(2 of 7)
Despite its resemblance to a superstar tour, Mandela's visit to the U.S. has a deeply serious purpose. His objective is to shore up the A.N.C.'s negotiating position as it enters into talks with South African President F.W. de Klerk about the shape of a new constitution that would for the first time enfranchise the 26 million blacks who represent 68% of South Africa's population. Mandela is seeking assurances that the U.S. will not prematurely loosen the economic sanctions it imposed on Pretoria in 1986. He is also looking for "money in buckets" to help the A.N.C., unbanned in February for the first time in 29 years, change from a militant underground force to an aboveground political organization.
But just as Mandela is seeking something from Americans, Americans are seeking something from him. Politicians hurry to pose with him, community leaders draw inspiration -- and status -- from his proximity, longtime antiapartheid activists take satisfaction from the mere sight of him. For a sometimes dispirited American civil rights coalition, Mandela provides, as he has before, a rallying point and common cause. For the many blacks who have begun to call themselves African Americans, he is a flesh-and-blood exemplar of what an African can be. For Americans of all colors, weary of their nation's perennial racial standoffs, his visit offers the opportunity for a full-throated expression of their no less perennial hope for reconciliation.
If Mandela can serve all those purposes, it is partly because for so long he remained an unknown quantity. Emerging from the enforced silence of a prison cell, he arrived in the U.S. more as a symbol of courage and hope than as a politician with well-known positions. Even when his positions were unequivocally stated, they were sometimes overlooked last week. New York Mayor David Dinkins could hail his guest as "a man of peace," a title that acknowledges Mandela's exemplary lack of bitterness toward his former captors, while sidestepping his refusal to disown violence as a means of effecting political change in South Africa.
Mandela heartened Americans by emphasizing that he envisioned a multiracial future for his country, with full respect for the rights of the white minority. He promised potential investors that their ventures would be welcome in a South Africa in which everyone, regardless of race, had the vote. Nonetheless, some of his remarks inevitably drew him into the maelstrom of U.S. politics.
Even before he arrived in New York, there were rumblings among American Jews about Mandela's praise for the Palestine Liberation Organization. He has met with Yasser Arafat three times since his release from prison in February. Much of that concern had been put to rest -- or at least diplomatically laid aside -- after a June 10 meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, at which Mandela assured a contingent of American Jewish leaders that he supported Israel's right to exist within secure borders. There was no such comfort for Cuban Americans in Miami, where Mandela is scheduled to arrive on Wednesday. They are threatening to stage demonstrations against Mandela's expressions of gratitude for Fidel Castro's support during Mandela's years of imprisonment.