Into the Inkatha heartland

Thabo Mbeki is tipped to be South Africa's next president and this week he entered enemy territory, says Pat Reber, in Durban Thousands of chanting, singing ANC supporters poured into a stadium to hear South Africa's likely next president, Thabo Mbeki, speak at a major election rally yesterday in this Indian Ocean port.

Mbeki, leader of the African National Congress and Nelson Mandela's deputy president, was entering one-time enemy territory. The choice of KwaZulu-Natal for a major end-of-campaign appearance signaled the African National Congress' intention to snatch provincial power from the Zulu nationalist Inkatha Freedom Party in Wednesday's election.

Many in the crowd wore white T-shirts with Mbeki's picture. "If it were legal to vote more than once, I'd vote 10 times because the ANC is the only organization with a vision of shaping this country," said Mthokozisi Gasa, 23. Thabo Mbeki was groomed from an early age to take over leadership of the African National Congress and - ultimately - the nation. An urbane intellectual who spent much of his adult life in exile, Mbeki is lauded by admirers as committed to improving South Africa, and painted by critics as a manipulator overly sensitive to criticism. He was born June 18, 1942, in the rolling grasslands of eastern South Africa, where his father was a key ANC activist and his mother a shopkeeper. Mbeki decided early he wanted to fight for the rights of the country's black majority. When he was about 10, he recycled soft-drink bottles to raise his ANC membership fee, but was told to return when he was older. He was back four years later. At age 18, he moved to Soweto, the black township near Johannesburg, to attend college - and live with a top ANC official. From that point, the ANC became Mbeki's surrogate family. Shortly after he enrolled at the University of Sussex, his father, Govan, was arrested with Nelson Mandela and sentenced to life in prison. Considered by some colleagues as insufficiently radical, Mbeki went off to the Soviet Union for military training. By the mid-1980s, while many ANC activists advocated revolution against the apartheid state, Mbeki - then the top aide to ANC President Oliver Tambo - wanted dialogue. He led an ANC delegation in 1987 at secret, informal talks with white South Africans about the future of their nation - talks that led to direct negotiations and the 1994 elections that ended apartheid. He became Mandela's vice president and in recent years has assumed much of the running of day-to-day government. With a victory in this week's election, Mbeki wants to accelerate access to utilities, health services and education for the millions of poor black South Africans. He also has warned whites that they must do more to help lift up blacks. A believer in free-market economics, Mbeki hopes to tackle 42% unemployment among blacks by encouraging business growth. The ANC attributes job losses to South Africa's entrance into the global economy and need to become more competitive. It has won praise for adopting free market economy, defying fears it would install a socialist system, but the resultant conservative social spending has alienated some of the ANC's traditional union and communist support. The opposition says the loss of 500,000 jobs and other economic problems is a result of ANC policies, and says crime and corruption is scaring away foreign investment. While conceding it has little experience in governing, and that the legacy of apartheid will take time to overcome, the ANC says it is learning, and claims to have unearthed corruption through special investigative commissions. Nationwide, they are expected to score a commanding win in the country's second democratic vote. The scrappiest contests are in two provinces that slipped its grasp in 1994 - Western Cape, where the mostly white New National Party, successor to apartheid's political rulers, has governed, and KwaZulu-Natal, the country's most populous province and the one with the bloodiest history of black-on-black violence. In the prelude to the first all-race elections in 1994, political clashes claimed more than 1000 lives a year in KwaZulu. With some exceptions, peace has gradually settled in this province - the result of co-operation by Inkatha leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi, who served as a minister in Mandela's cabinet, and of social improvements such as new housing, electricity and water. The two parties signed a peace pact earlier this month, and have tested the waters in former no-go areas by campaigning side by side. But a defeat for Inkatha could challenge the calm, and the government has assigned 23,000 police and military officers to KwaZulu to keep order, over one-quarter of a nationwide deployment through the election period.

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