Despite Bad Days, Winnie Mandela Is Back on Front Line in S. Africa : Activism: Last rites for political career may have been too hasty. Her reception indicates it’s too early to count her out as a force in black liberation struggle.

SOWETO, South Africa —  Before dawn on Good Friday, residents of a squatter camp in Soweto trekked to the hilltop Mandela mansion for help. Two squatters had been killed in a shootout with police, they said, and police were searching the shacks for weapons.

At the Mandela gate, the squatters were told that Nelson Mandela wasn’t there. But the group didn’t want Nelson. It wanted Winnie.

Within hours, Winnie Mandela was in the settlement, waving a plastic bag of spent rifle cartridges and accusing the “terrorist government” of trying “to kill you in your sleep.”

“The police want it to appear we are fighting among ourselves,” she told 300 cheering squatters. “This is the lie we are supposed to live with.”

Then she confronted a police general and demanded that his men leave. They did.

In the midst of the darkest days of her personal and political life, Winnie Mandela has quietly returned to the strategy that first made her a heroine of black liberation, wading into troubled townships and squatter camps to rage against the white government and comfort its victims.

Mandela’s return to front-line active duty may not restore a reputation scarred by her own willful behavior. But the reception she’s been getting is proof that it’s too early to count her out as a future force in South Africa.

“She’s always related well to ordinary people,” said Dali Mpofu, her deputy in the African National Congress’ social welfare department. “And, if anything, she’s getting more support now.”

Her storybook marriage to Nelson Mandela is over. She has quit as head of social welfare for the ANC, though she is staying on until a successor is named. She is free from prison only because her convictions for kidnaping and assault are on appeal. And the friends who swore by her alibi in that case now are recanting and accusing her of even worse.

Small wonder, then, that nearly every newspaper and political commentator in South Africa has rushed to give the last rites to her political career.

But they have been too hasty.

Mandela, 57, was reelected leader of the ANC women’s league in the Johannesburg region a few days ago. She also remains an elected member of the ANC’s national executive committee, and, more important, a rallying figure for the tens of thousands of angry, radicalized, often poorly educated youth who are largely ignored by most ANC leaders.

Winnie Mandela speaks, as she always has, directly to the impoverished, the victimized and the impatient--people who support the ANC but worry that its leaders, including Nelson Mandela, are negotiating away their future in a headlong rush to grasp power from President Frederik W. de Klerk.

Among these people, Nelson Mandela is both highly respected and widely ignored. They listen instead to the more radical Winnie Mandela. Her troubles with the law and her detractors in the ANC mean nothing to them, because she says what they want to hear.

“Comrade Winnie’s support is not the support that comes with an elected position only,” said Peter Mokaba, 32, head of the ANC’s youth league and, like Winnie, an ANC firebrand. “She does work on the ground. The people remember those that work among them, and for them.”

Two days after chasing the police out of the Soweto squatter shacks, Winnie Mandela was cheered on Easter by several thousand people from an impoverished, violence-racked township near Richmond in Natal province.

Singing traditional Zulu songs of praise, they lauded Mandela as the mother of the nation whom they would always protect. Then they wrapped her in a handmade blanket, which they had made as a gift, and presented her with table settings bought with their meager resources.

Later that day, Nelson Mandela, rival Zulu Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi and De Klerk called for peace at a large religious gathering in Transvaal Province.

Meanwhile, Winnie Mandela was traveling the 250 miles from Richmond to Sharpeville, where eight members of an ANC supporter’s family, including two children, had been killed that morning by five men armed with AK-47 rifles.

She launched a scathing attack on the Sharpeville police for failing to protect the family members, who had earlier told police they were being harassed.

“These killings must stop,” she said at a news conference. And she added that calls for peace by Nelson Mandela, De Klerk and Buthelezi were “meaningless if the government continues to kill people.”

A week later, when the ANC was arranging May Day rallies across the country, three of the four provinces in South Africa bid for Winnie Mandela’s presence on their stages.

Her support in the townships, built up by years of visits to the scenes of violence and hardship, presents a dilemma for ANC leaders. Many consider her a liability. Her militancy frightens and alienates many whites as well as moderate blacks, and the ANC knows it will need their support in any future election.

But the ANC cannot lose Winnie Mandela’s constituency, either. More than half of the ANC’s 700,000 members are in the youth league, and dumping her could drive them into more radical groups, such as the Pan-Africanist Congress and the Azanian People’s Organization.

“She may not be an angel,” added Mpofu, her deputy, “but you cannot ignore reality. She has support.” (Mpofu reportedly has been intimately involved with Winnie Mandela for several years. He says the accusations are “rubbish” and that they are just close friends.)

Winnie Mandela’s supporters don’t pay much attention to the controversy swirling around her. The white government has tried to silence and discredit her for three decades. Why, they ask, should it be any different today?

She was convicted last year on charges of kidnaping and assaulting four young men in the rooms behind her home in 1988. She denied any involvement, and her co-defendants supported her.

But in recent weeks, those co-defendants have gone to the newspapers with accusations that she played a direct role in the beatings, including the death of 14-year-old Stompie Seipei, and may have ordered the killing of a Soweto doctor a few days after he reportedly examined Seipei.

Her separation from Nelson Mandela after 33 years of marriage, announced by the stoical leader April 13, seemed to be an insurmountable blow to Winnie Mandela’s political career.

But Nelson Mandela, who took the painful step at the encouragement of other ANC leaders, took care not to criticize her. He said his love for her remained “undiminished,” and he lauded her long anti-apartheid efforts as a credit to the struggle for black liberation.

Close friends of the couple say Mandela, who is 17 years older than his wife, remains deeply grateful to her for the courageous battles she fought against the state during his 27 years in prison. And despite the many rumors of her infidelities, they say he still has affection for her.

Mandela says she remains committed to the ANC and the anti-apartheid struggle but that she’s resigned to having enemies inside and outside the ANC.

Her most vocal critics have included ANC supporters, among them the Weekly Mail newspaper.

Under the headline “End of a Myth,” Weekly Mail writer Gavin Evans recently argued that Winnie Mandela’s power and national stature were a myth created by foreign governments and local and foreign journalists enamored with her husband’s name. Winnie Mandela, Evans wrote, was nothing more than “a tough campaigner blessed with huge doses of physical courage but with no political discipline, a penchant for violence, a total incapacity to learn from her own mistakes and, frankly, a considerable capacity for evil.”

In fact, Winnie Mandela is a complex, stridently independent woman, say those who know her best. Her friends say her personality was shaped by those early encounters with the enforcers of apartheid.

They arrested her dozens of times, kept her in solitary confinement for 18 months, banned her from speaking to groups or reporters and banished her to the dusty township of Brandfort in an effort to silence her.

By her own estimation, the authorities turned this “little countryside girl from the backveld” into a tough, streetwise political operative who learned how to hate. And she did give the government fits.

But the attention she received, and the supplication she encountered among blacks, also built a towering ego and a lack of respect for all authority, even that in the anti-apartheid movement itself.

Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in February, 1990, put a temporary end to his wife’s political activity. But she soon grew impatient with her husband’s moderate views and returned to the fray, to the dismay of many ANC leaders.

“She’s always gone where the fires were burning,” Mpofu said. “Inevitably, a straightforward personality like hers is going to trample on people’s toes.”