ALTHOUGH it was six years ago, I can still remember that balmy afternoon with an almost disturbing vividness. Friends had gathered on the lawn of the little council house to welcome the great man home. A table was being prepared for the guests in the shade of a tree. I could hear glasses clinking and plates being set down as I sat on the brown leatherette couch in the tiny front room.
Seated to my right in a stylish blue suit was Nelson Mandela. He was telling me: about his experiences in the course of his 27 years' imprisonment, which had just ended. The most overpowering impression was the dignity which exuded from the man; a sense of importance and duty which had been impressed upon him since his youth as a member of a princely family of the Xhosa nation.
There was no bitterness, no sense of betrayal. He spoke in perfectly rounded sentences, his lawyer's training seeing to it that no loose ends were left untied. I felt I was talking to a very sober man, a man of probity, a person who, despite his revolutionary past, could be described as a "conservative" with a small C.
As I left the little house in Soweto, the garden had begun to fill up with representatives of South Africa's multi racial patchwork: staidly dressed white couples with the bearing of the professional classes, Indian women in saris, and in the middle of it all was Winnie in a dress of riotous colours. Everything in the garden fitted in with the happiness of the occasion. The Mandela daughters, Zindzi and Zenani, acted as joint hostesses at a garden party with impeccably colonial suburban values, save for the presence of a small grandchild who had been christened Gadafy.
ON leaving the Orlando district I spotted the modern mansion that Winnie had built during Mr Mandela's absence in on. Later I met a white woman who knew the Mandelas; she was wearing an expensive gold ring given to her by the woman who was then known as the "mother of the nation "Winnie", she told me, "gets presents from people and immediately gives them away to other people. She is an impulsive person.
The next time I saw Nelson and Winnie Mandela together, the situation was different. In the garden of the South African administrator's residence in the puppet state of Bophuthatswana we had gathered for a photo call. Rioting, the intervention of the Afrikaner Weerbestandweging (AWB), the shooting of three khaki clad racists, who had earlier shot people standing in the gardens of their own houses in Mmabatho, and the collapse of the regime of Lucas Manyane Mangope had given the previous days an air of excitement mixed with terror.
The rule of the house of Mangope had ended Mr Mandela had arrived in triumph. We had sped with him to Mafikeng (the former Mafeking where Baden Powell held out under siege in the Boer war) and to Mmabatho in a hurtling cavalcade, with our Tswana guide excitedly urging us to "cover the convoy, cover the convoy, or we will lose the old man." Along the route the people massed in their thousands.
In the administrator's garden it was quieter. The two men, the Xhosa prince and the Afrikaner civil servant, tidied their business suits for the photography session. Then a completely unplanned event took place. Winnie Mandela arrived, dressed as colourfully as usual. She placed herself to the left of the administrator, who suddenly found himself standing between the two Mandelas.
The administrator wore a startled look. Winnie Mandela beamed. Nelson Mandela looked sadly downward, lifted his head briefly, and looked down at his sparkling black shoes again. Not a word, not as much as a glance, was exchanged between the man and woman who had been married nearly four decades previously.
MUCH has happened in the six years between the homecoming party and Mandela's appearance before the Rand Supreme Court in Johannesburg, where he applied for a divorce this week.
Ms Mandela had been sentenced to six years in prison, commuted to a fine, for involvement in the kidnapping of 14 year old Stompie Moketse Seipei, who was murdered by one of her bodyguards; and that, said Mr Mandela's lawyer, had been the main cause of the "slight tension" between the couple.
There were stories of brutality and infidelity mitigated at least to some extent by the suffering, harassment and even torture she had undergone while her husband was locked away on Robben Island.
Winnie Mandela lives in that Soweto mansion now and, though the council house remains, Nelson Mandela has his official residence in the Dutch Colonial Tuynhuis, its whitewashed elegance set in the greenery of central Cape Town.
It is probably unprecedented for a President to bare his innermost thoughts before a divorce court: "Ever since I came back from prison, not once has the defendant entered our bedroom while I was awake. There were so many things I wanted to discuss with her, but she is the type of person who fears confrontation. I was the loneliest man during the period I stayed with her."
While I, and I am sure many others, felt real sadness at a 77 year old man of enormous dignity uttering such heartbreaking words, it is worth remembering there are people in this country prepared to denounce Mr Mandela, others who share his plight and those who voted for divorce in our referendum as "wife swapping sodomites".
What seems eminently possible is that the divorce cases coming before our courts will bear a greater resemblance to the pain and anguish exposed in the Mandela case, than to the images of irresponsibility and fecklessness painted by some of our anti divorce lobbyists. {CORRECTION} 96031900169