South Africa: The Black Pimpernel

For more than 15 months, top man on the South African police wanted list has been a black underground leader named Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela. Son of the paramount chief of the Tembu tribe,

Lawyer Mandela, 44, was sought by the white cops for helping to organize the mass work stoppage by Africans in May 1961 to protest apartheid and the proclamation of South Africa as a republic.

Special Branch (political) police searched for him everywhere, regularly swooped on his dowdy little home in Orlando township, searched bus stations and railway terminals. But towering (6 ft. 2 in., 245 Ibs.), affable Nelson Mandela sped from one hideout to another. Often he telephoned newspapers with defiant statements against the government; once he even gave a television interview to the BBC. Last February he traveled to a Pan-African congress in Addis Ababa and returned unnoticed.

Mandela became a disguise artist: dressed as a garage worker, he once wheeled a spare tire down the main street of Johannesburg under the nose of the cops. On another occasion, when he wanted to retrieve some documents from his Johannesburg office, Mandela dressed himself as a Zulu janitor in the traditional blue jumper and shorts, stuck huge earrings through his ear lobes, grabbed a broom and walked through the police cordon outside his office. Once inside, he tucked the papers under his shirt and calmly walked out.

Last week, on the Durban-Johannesburg highway, Nelson Mandela’s car was stopped by a police roadblock. Acting on an informer’s tip, the cops had finally got their man.