South Africa Mandela Declines Offer of Freedom

Dressed in the yellow T shirt of the United Democratic Front, a rapidly growing antiapartheid movement, Zindzi Mandela, 25, at the side of Johannesburg's Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu, stood silently for a moment in Soweto's Jabulani Stadium. Then she began to read to the 9,000 people gathered before her a message prepared by her father, Nelson Mandela, in his prison cell. "I cannot and will not give any undertaking at a time when I and you, the people, are not free," Mandela, South Africa's best-known black activist, said in his statement. "Only free men can negotiate; prisoners cannot enter into contracts. Your freedom and mine cannot be separated."

Thus, nearly 21 years after he was imprisoned on charges of sabotage and subversion, the former head of the outlawed African National Congress rejected a conditional offer of freedom by the white minority government of Executive President P.W. Botha. Instead, Mandela, 67, seized the opportunity to outline his own demands. The South African government, he declared in his message, must renounce violence, dismantle apartheid, lift its ban on the A.N.C., free those imprisoned or banished for their opposition to apartheid, and guarantee black South Africans the right to choose their leaders.

"There is no hope in this country until the government talks to the real leaders," Bishop Tutu told the cheering throng after Zindzi's reading. "You have just heard one of those leaders."

Few people, aside from his family, had heard anything from or of Mandela during the first two decades of his imprisonment. Then, beginning ten months ago, the authorities relaxed visiting and other restrictions against him, permitted an interview by a British politician and allowed the conversation to be published in the South African press. "The armed struggle (with the authorities) was forced on us by the government," Mandela said in the % interview. "If they want to give it up, the ball is in their court."

Four days later, Botha told parliament that the government would be prepared to consider releasing Mandela--provided the black leader promised not to "plan, instigate or commit acts of violence for the furtherance of his political objectives." Said Botha: "It is therefore not the South African government which now stands in the way of Mr. Mandela's freedom. It is himself."

After receiving Mandela's rejection last week, Botha closed the door on the issue. "My government's and my attitude on this matter flows on the one hand from a concern for men who have spent a long time in prison," he said. "On the other hand, we cannot order their release if they remain committed to violence, sabotage and terrorism." Critics questioned Botha's motives, suggesting that he had acted to get into the open the issue of the A.N.C.'s advocacy of violent change. Asked the Rand Daily Mail: "Was it a ploy, couched in such terms that Mandela had little choice but to reject it?"

The Mandela question aside, the South African government appears to be intent on some easing of restrictions against the country's 27 million nonwhites. Forced resettlement of black communities from "white" land to black homeland areas is to be halted, and central business districts in many white towns are to be opened to all racial groups. Last week the government agreed even to investigate, for possible repeal, two of the pillars of apartheid: the sets of laws forbidding mixed-race marriages and sexual relations across racial lines.

If such liberalizing measures are welcome steps away from apartheid, they are clearly insufficient for Mandela, who cried rhetorically from his cell last week, "What freedom am I being offered when I must ask permission to live in an urban area? What freedom am I being offered when I need a stamp in my pass to seek work?"