Will the real Winnie Mandela please stand down

For every challenge she presents a different face, says John Carlin. But behind the carefully painted layers, the truth about Winnie Mandela just gets uglier.

Take your pick. Brave Winnie, bad Winnie. Pensive Winnie, scheming Winnie. Doting wife Winnie, dissembling cuckolder Winnie. Thoroughly modern Winnie, corrupt mamma Winnie. The African National Congress, having sat on the fence for far too long, has finally chosen. In a blistering attack in a Johannesburg newspaper yesterday, an article signed by Steve Tshwete, the Minister for Sport, described Winnie Mandela as a paranoid, self-serving, treacherous charlatan. No one is in any doubt that Mr Tshwete was expressing the hitherto-repressed views of the leadership of Nelson Mandela's government.

So at last it's official. The Mother of the Nation is, after all, the Mugger of the Nation. Winnie, as a celebrated South African newspaper headline once put it, is in the Pooh. For no longer can she paint her detractors to be "elements of the white liberal press" working hand-in- glove with sinister agents of the old apartheid regime. The empress's clothes have been removed and the dirty secret that festered in the bosom of the world's most illustrious liberation movement has been exposed for all the world to see.

The organisers of last month's Million Woman March in Philadelphia, a celebration of black American women's devotion to family values and social responsibility, may now feel a pang of retrospective shame at their decision to honour Mrs Mandela with an invitation to be their keynote speaker. They and the rest of her admirers abroad, those who have wanted to believe that the real Winnie is the female Martin Luther King/Joan of Arc figure she has so diligently sought to portray, will not be inviting her again any time soon.

Yet to have kept the myth alive, to have fooled so many people for so much of the time, has required a certain genius, however tinged with evil and madness. There is method in her multiple personality disorder. It is the method of those biologically-refined political animals - whether benign or malignant, whether Tony Blair or Mobutu Sese Seko - whose every nerve-ending is tuned for the pursuit and retention of power.

In the days leading up to her husband's release from prison she played the part of the quivering virgin, seeming to contemplate with trepidation and delight a consummation that - like Ulysses' Penelope - she had so devoutly and patiently been awaiting. Once he was out, she acted for the photographers the role of the simpering, adoring spouse. The terrible truth had to wait six years until Nelson Mandela's poignant testimony at the couple's divorce trial. "Ever since I came back from jail, not once has the defendant ever entered the bedroom whilst I was awake."

All the while, in fact, she had been having an affair with a toy-boy lawyer half her age, but she kept up the public lie not out of any delicacy of feeling for the old man but because she knew it would be to her political advantage.

The secret of her political survival since the marital break-up is her amazing brazenness, explicable only in terms of this idea of Winnie as political animal driven by uncontrollable instinct, combined with a rare talent for populist manipulation. She knows what faces to prepare for the faces that she meets; she fits her language, her style of dress, her varied collection of wigs to meet the expectations of each crowd.

In her latest incarnation as Queen of the Poor, Evita to those sectors of society most susceptible to her rhetorical fraudulence, she had built a political platform for what seemed like her frighteningly plausible bid for the South African deputy presidency.

By acting now, the ANC leadership hope they have banished the possibility that one day Mrs Mandela could be a heartbeat away from becoming yet another all-powerful monster on the African political scene. But don't rule her out. Right now she is, once again, repainting her face, rewriting her script.