The Making of a Leader

By RICHARD STENGEL/JOHANNESBURG

Just a short stroll from Nelson Mandela's modest country house in the Transkei is the even more humble village where he was born. The round thatched huts of Qunu have no running water or electricity, and shy herdboys wielding sticks tend the skinny cattle the same way young Rolihlahla Nelson Mandela did almost 70 years ago. Walking across the green hills above the village one morning not long ago, Mandela recalled a lesson he learned as a boy. "When you want to get a herd to move in a certain direction," he said, "you stand at the back with a stick. Then a few of the more energetic cattle move to the front and the rest of the cattle follow. You are really guiding them from behind." He paused before saying with a smile, "That is how a leader should do his work."

No one would suggest that so charismatic a figure as Nelson Mandela, a doughty and energetic 75, leads from behind. But Mandela has always made his authority felt on two levels: by standing at the head of the African National Congress as symbol and standard bearer and by forming strategy from behind by suggestion, pressure, indirection. During his career as a politician -- a word he proudly uses to describe himself -- he has at times moved out ahead of his colleagues and audaciously created policy, while at other times he has been content to plant the seed of an idea that bears fruit only many years later.

Next week Mandela will become the President of the country whose government he fought against for so long. Leading a liberation struggle is a task fundamentally different from heading a government; Mandela will no longer seek to bring a system down but to build one up. Yet his style of leadership is suited to his new task, for he is a practiced seeker of unity and consensus.

Mandela witnessed the dynamic of leadership early on. Several times a year, his guardian, Chief Jongintaba, the regent of the Thembu tribe, presided over what were essentially tribal town meetings. People came from far and wide to Chief Jongintaba's royal seat, the Great Place at Mqekezweni. These meetings lasted days, and did not end until everyone had had a chance to speak his , mind. Rolihlahla sat on the fringes and watched as his guardian listened in thoughtful silence. Only at the end would Chief Jongintaba speak, and then it was to nurture a consensus. A leader, Mandela learned, does not impose a decision. He molds one.

The lessons of the Great Place apply today when Mandela chairs meetings of the National Executive Committee, the ruling body of the A.N.C. His face becomes a mask as he notes each person's views and registers the course of the discussion and argument. He knows the weight of his opinion and holds it in reserve until it is deemed necessary. If there is a deadlock he attempts to resolve it. Otherwise he tries to steer the argument toward consensus.

Mandela, as someone once observed, is a combination of African nobility and British aristocracy. He has the punctilious manners of a Victorian gentleman. (His aides sometimes chastise him for rising from his chair to greet everyone who approaches him.) His patrician nature is on display most prominently in his dealings with President F.W. de Klerk, whom he has often treated as a kind of bumbling equerry. At the end of the first day of negotiations for a new constitution in 1991, Mandela gave De Klerk a withering dressing down: "Even the head of an illegitimate, discredited minority regime, as his is, has certain moral standards to uphold." His wrath is cold, not hot; he does not explode at his foes, he freezes them out.

At the same time, Mandela possesses a common touch that no amount of political coaching can inculcate. When Mandela speaks at banquets, he makes a point of going into the kitchen and shaking hands with every dishwasher and busboy. On countless occasions, he will stop in the middle of a street or hallway to talk with a little boy; his questioning has the rhythm of a catechism. "How old are you?" he will say. "Four," the boy might whisper. "Ah, you're a big man, man!" he will reply with a smile. "And what did you have for breakfast today?"

One paradox of leadership is that voters are partial to candidates who seem both bigger than they are and yet are also one of them. When Mandela lived underground as an outlaw in the early 1960s and was dubbed the Black Pimpernel by the South African press for his ability to elude the police, his colleagues marveled at how he blended in with the people. He usually disguised himself as a chauffeur; he would don a long dustcoat, hunch his shoulders and, suddenly, this tall, singularly regal figure was transformed into one of the huddled masses moving along the streets of Johannesburg. Even today, at rallies or meetings, the poorest supporter of the A.N.C. feels he has the right to greet and address his leader.

Though Mandela may be a natural mass leader, he does not exhibit all the attributes associated with such charismatic figures. Yes, Mandela may plunge into ecstatic crowds at rallies, pump hands, give the clenched-fist A.N.C. salute and dance a few steps of the toyi-toyi. But when he begins to speak, the cheers usually turn into a good-natured but puzzled silence. Not for Mandela the soaring metaphors of Martin Luther King or the rhyming aphorisms of Jesse Jackson; he addresses his audiences in the sober, didactic style of an organic-chemistry professor. "I try not to be a rabble rouser," he says. "The people want things explained to them clearly and rationally. They recognize when someone is speaking to them seriously. They want to see how you handle difficult situations, whether or not you stay calm."

Mandela rarely practices the modern politician's art of telling his listeners what he thinks they want to hear. To black audiences, he declares that democracy and majority rule will not change the material circumstances of their lives overnight. At the same time, he informs white audiences that they must take responsibility for the past and they will have to reconcile themselves to a future of majority rule. He is the paterfamilias of his nation (his staff members call him "Tata," which means father), but he is a stern parent, not a cuddly one.

For Mandela, consensus must be its own reward, for he does not always get his way. During his imprisonment on Robben Island, he wanted to stage a strike to force the warders to address prisoners with the honorific "Mr." But he was always turned down by his comrades. Last year he urged the A.N.C. to reduce the voting age to 14, but his colleagues refused. Once he has lost, he publicly speaks in favor of the position he opposed. "I sometimes come to the National Executive Committee with an idea and they overrule me," he recently observed. "And I obey them, even when they are wrong," he added with a smile. "That is democracy."

Mandela has always taken the long view, and sometimes this gives him victories in battles that were started decades ago. After the government began to implement its Bantustan policies in the 1960s and '70s, a plan to relegate all blacks to poor, quasi-independent tribal homelands, Mandela urged the . A.N.C. to make peace with the black leaders of these enclaves whom many in the movement scorned as traitors. The A.N.C. shied away from this policy, but he kept arguing his case. In the past three years, however, the A.N.C. has brought these leaders into its embrace.

His style derives from a hard-won discipline. Oliver Tambo, his former law partner and the longtime leader of the A.N.C. in exile who died last year, once described the youthful Mandela as "passionate, emotional, sensitive, quickly stung to bitterness and retaliation by insult and patronage." Who can discern those characteristics in the controlled Nelson Mandela of today? He now prizes rationality, logic, compromise, and distrusts sentiment. Prison steeled him, and over the decades he came to see emotion not as an ally but as a demon to be shunned. How was the man who emerged from prison different from the one who went in? His reply: "I came out mature." It is not simply that he harbors little bitterness in his heart; he knows that bitterness will not move him an inch closer to his goal.

If there has been a consistent criticism of Mandela over the years, it is that he is too willing to see the good in people. If this is a flaw, it is one he accepts because it grows out of his great strength, his generosity of heart toward his enemies. He defends himself by noting that thinking too well of people sometimes makes them behave better than they otherwise would. He believes in the essential goodness of the human heart, even though he has spent a lifetime suffering the wounds of heartless authorities.

At home, Mandela will take out his well-thumbed Filofax, find a number, and telephone a colleague to discuss an issue. However, he is not a man who is mired in details. Although Mandela did not even see a television until the 1970s, he understands the importance of mass-media images, and will make gestures of large symbolic content, as when he grasped De Klerk's hand at the end of their recent debate and said he would be proud to work with his opponent -- a man he has publicly labeled untrustworthy. He is gracious, amiable, gentlemanly, ever the host, always the subtle master of the situation.

Even as Mandela voted last week and dutifully smiled in all directions for the photographers, his mind seemed both on the past and on the future; he thought back to his fallen comrades who did not live to share his victory and ahead to how he would contrive to forge one nation out of a divided land. His % moment of triumph gratifies him but comes with unsought consequences. While in jail, Mandela was surrounded by armed guards who never took their eyes off him. Now, wherever Mandela goes he is surrounded by armed guards who never take their eyes off him. In a sense, he has exchanged one form of prison for another, and the revolutionary who was a threat to the state has become the prisoner of fame and power. In the midst of his election he lamented the fact that he did not have time to play with his beloved grandchildren. It is the burden of the leadership he was born to and has achieved.