World Notes SOUTH AFRICA

As black nationalist leader Nelson Mandela was recovering from tuberculosis in a clinic near Pollsmoor Prison last month, rumors circulated that his 26-year confinement would soon end. Instead of freeing Mandela, however, the South African government last week installed him in a guarded, one-story stucco house on the Verster Prison Farm, 35 miles east of Cape Town.

The spacious, Spanish-style house comes complete with a pool, patio, rose garden and prison-provided meal service. The government obviously hopes to loosen the restraints on Mandela, 70, so slowly that a final release will seem anticlimactic. Pretoria said it will allow Mandela's family "unlimited access" to the patriarch of the banned African National Congress. Mandela's wife Winnie rejected the offer, saying she "does not intend to take more than the 40-minute visits allowed in the past until all political prisoners are given the same privileges." As he has since 1962, Nelson Mandela remains a prisoner in a prison, no matter how comfortable.