughter echo across the township.

Another day, another rally, this one halfway across the country: President Frederik W. de Klerk also rides a pickup into a raggedy soccer stadium, his bald head glinting in the sun. He’s in Postdene, a mixed-race township outside Kimberley. Many mixed-race voters are sympathetic to De Klerk’s ruling National Party, if only because they fear they will suffer under black rule. Unlike Mandela, De Klerk has no raised stage, no portable toilets, no giant banners, no tall banks of booming speakers. His voice is tinny, rasping through small speakers set on the small truck’s hood. The crowd, perhaps a few hundred people, is wary, surly, nervous. A few hold small flags, but the president is met in stony silence. His security men are jittery. Something is wrong.

Then, chaos. Several dozen blacks with ANC posters run across the field straight for De Klerk. They rip down a National Party banner, then grab and shred posters and paper flags. A wild shoving match ensues beside the truck. A plainclothes cop grabs a protester’s shirt and yanks a knife away. “Don’t touch me,” the man screams. De Klerk scowls as hecklers drown him out with ANC chants. A hail of stones and wadded-up paper fills the air and something hits the president under his left ear. He flinches, more in surprise than pain, but bravely stays erect behind a tight circle of bodyguards as the truck lurches away. “Goodby, De Klerk, goodby!” jeers the laughing crowd. “Away, De Klerk, away!”

Moments later, armored vehicles rumble in with flak-jacketed riot police clutching assault rifles. The crowd scatters, pounding De Klerk’s motorcade with their fists and pelting photographers with stones. Police deploy outside the township entrance with snarling dogs and huge coils of razor wire. A black organizer for the aborted rally is terrified to go home. “I’m not safe there,” he says, pleading for a place to sleep, a place to hide. De Klerk tells the press afterward, “We will not cringe, we will not run away.” Later, an aide scouts the site of the day’s final rally in a nearby black township. He comes back breathless. A white man, the son of a local National Party leader, has emptied a pistol into another mob of stone-throwing protesters, killing a black woman. De Klerk cancels the rally.

With South Africa’s First Free Elections Only Days Away, the country is a tense, tenuous place, unsure whether it is headed for war or peace. The past is riven with hate, suffering and the bitter divisions of apartheid. The present is filled with violence, intimidation and fear. And the future is a dream of multiracial democracy. When balloting starts April 26, the black majority will vote and run their own country for the first time since Dutch merchant Jan van Riebeeck built the initial white settlement at Cape Town in 1652 and started a legacy of harsh white rule.

Although the official, enforced segregation of races has ended, South Africa remains a land of separate and unequal societies. The 5.1 million whites dominate 30.6 million blacks, 3.4 million “Colored,” or mixed race, and 1 million Indians. Under apartheid, blacks were denied citizenship, decent schooling or health care. Millions were confined to squalid reservations called homelands. The rest lived in townships, usually sprawling slums and smoke-filled shantytowns with no electricity, running water or paved roads. Most blacks still live in those appalling conditions. Nearly half have no formal job, and cannot read or write. Black incomes are barely one-tenth those of whites. Black infant mortality is eight times that of whites. One in 20 black children dies before age 5.

In November, a typhoid epidemic affected more than 1,500 blacks in the squatter camp of Botleng. Less than an hour from downtown Johannesburg, Botleng has no sewage system, simply buckets that are dumped on rotting garbage heaps. The roads are ankle-deep in mire and muck. Drinking water comes from rusty street taps or muddy puddles. Two miles away stands the posh white town of Delmas, with manicured lawns, tree-shaded streets and BMWs. It also has a hospital that refused to admit typhoid-stricken black children, shipping them to another medical facility 20 miles away.

But profound change is coming. The government is beginning to return land to blacks who were removed at gunpoint from their farms and dumped in desolate areas because their property was a “black spot” in “white areas.” Schools and neighborhoods are slowly, reluctantly, opening their doors. State media is no longer the government mouthpiece. And most important, history is about to be reversed. The whites who have ruled with racial tyranny are about to hand power over to blacks who were mostly in prison or in exile only four years ago. Even more astonishing, the ANC and the National Party, black and white, are delivering black liberation through a “negotiated revolution,” not all-out war.

Mandela is virtually certain to win and win big. ANC polls show a solid base of 55%, but the vote could go much higher. For the 16 million to 18 million blacks who are expected to cast ballots for the first time, the election is not about who offers the best housing or fiscal policies. The largest poll ever done here--sponsored by the Matla Trust, the nation’s largest voter-education group--was clear on that much. “What was the most important reason to vote? Freedom!” says poll director Susan Booysen, analyzing the results of interviews with more than 8,000 people. “Freedom was more important than jobs, better government, or a better life.”

The hard part, of course, comes after the voting. Except for race, little here is black and white. Just as communism suppressed ethnic tensions in Eastern Europe for 40 odd years, apartheid overshadowed other animosities here. The new South Africa promises to be a pressure cooker of racial, ethnic and political tensions, with schisms between black and white, rich and poor, urban and rural and, of course, black and black. Bitter grievances between the two largest tribes, the Zulus and Xhosas, over issues of land, cattle, power and politics, have fueled a savage spiral of violence over the last four years. So have battles between rival groups of Zulus. Rogue police officials, seeking to weaken the ANC, have contributed to the carnage. At least 15,000 people--nearly all of them black--have been burned, shot or hacked to death since 1990. The murder rate in what Mandela calls the world’s most violent country is 10 times that of America.

“The only certainty about the situation is that the system of apartheid will go,” says Colin Eglin, a leader of the tiny Democratic Party. “The uncertainty is what kind of system will be put in its place.”

Minefields already abound. A low-intensity civil war is raging between ANC supporters and their rivals in the Inkatha Freedom Party in Zulu strongholds of Natal province. More than 290 people were killed and hundreds wounded there last month, a sad new record that forced the government to declare a province-wide state of emergency. The powerful Zulu leader, Chief Mangosuthu G. Buthelezi, who heads both Inkatha and the KwaZulu homeland, wants greater local autonomy. Prickly and petulant, he has sworn to boycott the elections, ignore the constitution and fight an ANC-dominated regime.

So has a motley alliance of rabid white racists. It is easy to ridicule blustering bullies and buffoons like Eugene Terre’Blanche (headline writers call him E.T.), head of the neo-fascist Afrikaner Resistance Movement, and their belligerent demands for a secessionist white state. It’s not so easy to ignore their threats to wreck the election and sabotage the new black-led government. Their claim of 60,000 ready-to-fight supporters is absurd, but a handful of dedicated terrorists can create havoc. Witness Northern Ireland.

And many blacks fear the consequences of unfulfilled political promises. Mandela is partly to blame. Although he routinely warns against “exaggerated expectations,” he also vows that “each and every person would be entitled to housing like the whites have now.” At each rally, he dutifully repeats the ANC’s ambitious platform: to build 1 million homes, to create 2.5 million jobs, to provide electric power for 2.5 million homes, to guarantee 10 years of free schooling and free health care for children and much, much more.

Laudable goals, of course. But realistic? Not any time soon. “For us to turn the country around, it will take decades and decades,” warns Tokyo Sexwale, a regional ANC leader. Olga Chauke, a young black woman who runs voter education workshops in the western Transvaal, agrees. “People think after the election, they’ll get big houses and a Mercedes-Benz. And people believe that! I blame the politicians. They lie to the people.”

Several scenarios are possible after democracy finally dawns in the world’s most racially polarized country. The first, discussed endlessly in the press and nervously at dinner parties, is apocalypse. It goes like this: Backed by white army officers, right-wing terror squads sabotage power stations, bomb factories and assassinate black leaders. The bloodletting in Natal erupts into wholesale slaughter. Angry young blacks riot in the cities and leafy white suburbs, seeking new homes, cars and revenge. Wealthy whites flee, the civil service crumbles, foreign investors stay home and Africa’s largest and strongest economy collapses.

The next scenario is less pessimistic. The ANC wins a landslide, taking two-thirds of the vote. They run roughshod over political foes in the so-called government of national unity. Security forces crack down on black and white extremists, jailing thousands without trial and declaring a state of emergency. The Communist Party, the ANC’s longtime partner, asserts itself with a vengeance, and the government nationalizes mines, banks and factories. After four decades of oppressive rule by the white National Party, authoritarian blacks in the ANC take charge.

Yet another version is more hopeful. Pride and exhilaration sweep the land after a huge election turnout. Vote-related violence is localized and doesn’t derail the May 10 inauguration. President Mandela’s pleas for racial tolerance and peace are respected. Security forces stay loyal, and white extremists are marginalized into small hate groups, like the Ku Klux Klan. A majority of Zulus vote ANC, and turmoil subsides in Natal. A Constitutional Court keeps the new rulers in check. Foreign investors, governments and international agencies pump in billions to show support. The first McDonald’s opens.

The last scenario, or some version of it, seems the most probable. Time and time again since De Klerk released Mandela from 27 years in prison in 1990, launching the nation on the bloodstained path to democracy, South Africa has teetered on the brink of catastrophe--and turned back. The country is resilient and the center has held. It may take generations, as it has in America, for hate-filled minds to change, for decent schools and jobs programs to take hold, and for real opportunities to emerge. And as in America, bitter battles lie ahead in small towns and local school boards. But barring an unforeseen disaster, the birth of the new South Africa stands a good chance of succeeding.

Dressed in a glittering tuxedo, with a thin mustache and a fast patter, Aubrey Welsch is teaching South Africa how to vote. Welsch hosts a new Saturday night TV quiz show called “It’s Your Vote!” It offers “fabulous prizes,” a catchy jingle and Jessica, the ever-smiling assistant in a black sequined minidress. Mike, a plumber, is the contestant tonight. The first question: How many people are allowed to enter a voting booth? Mike ponders the possible answers (no limit, one or three), and the prizes (a refrigerator, microwave or video game gadget) before venturing “one.”

Then come more questions about voting procedures. Finally, Welsch turns to five “voters” from the studio audience. Each must mark a ballot on whether they think Mike’s answers are correct. “It’s a secret vote,” Welsch says, then turns to the camera. “That’s right, folks, the vote is totally secret. So Mike won’t know who voted for him. But he has to accept the vote. And it’ll be the same in the elections. Your vote will be totally secret. And whichever party wins, everyone has to accept it. That’s democracy!”

Television otherwise plays a small role in this election--political ads have been banned so rich parties can’t dominate the airwaves. And most of the 100 or so other voter education programs are more mundane. Unions, churches, factories and non-governmental groups hold mock elections and training sessions to teach people to vote who have never voted before. It’s a critical task. Experts fear that millions of votes may be accidentally invalidated, undermining the legitimacy of the final tally and the authority of the new government. Many of the uneducated rural voters may be too frightened, or too confused, to mark the ballot correctly.

It’s easy to see why. South Africa’s first free elections are not simple. Some 26 parties are running. The ballot for the 400-seat National Assembly alone will be longer than a newspaper page. Each of the nine new provinces will have a separate second ballot for their provincial assemblies. Many of the parties are brand-new and virtually unknown, and one is so poor its phones were recently disconnected for lack of payment. But under a system of proportional representation, any party could win a seat or two. And any party that wins 5% of the total vote will be guaranteed a place in the Cabinet of the new government of national unity. Win 20% and you get to be a deputy president. Fabulous prizes!

The Independent Electoral Commission is in charge. The 16-member panel must certify if the election is “substantially free and fair,” a term that clearly covers a lot of ground. The chairman, Judge Johann Kriegler, outlined the still-evolving election plans over lunch recently. Up to 300,000 workers and monitors will be assigned to 9,000 polling stations. Another 1,800 United Nations monitors, plus more than 1,000 international observers, will watch for trouble and fraud. Countless volunteers are coming from colleges, churches and peace groups around the world. So are 10 chartered jumbo jets loaded with 80 million ballots being printed in England, enough so no polling station runs out. Officials say no single South African printing company could ensure production, delivery or security for such a large order.

Unlike most countries, South Africa has prepared no voters’ roll, so the 22.7 million eligible voters can go to any polling station anywhere in the country. Voters’ hands will be dipped in ink that shows under ultraviolet light to ensure no one votes twice. The voting itself will take three days. To maintain security, the army and police have canceled leaves and called up reservists. Virtually every police officer and soldier in the country will be assigned to guard against intimidation at the polls or to ride shotgun when the sealed ballot boxes are moved overnight to local jail cells or bank vaults. The boxes will finally go to 90,000 “enumerators” at 1,091 counting posts--one for every 10 polling stations--so no one will know how a single community voted. “We fear reprisals,” Kriegler says. “We’ve told people ‘your vote is secret.’ What if we then announce you’re the only ANC village in, say, an Inkatha zone?”

The same fear has led the electoral commission to ban exit polls, even by foreign TV networks. “We’ve told people, ‘No one can ever know how you voted and your vote is secret,”’ he says. “And then you come out of your voting station and there’s a man, a white man at that, with a foreign accent, asking for whom you voted. We’d be a laughingstock given all the promises we made.”

Tom Lodge, a political scientist at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, takes a caustic view of all this. If the ANC meets its goal of winning 67% of the vote, Lodge notes, it will have the legal majority in Parliament. It could then rewrite the current interim constitution without considering the concerns of smaller parties, among other things. Lodge finds that prospect worrisome: “Remember, the ANC is a relatively recent convert to liberal democracy.”

But so are nervous whites like Cornelis Serfontein, a lanky 48-year-old farmer in the right-wing stronghold of Potchefstroom. Like many of the 3 million Afrikaners, descendants of the early Dutch and French pioneers, he is caught in a dilemma. He has lived his entire life in a land where white power, prestige and privilege were guaranteed. He served 15 years as local vice chairman of the National Party, presiding during the most brutal years of the apartheid era. But, like his country, he has changed. He resigned his party post recently, and his story pours out of him with passion and pain.

“The more enlightened Afrikaner is caught between the right-wing forces,” Serfontein says. “And if you move to the left, you’re in danger. If I stand up today in Afrikaner company and say I am leaning toward the ANC, I’m totally cut off and isolated. And my children are intimidated. You must look after your family. We have nowhere to go. Make no mistake. We’re born and bred South Africans.”

He pauses, then adds, “The National Party has had no opposition since 1948. There was a lot of corruption. We can’t argue that away. We always say look at corruption in the rest of black Africa. But the corruption here was only more refined. It’s unreal what we have done to our country.” He grows quiet as several whites pass on the street, then resumes. “I can say I probably won’t vote for the ANC. But I can see in the future, when I see how they run the economy, then I might. I want to see a better standard of living for everybody.”

Perhaps 3,000 people attend the Feb. 2 kickoff of the national Party campaign. They fill the hangar-like hall at the World Trade Center outside Johannesburg, where the interim constitution was adopted and signed last December after exhausting, exciting round-the-clock talks. Tonight, however, the hall has all the thrill of a physics lecture. Delegates and party workers sit stiffly at long tables, quietly waiting for something to start. Several hundred mixed-race supporters pack the back of the hall. But the majority of the non-revelers are the red-faced, overfed Afrikaners that the party has long attracted. A six-man, all-white brass band blares “When the Saints Go Marching In.”

A black preacher suddenly takes the stage. “Viva De Klerk! Viva!” he shouts several times, thrusting his fist into the air. The audience looks nervous--”viva” is a standard ANC chant. A few shout back, but the chants are stillborn. Still, it is nothing to what follows. The band pulls out new sheet music, and lyrics flash on giant screens at the front of the hall. And then it begins, an excruciating attempt in the name of national unity to sing “Nkosi Sikelel’i Afrika,” the call-and-response hymn that has become Africa’s chief liberation anthem. Sung at every ANC rally, it is a haunting tune that thunders out of stadiums and echoes across the townships. Every black schoolchild knows the words. Here, the audience struggles to read the Xhosa words on the oversized cue cards and follow a tune that the band, clearly unfamiliar with the music, tries to play with a polka beat.

Later I mention this incident with a laugh to one of De Klerk’s advisers. He sighs. “People are in shock,” he says. “You have to remember Afrikaners come from a religious culture where public dancing was frowned upon. They’re staid, conservative, very disciplined and organized. And they’re uncomfortable with all this public stuff.”

Jan Bosman, another aide, agrees. “The National Party is more used to City Hall meetings, with all the people sitting down, all very dressed up and polite,” he says. “You started with a prayer, had a long-winded address by the president, then tea and cookies. All very formal and polite. And, of course, all white.”

Of course. And that’s the problem. First elected in 1948, the National Party invented and institutionalized apartheid and used every power of a police state, including torture and murder, to enforce its dictums. It still has all the powers of the state--cars, phones, police and the like. But it can’t hope to win enough votes to become a respectable opposition party unless it can appeal to the people who have the most reason to resent them--blacks. Polls show black support for De Klerk in the low single digits.

As a result, De Klerk’s uphill campaign is more interesting in some ways than Mandela’s. As a fourth-generation Afrikaner politician, De Klerk is member of a family that was partly responsible for the horrors of apartheid. No one expected him to be different. The young lawyer went to Parliament in 1972 and quickly joined the verkrampte, or hard-line wing of the party. As education minister in the mid-1980s, he never publicly questioned the policy of providing only substandard schools for blacks. To this day, he has never said apartheid was wrong, only that it didn’t work and he’s sorry for the misery it caused.

But De Klerk’s nobler side began to show after his party narrowly elected him president in August, 1989. “Our goal is a totally changed South Africa,” he said when he took office. Six months later, he released Mandela from prison, legalized the ANC and other black opposition parties and began official desegregation. The uncertain march from apartheid to democracy had begun. The next few years saw tortuous on-again, off-again negotiations between the ANC, the government and 24 other parties. The result has been not only the new constitution, but a black-dominated transitional executive council that has become a virtual shadow government.

Today, De Klerk, 58, remains far more popular than his party. So he tells voters that he heads the “new National Party.” There’s a new slogan (“We’ve made the change!”), a new logo and flag (the pastel design was reviewed by traditional black witch doctors) and a new message of atonement. They even hired spin doctors, Lowe Bell Communications, whose London-based directors have advised leaders from Margaret Thatcher to Billy Graham. The consultants studied election returns from other African countries. They commissioned focus groups, opinion surveys, heavy media buys and tracking polls.

The results? A majority of blacks think the party is still all white and still in favor of apartheid. And something else. “There was a perception that De Klerk lived in an ivory tower, that he was strait-laced, that he had no understanding or concern for the way poor people lived,” says Chris Fismer, a senior aide. “It was not true, but that was the perception.”

Enter a new De Klerk, clad in polo shirts instead of suits, and ever willing to pose with tribal robes, spears and shields. At a seaside lunch of grilled lobsters at Lambert’s Bay, aides huddle as the relaxed, open-collar candidate drinks a glass of red wine and smokes a Lexington cigarette. The aides decide that he should sit on a rough-hewn log, with his back to the white-capped ocean, for a news conference. “Make him look like a man of the people, all that stuff,” one says. I ask if it really matters, given the party’s other problems. “Most people don’t care,” he replies with a laugh. “We could put him up against a skull and crossbones and people wouldn’t care.”

But De Klerk cares. “There’s a request for a photo opportunity,” he says after the news conference. “Does it still exist?” The photographers, of course, say yes. So De Klerk strides to the water’s edge. He dips his hand in the surf and stares pensively out to sea. After a moment, he slowly turns and walks down the lonely sand. The cameras click furiously. “Enough?” he asks. It is reminiscent of the famous photo of Richard Nixon walking the beach in his wingtips.

De Klerk has taken several tips from Nixon’s handbook. He appeals to the “silent majority” in his speeches, isn’t above packing his crowds with government workers and plainclothes security men and is running a law-and-order campaign. He demonizes the ANC as “secretly controlled by Communists, militants and extremists” dedicated to using violence. It’s a tricky strategy. For one thing, De Klerk has spent the last four years trying to convince terrified whites that Mandela and the ANC can be trusted. The other problem is he’s at least partly right: angry black protesters try to disrupt nearly every township rally he holds. He’s been spit on, shoved and shouted down.

I join De Klerk as he barnstorms a dozen forlorn farming and fishing towns in a desolate, wind-swept area of the Western Cape. South Africa is almost twice the size of Texas, and here the landscape has the same rolling hills, dusty plains and vast emptiness with two-lane blacktops stretching to the horizon. Mixed-race voters predominate, and polls show many are undecided. So at each stop, De Klerk fans fears of blacks and Communists, then promises that he will stand up to the ANC. “They burn houses and destroy schools,” he says. “They are the breakers. We are the builders.” And at nearly each stop, young ANC protesters oblige by ruining his rallies.

The first stop is in Atlantis, built on empty sand dunes 18 years ago for mixed-race families forced out of Cape Town by the mad social engineers of apartheid. About 40 ANC protesters chant and boo as De Klerk shouts to be heard inside a small hall. “I think it’s a disgrace he wants to enter this town,” complains Rachel Visser, a local ANC activist. “They forced us to live here. We don’t have money for food, our schools don’t have books and now the factories are closing. And he wants our vote.”

But Diane Cupido, a 29-year-old unemployed woman, proudly holds a De Klerk poster nearby. “The reason I support the National Party is blacks want to take revenge,” she says. “They all went to prison and now they want revenge.”

By the fourth stop, at a street rally in tiny Vredenburg, dozens of blacks have gathered to dance and shout. Beefy security men lock arms to try to hold them back. “Go to hell, De Klerk,” the mob chants, drowning out his speech. Finally, they rush his sound truck. An armored personnel carrier quickly rumbles up and an all-white squad of riot police jumps out with shotguns, assault rifles and tear gas. The crowd eyes them nervously as De Klerk’s BMW drives off.

Then shouts echo up the street. A police van in the convoy has clipped a protester, then sideswiped a photographer’s car. The driver never stopped. An angry crowd quickly surrounds the black hit-and-run victim. “They’ve killed him! They’ve killed him!” one woman shouts hysterically. Pushing closer, I can see the man on his back, but he’s talking and in no obvious discomfort. An ambulance quickly carts him off. Both sides, it seems, are satisfied. The local ANC gets a martyr, another black victim of white brutality. And De Klerk gets another picture in the paper of dangerous ANC intimidation.

ANC strategy, in contrast, seems simple: blame others for the violence, rein in its hooligans and convince voters, and the world, that it is ready to govern a nation of 40 million people with a giant economy and an untested constitution. “We must behave as people who are fit to govern,” Mandela told a recent rally in Kimberly, “people who have a sense of responsibility.”

So the ANC uses advertisements and rallies to underscore the message that the former revolutionary movement and guerrilla army is, indeed, prepared. Each week, it runs full-page newspaper ads with detailed plans to build schools, homes and communities. Stanley Greenberg oversees the ANC polls and communication strategy when he isn’t working for his other chief client, President Clinton. I ask whether voters read the ads. “It’s reinforcing that they have a plan to address problems,” he says. “It’s not in the details. It’s in the belief that the plan is there.”

Just as Clinton peddled copies of his campaign’s economic plan, the ANC urges people to send for the party’s manifesto, called “A Better Life for All.” And just as Clinton used “town meetings,” Mandela conducts regular “people’s forums” to answer questions about everything from police brutality to crumbling hospitals. His bodyguards were trained by U.S. State Department security agents, but no American presidential candidate ever got the frenzied, adoring, star-struck crowds that Mandela routinely draws. This election, after all, is their own liberation.

A rally in Ikageng, in the western Transvaal, is typical. The whole township turns out, not just to see him, but to celebrate. Thousands of people line rooftops, cling to lampposts and stand shoulder-to-shoulder along the dirt roads. Drum majorettes, in white satin and gold braid, march to thumping drums and blaring trumpets. Teen-agers dance to a reggae band. Women ululate and sing praises to Mandela. Former guerrillas, and at least one tiny toddler, proudly wear camouflage fatigues. The crowd spills out of the packed stands and surges past the hapless guards, shoving and shouting in cathartic glee. Euphoria fills the air.

But as often happens, it fizzles when Mandela speaks. He’s stiff, wooden, and prone to lecturing the audience. He drones on about crime, reading a long list of statistics--so many dead since 1984, so many murders a day, so many robberies, so many gun licenses issued and so on. Then onto collective bargaining, a breakdown of the education budget, pension reform and the new Constitutional Court. He speaks in English, which some Tswana-speakers clearly don’t understand. People soon begin drifting out.

Still, at 75, Mandela has a regal bearing and unflappable dignity. He is trim and fit, although he wears a hearing aid and special socks for a circulation problem. But unlike De Klerk, image is no problem. At one rally, women draped a purple blanket on his shoulders and gave him a padded rocking chair. He arranged the robe so it hung over one shoulder and wrapped around his waist. He sat in the chair, as erect as on a throne, the very picture of the royal Thembu chief he was raised to be.

He enjoys recounting those early years. Helicoptering into tiny Mqekezweni, he takes reporters into a round grass hut with a floor of smeared cow dung where he had lived as a child. Outside, he says with a grin, “It was here I made my first love to a young lady. So you can see how important this area is for me.”

He talks, too, of his long, lonely years as a political prisoner: of learning of the death of his mother, Nosekeni, in 1968, and his eldest son, Thembi, in a car crash a year later. He was forbidden to attend the funerals. “I was deeply hurt that I could not pay my last respects to either my mother or my son. I could not share my pain with anyone,” he says during a visit to his former cell at Robben Island.

Not all the memories are bad. He has built a four-bedroom vacation house modeled exactly on the prison warder’s home he occupied during his last two years of incarceration. And he still rises at dawn, exercises and makes his bed as he did in prison.

The stern authority and paternal presence that saw him through prison are visible on the campaign trail. He publicly rebukes his staff for mismanaging campaign events. And he is furious that De Klerk and the National Party claim credit for ending apartheid. “The people are shunning the National Party like lepers, which they are,” he says angrily at Zambela, another township. “They are still a racist party that clings in one way or another to the policies of racial discrimination.” And later, he mocks De Klerk for complaining about the hecklers. “South Africa has got robust politics and sissies should not address political meetings.”

But Mandela also can be a loose cannon. In recent weeks, he has said that right-wing whites would be able to vote for a self-ruled state. Then he said it wasn’t certain that an ANC leader--him, in other words--must be president. Finally he told Dutch TV he might resign after a year as president and let a younger man finish the next four years. Each time, his aides quickly backpedaled and described his recorded comments as a joke, a misunderstanding or a misquote.

As president, Mandela will inherit staggering social and economic problems. Life for many South Africans has grown worse since he was released from jail. A culture of criminal violence rages in the townships. Black schooling has virtually collapsed. The economy is mired in the longest and deepest recession in decades. And the new democracy will be a fractious collection of competing interest groups. Young, aggressive politicians will be on the make in the new national and provincial assemblies. Some of Mandela’s strongest supporters--the Communists, trade unions, even his estranged and militant wife, Winnie--may become albatrosses once he’s in power.

How will he manage? Post-colonial Africa is littered with the shattered dreams and ruined economies left by charismatic, nationalist heroes who were unable to rule. To avoid their fate, Mandela must steer a careful course between black expectations and white fears, between revolutionary zeal and government abuses. His closest aides, people like ANC Secretary General Cyril Ramaphosa, 41, and party chairman Thabo Mbeki, 51, will play a key role. The challenge is immense, but there are many reasons for hope.

And in the end, Mandela’s hectic campaign schedule shows how miraculous this election is. On most days, he skips the wealthy white enclaves, with their Mercedeses and back-yard swimming pools, that have always run South Africa. Instead, he heads for the wretched townships, the miserable mining camps and sad squatter settlements--neglected, impoverished, often unmarked, and always out of sight of the white minority.

And when the unmistakable gray-haired figure arrives, with his beaming smile and infectious enthusiasm, he’s greeted as a martyr, a hero, a symbol of freedom and leader of liberation. His aura and appeal are almost religious.

Mandela obviously agrees. “All of you, without exception, are my flesh and blood,” he tells a crowd at one recent rally. “Your aspirations are my aspirations. Your victory is my victory.” The cheers are deafening.