Mandela Drinks A Symbolic Cup Of Coffee -- S. African Leader Visits Verwoerd's Widow

ORANIA, South Africa - President Nelson Mandela dropped in for coffee today with the widow of the man who virtually invented white rule.

It was one of the stranger sights in post-apartheid South Africa.

Orania is no leafy suburb where Afrikaner ladies like diminutive Betsie Verwoerd, 94, typically live. This spartan desert settlement amounts to an Afrikaner kibbutz inhabited by 460 whites.

Mandela's visit to the heartland of white Afrikaner territory was part of his efforts to unite all of South Africa's citizens into one country. The Afrikaners have another goal - to show that a separate homeland for whites was a positive step in South Africa's political development.

Most South African whites have grown to admire their reconciliation-minded president, but today's welcome here was muted at best.

Only about 20 schoolchildren and a dozen adults, including the town's elders, turned out alongside Mrs. Verwoerd to watch Mandela's helicopter land in the swirling dust. Other townsfolk stayed home or tended their fields during his two-hour visit.

"We wish he was the president of a neighboring country," explained Elizabeth van der Berg, a granddaughter of Mrs. Verwoerd.

Her 16-year-old son, Gabriel, struggling with English, described the visit as "important for people to see Orania isn't racist."

Orania's claim to fame is a half-size statue of Hendrik Verwoerd, which stares down over the town's pre-fab housing from a small bluff.

The taciturn man, assassinated by a demented parliamentary page in 1966, turned white minority rule into a science that included separate "homelands" for the black majority that made them foreigners in their own country.

Verwoerd, prime minister of South Africa from 1958 to 1966, sent Mandela to prison for life in 1964 as punishment for fighting for a country where whites and blacks would live together peacefully.

Mrs. Verwoerd and Mandela shared a cup of coffee and a few cakes in private at the town community hall, then emerged for the benefit of the journalists. Mandela steadied the widow and helped her read a speech in Afrikaans as she leaned on her cane.

"I identify myself with the wishes of my people for a volkstaat, which I believe could be developed in this part of the country," she said, according to an English translation of her speech.

But Mandela said: "I want a united South Africa, where we can cease to think in terms of color."