IN 1983 when South Africa was in a state of revolt and the apartheid government feared losing its grip, the department of foreign affairs conducted an audit. How famous, they wanted to know, was Nelson Mandela?
He had not been seen or heard in the two decades since a court had sentenced him to life imprisonment. But in the years of his absence, the idea of him had grown and grown, turning him into government’s most formidable foe. Just how big was he, they wanted to know.
The results of the audit were shocking to its authors. A block of flats in the East End of London had been christened Mandela Heights, they discovered; a room in an art gallery in Glasgow was named the Mandela Room; he had been given the freedom of the city of Rome and of the town of Olympia in Greece; a high school in the village of Ilmenau, West Germany, had been named after him; 20 000 well-wishers in the German Democratic Republic had sent him postcards, as had thousands of people in Sri Lanka.
What accounts for this near-universal love? His face, after all, was unseen, his voice unheard.
A large part of the answer was his wife.
When her husband was jailed for life in 1964, Winnie Mandela (then 28), was left a single mother of two small girls. She was also astonishingly beautiful. In those unashamedly chauvinistic times, the titillation of the male journalists who wrote about her in the black South African press was scarcely concealed.
She was young and gorgeous, it was said, and who knows when her husband would return. Would she really wait for him, like Penelope waited all those years for Odysseus? Then again, what man was bold enough to cuckold black SA’s most famous son?
As the years passed, her