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Like a media-savvy pol -- and a single-minded revolutionary -- Mandela repeated at every opportunity his simple line that because apartheid is still alive and well, it is too soon to reward Pretoria for the reforms De Klerk has made, some of which are more cosmetic than real. Mandela can also hope to return home with several million dollars in new contributions to the A.N.C. In New York a $2,500-a-ticket fund raiser hosted by Eddie Murphy, Spike Lee and Robert De Niro aimed to raise $500,000 from a celebrity crowd that included Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward and Mike Tyson. At another gathering the same night in the Park Avenue apartment of prominent Democratic Party backers Arthur and Mathilde Krim, a crowd of well-heeled figures from the business world chipped in another $500,000.
By one measure Mandela's trip was a success before he ever set out. "This is the consolidation of the political credibility of the A.N.C.," declares the Rev. William Howard, past president of the National Council of Churches and a 20-year veteran of the antiapartheid fight in the U.S. "Four or five years ago, the very top leadership couldn't even get a meeting with the person on the Africa desk at the State Department. Now the President has invited Mandela to the White House, and everybody wants to meet with him."
But the joyous reception of Mandela was also a rite of self-congratulation for the American civil rights activists who have used the struggle in South Africa as a rallying cry. Such leaders had started to make connections with the battle against apartheid long ago. The American Committee on Africa, the first antiapartheid organization in the U.S., was created in 1953. But it was during the 1980s that civil rights activists discovered in the fight to free Mandela an effort they could throw themselves into with gusto -- and little moral ambiguity.
That discovery came at a time when the Reagan Administration treated the civil rights agenda with indifference, if not outright hostility, and the movement had become fractured over intractable disagreements about increasingly abstract concerns like affirmative action. By comparison, apartheid was an issue as clear-cut and compelling -- and televisable -- as a segregated lunch counter in Birmingham. It offered a focal point for the inchoate resentments many felt of the greed and selfishness spawned during the Reagan years.
As such, the movement to force colleges and universities to divest their holdings in companies that do business in South Africa captured the imagination of the mostly listless campus generation. "The South African issue caught on in 1985 in a way that no issue had since the 1960s," says Robert Price, a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. "We were briefly back into a period of politicization and mobilization, which we had not seen since the '70s." By now over 150 colleges, 80 cities, 26 states and 17 counties have divested their stock in companies that do business with South Africa.