London. -- Even Winnie Mandela deserves pity, but that's not why the South African Supreme Court reduced her five-year jail sentence for kidnapping to a modest fine last month. It was mainly to avoid causing worse distress to her estranged husband, African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela.
Nobody really doubts that Winnie Mandela was guilty not just of kidnapping four innocent black youths in 1988, but also of murder. (Her chief bodyguard, Jerry Richardson, was convicted of murdering one of the four, Stompie Seipei, almost certainly on her orders). But Nelson Mandela has to stay alive for at least four or five more years, so don't burden him with further misery.
Why four or five more years? First, Mr. Mandela must survive until next April 27, when South Africa will hold its first fully democratic, non-racial election. This election is meant to perpetuate the fragile but vital alliance between the African National Congress and the formerly all-white party that invented apartheid, President F.W. de Klerk's National Party. It is intended to produce a coalition government, with Mr. Mandela at its head, that has both black and white support during the transition process.
But few white voters will buy the idea of a coalition government unless Mr. Mandela, the only black politician most of them trust, is firmly in charge of the ANC. And Mr. Mandela will be even more indispensable after the election -- to keep impatient blacks from wrecking the deal.
The coalition government is scheduled to run until 1999, when there will be winner-take-all elections. If South Africa should get that far without a fatal rupture of public order, it will probably be home and dry. But there is a great crisis it has to pass on the way.
Two or three years after the election, when it has finally become clear to everybody that the end of white minority rule cannot instantly eradicate black poverty, black radicals will begin to incite revolt against those who made the deal.
Most revolutions go through this phase where the moderate leadership, having made a deal and gained power, has to use force to contain the extremists who reject any compromise. And that will require an ANC leader with the credibility to use the state's security forces against other blacks.
Chris Hani is dead, and Joe Slovo is dying. Cyril Ramaphosa is a fine negotiator, but hardly a charismatic figure. The only ANC leader who can be counted on to give the order to shoot some of the more violent rebels and put the rest in detention, when the crisis comes, is Nelson Mandela.
