PORTRAIT OF A MARRIAGE

Their partnership became a symbol of hope in apartheid South Africa. Now forgotten transcripts reveal the truth about Nelson and Winnie Mandelas relationship - and the betrayals that tore it apart

- JONNY STEINBERG

The results of the audit were shocking to its authors. A block of flats in the East End of London had been christened Mandela Heights, they discovered; a room in an art gallery in Glasgow was named the Mandela Room; he had been given the freedom of the city of Rome and of the town of Olympia in Greece; a high school in the village of Ilmenau, West Germany, had been named after him; 20000 well-wishers in the German Democratic Republic had sent him postcards, as had thousands of people in Sri Lanka.

What accounts for this near-universal love? His face, after all, was unseen, his voice unheard.

A large part of the answer was his wife.

When her husband was jailed for life in 1964, Winnie Mandela (then 28), was left a single mother of two small girls. She was also astonishingly beautiful. In those unashamedly chauvinistic times, the titillation of the male journalists who wrote about her in the black South African press was scarcely concealed.

She was young and gorgeous, it was said, and who knows when her husband would return. Would she really wait for him, like Penelope waited all those years for Odysseus? Then again, what man was bold enough to cuckold black SA's most famous son?

As the years passed, her public profile grew considerably more serious as she turned out to be a substantial political figure in her own right - and amazingly brave.

In 1969 she was arrested, tortured and placed in solitary confinement for more than a year for attempting to build an underground network of the banned African National Congress (ANC).

And in 1976, when Soweto's schoolchildren revolted en masse against their inferior education, she was on the frontline, side by side with the rebelling children.