Mandela Urges Reconciliation as He Ends Historic Campaign

Nelson Mandela, reaching another milestone in his four years of freedom, wrapped up his party’s historic election campaign here Sunday by urging 100,000 of the cheering faithful to help him usher in a new era of racial equality and reconciliation.

The 75-year-old leader of the African National Congress, an almost certain winner in South Africa’s first all-race elections this week, told the crowd gathered on a sports field under a hot sun that the real work will not begin until after the balloting.

“Now we must work together for our country,” Mandela said, pausing frequently in an hourlong speech as his words in English were translated into Zulu. “The enemy of peace is also poverty, illiteracy and hopelessness. And this Wednesday, we can start the process of rebuilding.”

The campaign officially concluded Sunday, as required by law. The voting begins Tuesday with balloting among “special voters” in hospitals and retirement homes, and the rest of the country goes to the polls Wednesday and Thursday.

Mandela spoke here just a few hours after a car bomb exploded near ANC headquarters in downtown Johannesburg, killing nine and injuring scores. He told the crowd that he planned to meet with President Frederik W. de Klerk later Sunday to discuss the bombing.

But Mandela, who went to jail for waging guerrilla war against the white-run security forces, already sounded more like the country’s president than the liberation leader he has been for nearly four decades.

He urged his supporters to remain calm and allow police to properly investigate the bombing, which officials believe may have been the work of right-wing whites who are boycotting the elections and demanding a separate homeland.

“Don’t concentrate on the violent activities of those who want to disrupt these elections,” he said. “Leave the task of dealing with law and order with the security forces.”

Speaking in the regional power base of Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi’s Inkatha Freedom Party, Mandela also lamented Saturday’s killing of three ANC supporters as they tried to put up posters and distribute campaign literature in Ulundi, the capital of KwaZulu, the Zulu homeland that Buthelezi controls.

The deaths suggested that despite Buthelezi’s decision to end his boycott of the elections, more Inkatha-ANC clashes are probably inevitable.

Mandela said he had telephoned Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini and Ulundi’s police commissioner to express his concern, and he promised that “we are going to take the strongest action to avoid a repetition.”

“We want to make it clear that we are not going to be deterred from getting our freedom,” Mandela added. “To those who would try to destabilize this process, I say nothing they will do can prevent April 27th from being a historic day in this country.”

Soon after his release from 27 years in prison in 1990, Mandela had told a huge ANC crowd at the same sports field in Durban to “throw your pangas (machetes) into the sea.” But his appeals for an end to the killing have gone unheeded.

Nearly 14,500 people have died in political violence in South Africa since the ANC was legalized in 1990.

Opinion polls suggest that the ANC can win about 50% of Natal province, compared to 19% for Buthelezi’s Inkatha.

What’s more, Inkatha’s support is confined largely to the province, one of nine in the country, and polls indicate that De Klerk’s National Party is likely to place second to the ANC nationally.

Buthelezi campaigned in Soweto on Sunday, where he drew more than 10,000 supporters for his last major rally. He predicted that South Africans would turn out in great numbers for his party on the election days.

“My supporters stretch across the nation,” he said. “And the politics my party endorses has not only remained consistent and pragmatic but has a universal appeal of which no other South African party can boast.”