She married into it.Her loyal friends, like Peter Mokaba, the militant-talking former head of the ANC Youth League, say the ANC abandoned her in her time of trial It is equally true that she abandoned it. Resettled in the vast black metropolis outside Johannesburg, she set up her own office, built her own following, spoke her own mind.In Soweto, Mrs Mandela opened her house to teenage gang members, organizing the infamous Mandela United Football Club. Ostensibly a soccer team intended to keep youngsters out of trouble, it became a band of thugs who terrorized the township. By 1991, four members of the club had been convicted of murder.The most notorious case, that of the 14-year-old resistance hero, Stompie Seipei, became Mrs Mandela’s Chappaquiddick.She had Stompie and three other boys kidnapped from the home of a white minister she suspected of sexually molesting his charges.

In a back room of her house, her football club beat the boys to extract testimony against the minister; the “coach” of Mandela United later slit Stompie’s throat, a crime that landed him on Death Row.Two witnesses said Mrs Mandela personally whipped the four youths, punched them and slapped them and said they were unfit to live, but the state, could not make that charge stick. Some witnesses who had given police evidence against Mrs Mandela simply disappeared Others nervously changed their stories on the stand. Mrs Mandela’s two co-defendants, Xoliswa Falati and John Morgan, later told reporters they had perjured themselves to protect Mrs Mandela. She was ultimately acquitted of all but the kidnapping, and thereafter proclaimed the entire case a political witch-hunt.Last August, Mrs Mandela took the floor of Parliament to deliver her postscript on the case. Curiously, some listeners took it as an apology, but in fact it was a carefully crafted exercise in self-exoneration. Stompie, she said was a casualty of apartheid and the passions it aroused.”My deepest regret is that I failed Stompie – that I was unable to protect him from the anarchy of those times.”The kidnapping left Mrs Mandela an outcast, forced to resign her posts in the movement and separated from her husband.

It also curdled what had been a fairly warm relationship with the liberal press into a fierce and mutual animosity.They reveled in her shady business deals and profiled her new courtiers, people remote from the idealism of the movement. Prominent among those was a white socialite with a conviction for illicit diamond purchases who, after Mrs Mandela was redeemed and in Parliament, bought a suburban manor for her to use. The scandals were legitimate news, of course, but the coverage carried an unmistakable presumption of guilt.The vitriolic reporting confirmed her sense of a conspiracy against her, and she shut herself off. She does not give interviews any more, although her personal charm has always been one of her most effective weapons. Even John Carlin, the former Johannesburg correspondent for The Independent and one of Mrs Mandela’s toughest critics, admits that he was “absolutely, helplessly beguiled” in his one interview with her, in 1990. “She was regal and coquettish at the same time,” he recalls, “I forgot all about Stompie the moment she entered the room.”In the five years since Nelson Mandela was freed from prison, the Mandela’ fairy-tale marriage has deteriorated into a painful estrangement.Zindzi Mandela, one of the couple’s two grown-up daughters, recently said in a magazine interview that after Mr.