Africa’s Conscience Winnie Madikizela-Mandela Stands Accused Of Bloody Reign.

The Mother of the Nation, as Winnie Madikizela-Mandela was known during the anti-apartheid struggle, has been recast as the mother of calamity as South Africans scrutinize the dark side of their country’s extolled rebirth.

Public hearings into the criminal activities of the Mandela United Football Club, a notorious gang of renegade youths led by Madikizela-Mandela during the tumultuous 1980s, continued Wednesday with the testimony of Jerry Richardson, the club’s “coach” and chief killer.

An enigmatic and bizarre figure with an intelligence level that his lawyer said was extremely low, Richardson, 48 and a convicted murderer, was the last of three dozen witnesses to testify before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Madikizela-Mandela, the former wife of President Nelson Mandela, speaks for herself today. Her testimony will mark the climax of a so-far inconclusive examination of how her bodyguards became the font of murderous mayhem in the black township of Soweto in the 1980s and whether she took part.

An icon of the fight against apartheid, Madikizela-Mandela was jailed and tortured several times while her husband was serving 27 years’ imprisonment. Nelson Mandela was released from prison in 1990, the couple separated in 1992, he was elected president in 1994, and they divorced last year.

The truth commission was established shortly after South Africa’s transition to nonracial democracy to uncover abuses committed under apartheid. While most hearings have focused on misdeeds by the white security forces, the commission is now probing killings associated with the woman who nearly was the nation’s first lady.

Richardson, whose credibility was undercut by his admission that he was also working as a police informer for the apartheid government, said Madikizela-Mandela - whom he referred to as “Mami” - ordered five killings that her bodyguards carried out. All the victims were killed because they had been labeled as informers - if only for not following Madikizela-Mandela’s orders properly, he said.

“I killed under the instructions of Mami,” he said. “Mami never killed anyone, but she used us to kill a lot of people.”

Richardson’s testimony refuted that of the only other former bodyguard to accuse Madikizela-Mandela of murder. Katiza Cebekhulu, another police spy within the club’s ranks, testified last week that he saw a figure he believed to be Madikizela-Mandela stabbing Moeketsi “Stompie” Seipei in the neck. Seipei, 14, was abducted along with three other youths in December 1988 and killed in January 1989 after being beaten nearly to death at Madikizela-Mandela’s home. She was convicted in 1991 for the boy’s kidnapping.

But unlike the repeated humiliations she endured during the apartheid years, this time Madikizela-Mandela’s accusers are not the plotting agents of a racist regime. For the most part, the tales of her undoing are coming from within the ranks of the African National Congress - the same people who stood by her during the darkest days of apartheid, when she gained an international reputation as the brave defender of the oppressed.

“As I sit here, I am deeply conflicted,” said Azhar Cachalia, an anti-apartheid activist and longtime friend who is now a high-ranking government official. “There is a part of me which wants to, in a sense, go over and hug you and say, ‘Let’s walk away from all of this, because it is a bit of a bad nightmare.’ But there is another part which says we can’t go forward unless there is some level of accountability.”

But the allegations are coming during an unprecedented public gathering in the Johannesburg community center that has brought shackled convicts and smartly dressed government officials to the same wooden platform splashed in the sweltering Klieg lights of television cameras from across the world.

Although some witnesses have waffled and others have chosen their words delicately, their common pursuit has been difficult to disguise: public exoneration for themselves and public rebuke for Madikizela-Mandela.

“My hands are not dripping with the blood of African children,” said Xoliswa Falati, a former Mandela neighbor who was convicted in the assault and kidnapping of Seipei but who now says she lied to protect Madikizela-Mandela.

Yet as truth commission investigators try to reconstruct Madikizela-Mandela’s activities in the late 1980s, it has become plain that responsibility for the alleged criminal happenings does not fall solely at the doorstep of her Soweto home.

Prominent anti-apartheid activists, including several who now hold top positions in the ANC and the South African government, have squirmed when asked why they did so little to rein in the wife of Nelson Mandela when the country was rife with rumors of her criminal doings.

Witness after witness came up short of an explanation.

“It is difficult seven or eight years later to actually appreciate the conditions under which people worked at that time,” said Frank Chikane, special adviser to South African Vice President Thabo Mbeki. “We did whatever we could do at that stage to save lives, to avoid further lives being lost. There were difficulties in doing that.”