For once the man many south Africans believe could one day lead the country is stumped for a reply. The questioner is Cecil calling from Meadowlands: "I live next to a gold-mine waste dump," he says. "All day the mine dust blows through my house. What are you going to do about that?" Under the earphones in Johannesburg's Radio 702 studios, Mosima Gabriel Tokyo Sexwale, who grew up by the yellow mine-dumps himself, grins. "I don't have an answer to that one," he admits. "I'm not God, I can't fix everything,'' he says, off air. "But listening and reacting to the problems is important. This is a personal thing between me and the people."

Sexwale is the premier of South Africa's richest province, once known as PWV for Pretoria, Witwatersrand and Vereeniging and now called Gauteng, meaning Place of Gold. His fortnightly, hour-long radio show Talk to Tokyo is such a hit that the velvet-voiced politician is already under fire--from opponents who accuse him of grabbing airtime for the African National Congress and from journalists who claim his bias toward radio is unfair to the rest of the media. The handsome premier--42 and once voted the country's sexiest public figure by Gauteng's predominantly white suburban matrons--is unperturbed by the protests. "Why shouldn't I talk to ordinary folk without journalists to filter the questions?" he replies. "These are people whose problems are the price of bread, mine-dust in their houses and holes in their roof. You don't get that sort of thing at press conferences."

Soweto-born and-raised--his father was a clerk at Johannesburg's General hospital--Sexwale grew up amid the turmoil of the black township upheavals. He was eight when he heard the explosions at a nearby post office of the first bombs in the A.N.C.'s guerrilla anti-apartheid campaign. He was 11 when his hero Nelson Mandela, commander of the A.N.C.'s Spear of the Nation, was sentenced to life imprisonment. He joined Steve Biko's black-consciousness movement and became a local leader of the radical South African Students Movement. At 18 he was in the outlawed A.N.C. underground, and six years later, as a hardened combatant, he faced the death penalty in a South African court.

Even then, spectators and lawyers who sat in on the trial were impressed by the maturity and confidence displayed by the young man known as Tokyo because of his keenness for the fighting science and self-discipline of karate. "He sat there like a rock, but he could still smile," recalls one veteran civil rights lawyer. And when he smiled, the entire courtroom lit up." After a retrial, Sexwale was sentenced to 18 years' hard labor on Robben Island, where Mandela was held. There Sexwale soon established himself as a leader and was instrumental in getting permission from authorities to form a "general recreational committee," which later became a front for the political debate inmates had been denied for years. To Sexwale, Robben Island was, ironically, a release: "I should have been sentenced to death. When they said 18 years I said, 'My God, I am free.'" It will always be "a place of memories: memories of fighters, soldiers, politicians, of people who could transform misery into an advantage, a prison into a university, prison warders into brothers."

Sexwale's personality made an impression beyond the warders and officials of Robben Island as well. In 1987, as the government began to ease restrictions at the prison, Judy Moon, a young, white legal secretary with a Cape Town law firm, was able to help some of the prisoners, including eventually Sexwale, re-establish contacts with the outside. "He was very powerful and in control," she recalls. Tokyo began writing personal notes and poetry to her. And in February 1993, three years after he was freed from Robben Island, they got married.

By this time Sexwale was chairman of the A.N.C. in the all-important PWV region, and last year he was President Mandela's natural choice to become the province's premier, an office to which he has brought his own personal traits of straight talking, open-handedness and friendly charisma. Though outside of national parliamentary politics, he is probably the A.N.C.'s greatest asset. Says a senior A.N.C. source in Soweto: "We see Sexwale as the man most likely to become another Mandela."

In a nation that hardly dares to contemplate its future after the passing of the great man--whenever that may be--Sexwale's credentials are very much in order: son of Soweto, freedom fighter, Robben Islander and, with a white wife and two cafe-au-lait children, a family man who is a living symbol of South Africa's rainbow nation. "I know the needs of the family. And I'm a black man married to a white woman--I know what racism is all about," says Sexwale. "I have no hang-ups about talking to the people about their concerns, their grievances, their aspirations. What they want is for someone to listen to them and to promise some action where it's needed." What about the possibility that he may one day head the government in South Africa? Once again a rare moment when he is stumped for a reply. "Ask me another," chuckles Tokyo.