EXCLUSIVE: SPENDING A DAY WITH PRESIDENT MANDELA

Nelson Mandela has arrived at an estate in the wine country outside Cape Town where he will dine and speak on economic reconstruction to 75 mostly white businessmen and bankers. He receives a standing ovation. Politely acknowledging the applause, he samples a glass of sweet Weisser Riesling 1993 and jokes about his lack of vinous sophistication. During his last days in prison, he says, he was permitted to have visitors for relatively luxurious meals, and his warder once told him the best wines were dry. "I thought every wine was wet," Mandela says now with a laugh. Not long ago, some of the businessmen might have regarded their speaker as a dangerous revolutionary, but now they laugh too.

Graceful, charming, deliberate, Nelson Mandela is the sun whose gravity holds the disparate elements of South African society in peaceful orbit. As his country prepares to celebrate the anniversary of its first democratic elections, he permits Time the exclusive opportunity to spend a day with him.

It begins in Qunu, the Xhosa village where Mandela grew up and where he has been vacationing for the past week. Fog and rain blanket the Transkei hills, so the President must forgo his usual daily morning walk. At 5 a.m. he heads for the airport, where his jet waits to fly him 400 miles north to Pretoria, South Africa's administrative capital.

The President arrives at his office on the first floor of the Union Buildings earlier than most of his staff. A little after 7 a.m., Mary Mxadana, the secretary whom Mandela refers to as "my boss," brings in newspapers and a stack of correspondence (among the letters is a handwritten note from Queen Elizabeth II thanking Mandela for hosting a royal visit the previous month). Mandela reads five papers each morning, with obvious enjoyment and unflappable absorption. Finishing an article, he executes an unhurried turn of the page followed by a crisp fold and a snap.

At 8 he meets with Jay Naidoo, the Cabinet Minister in charge of the Reconstruction and Development Program, the government's ambitious effort to improve the lives of the nation's impoverished black majority. Naidoo reports progress-196,000 new houses are in the pipeline-but he acknowledges that results have been slow. Mandela repeatedly demonstrates his grasp of practical details. For example, he advises Naidoo to look into a low-cost housing scheme emphasizing self-reliance that he recently observed in Namibia.

Later, while Mandela is being interviewed by Khulu Sibiya, a prominent black journalist, a phone call comes in from former President P.W. Botha. The last of the country's hard-line Afrikaner leaders, Botha for years refused to release Mandela from jail. He is famous for his bullying manner, and before taking the call, Mandela jokes, "Fortunately, I am quite a distance away, so he won't wag a finger at me." On the line, Mandela is respectful and speaks to Botha in Afrikaans. The conversation is off the record. After hanging up, Mandela calls his two junior partners in the government of national unity, Botha's successor, F.W. de Klerk, and Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, leader of the Inkatha Freedom Party, and solicits their opinions on Botha's views.