TV Reviews : There Are Two Sides to ‘Mandela’ Story

“Mandela” is a misleading title for tonight’s report on PBS, co-produced by “Frontline,” the BBC and Channel Four in Britain. “Mandelas” is more like it.

The crowning irony behind today’s South African election, virtually conceded to African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela, is that while Mandela may have forged friendlier relations with his former fearsome rival, Inkatha Freedom Party leader Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, his new harshest rival may be his estranged wife, Winnie Mandela.

In the broadcast’s opening half-hour, BBC reporter Michael Buerk traces Mandela’s rise to power, while “Frontline’s” (and veteran National Public Radio South African watcher) John Matisonn examines Winnie’s rise and fall and new rise.

The hour’s most interesting dimension is the unveiling of the future President’s real rival (the report was finished before Buthelezi’s surprising decision to join the national election), but it’s also linked with the report’s most astonishing failure. Though Matisonn clearly explains the painful history of Winnie Mandela’s persecution during her husband’s decades-long imprisonment--and her inevitable radicalization--nowhere is Nelson’s political evolution explained. She is now at the ANC’s militant left flank, and he is its most eloquent centrist. How did this come to be?

Despite one of the most elegantly written voice-over reports to be found in any “Frontline” report--and that is saying a lot--Buerk neglects to track for U.S. viewers how Nelson Mandela first became an ANC leader in the ‘50s, and how his long-held vision of a democratic, non-racial South Africa was deeply informed by socialism. Mandela’s vision grew more centrist and more willing to mix capitalism and socialism as he grew older in prison. By his release in 1990, and now during election campaigning, the former icon of revolution has grown to oppose leftist and rightist violence, socialized takeover of white-owned property and the rhetoric of race-baiting.

Winnie could not be more different, as Matisonn shows with clips on the campaign trail and confrontations with police. While her suspended sentence for involvement in the killing of young Stompie Seipei by her bodyguards alienated her from the ANC brain trust, she has gradually reasserted herself as “a voice of the people,” a grass-roots radical.

Winnie’s interest in maintaining the division--and dogging the ANC establishment to follow through on all of its many campaign promises--utterly conflicts with Nelson’s hope of a growing democratic, multiracial middle class.

How do you spell d-i-v-o-r-c-e?

* “Mandela” airs tonight at 9 on KCET-TV Channel 28 and KPBS-TV Channel 15, and at 8 on KVCR-TV Channel 24.