PART OF MY SOUL WENT WITH HIM

Joining the publishing rush to works on South Africa is this collection of short pieces, statements, letters, and interviews, by or about Winnie Mandela and her famous living martyr husband, Nelson. For the past 20 years, Nelson Mandela, generally considered to be the leading spokesman for the black population of South Africa, has languished in a prison on an island off the coast of that country. His alleged crime: inciting blacks to revolt against the apartheid politics of the ruling minority white government. This collection is a wrenching memoir of a marriage still held sacred after this long separation. It is also the story of the politicization of Winnie, who learned early that Nelson did not belong to her but to his countrymen. Faced with despair over her husband's enforced exile, Winnie writes: ""How can I lose hope when I know that in truth this country is mine and that I'll get it back! I know that all this is something I must bear in order to reach that goal.""Winnie, herself, is no stranger to prison. Her first pregnancy was spent there in 1958. But these are things to which one never quite becomes accustomed. The weakness of this collection is that is depends basically upon cheer-leading, with a marked lack of practical political application. The problems of South Africa are deep--even Nelson Mandela himself says that the transition period from white to black will be the most difficult that any nation has faced. But this memoir does put a face and a comprehensible human dimension on the sufferings of a tortured nation. It's touching.