NELSON MANDELA & F.W. DE KLERK

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achieved through negotiations his vision of a nonracial, majority-ruled South Africa. But to ensure success, Mandela was compelled to forgive conduct toward himself and all South African blacks that his own moral code tells him is unforgivable. That he bowed to such compromise is testimony to the fact that the Nelson Mandela who walked with such dignity out of prison in February 1990 was not the same firebrand who had been placed there 27 years before. Born into the royal family of the Thembu, a clan of the Xhosa tribe based in the Transkei, Mandela was trained as a boy to rule someday as a chief. Instead he became a lawyer and an A.N.C. militant. It was just a few months after then A.N.C. leader Chief Albert Luthuli was awarded the 1960 Nobel Peace Prize that Mandela urged the party leadership to take up arms. Committed to nonviolence, Luthuli was deeply ambivalent about the proposition. . Mandela remembers Luthuli finally telling him, ''We are going to keep to nonviolence, but we give you permission to go and start the organization to embark on armed actions. You will report to us from time to time on the progress you're making, with the understanding that the organization as such is not going to be involved.'' As a founder of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the A.N.C., the young Mandela participated in acts of violence. But the attempt to maintain the fiction that the A.N.C. was uninvolved was quixotic. The government had already banned the organization in 1960; by 1962 Mandela was under arrest, and two years later he was sentenced to life imprisonment for sabotage. Several interesting changes occurred during Mandela's long, long incarceration. For one thing, his enforced isolation slowly transformed him into a mythic figure. Incommunicado, without the opportunity to speak out on specific issues, Mandela in his silence became South Africa's most persuasive presence: an inspiration to blacks, a recrimination to whites. What is more, he sensed the moral power his confinement had conferred. Mandela had always been willing to talk; violence was his recourse when the other side would not listen. One day in 1986 he sat down and wrote a letter to the government proposing a dialogue on the nation's future. This gesture received a secret but surprisingly willing response from President P.W. Botha, a hard-liner on apartheid who nonetheless had begun to sense his country's escalating dilemma. Apartheid was collapsing of its own inherent absurdity. Moreover, the outlawed A.N.C.'s 1984 call to make South Africa ''ungovernable'' had been answered by a surge of black demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience. To put down such unrest, the government had to use increasingly brutal police and military actions, many of them filmed by news cameras and televised to appalled viewers around the globe. These ugly spectacles increased international pressure for economic sanctions against South Africa. Whites saw their nation becoming an international pariah. Realizing he needed Mandela, Botha arranged a meeting with him at the presidential residence, Tuynhuys, in Cape Town in July 1989 -- Mandela had been slipped out of prison for the purpose. The two issued a joint communique committing themselves, in general terms, to peace. A month later, Botha, whose authoritarian style had impeded real progress, was nudged out of office by party leaders. Though he was no one's idea of a revolutionary, De Klerk had carefully watched Botha's struggles to