The Mandelas: True and Loyal

By Alain L. Sanders

Shortly after his release from prison 15 months ago, as photographers nagged him to hold his impatient wife tenderly for one more picture, Nelson Mandela took Winnie's hands and pressed them into his. "She'll do it for me," he said. "I'm the only one who can control her." That episode illustrated the deep bond uniting South Africa's two most prominent antiapartheid activists and the anchored strength it has given to their turbulent lives.

Ever since they married in 1958, Nelson and Winnie Mandela have maintained an extraordinarily close union under the most trying conditions. A potentially fractious match to begin with -- he a formidable, eloquent, revolutionary lawyer; she a fiery, militant social worker 16 years his junior -- the Mandelas have survived 27 years of separation dictated by Pretoria's imprisonment of Nelson for sabotage and conspiracy to overthrow the government by force.

The days of solitude may have helped solidify the marriage and increase Nelson's dependence on his wife. "Had it not been for your visits, wonderful letters and your love, I would have fallen apart many years ago," Nelson wrote Winnie from his Robben Island prison cell in 1979. His sense of family and corresponding feelings of guilt at having left her and their two daughters behind also helped cement the relationship. "I have often wondered whether any kind of commitment can ever be sufficient excuse for abandoning a young and inexperienced woman in a pitiless desert," he wrote in another letter.

As much as anything else, what entwines them is the cause that has impelled both of them to sacrifice so much of what a marriage ought to be. "I knew when I married him that I married the struggle, the liberation of my people," says Winnie in her 1984 autobiography. Over the years, however, Winnie became something of a loose cannon, detonating one major political explosion after another.

Although she claims to have been misquoted, in 1986 she embarrassed the then banned African National Congress with a speech encouraging blacks to seek freedom "with our boxes of matches and our necklaces" -- a reference to a grisly form of execution carried out by lighting gasoline-filled tires around the necks of suspected government collaborators. She surrounded herself with a group of young bodyguard thugs known as the Mandela United Football Team who took it upon themselves to terrorize opponents -- real or imagined -- in the black township of Soweto. Increasingly imperious, Winnie was denounced in 1989 by other black leaders for having "violated human rights . . . in the name of the struggle against apartheid." She visited Nelson in prison shortly afterward, and though it is not known what he told her, a chastened Winnie immediately lowered her profile.

Ever the careful lawyer, Nelson vowed last week not to let Winnie's conviction undermine the task of reconciling South Africa's whites and blacks. In a speech to white students outside Cape Town, he urged everyone to "leave this matter with the courts." That is not to say he intends to do the same thing personally. As he told his A.N.C. colleagues at the start of the trial earlier this year, "My wife has been true and loyal to me over the last 27 years in which I've been imprisoned. I was unable to give her that protection. I'm now here, and I'm ready to give her that."

With reporting by Peter Hawthorne/Cape Town