S. Africa Campaign Busts Wide Open : Politics: Nelson Mandela and supporters rally to celebrate freedom. President De Klerk’s party takes credit for it.

PAARL, South Africa —  The campaign for this nation’s future, largely a political fight over who gets the credit for ending the bitter apartheid past, erupted into a free-for-all Wednesday, the fourth anniversary of the day President Frederik W. de Klerk legalized Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress and 35 other opposition groups.

Here in the Western Cape wine country, Mandela and scores of other former political prisoners sought to grab the moral high ground by lighting a “torch of freedom,” releasing doves and laying a wreath of white flowers on coils of razor wire outside Victor Verster prison, where Mandela served the last 14 months of his 27 years in harsh incarceration.

“You have no imagination of the cruelties that are committed behind those walls,” Mandela told a sun-splashed rally of chanting, singing supporters at a jammed sports stadium in Paarl, north of Cape Town.

Two men wearing prison chains and manacles stood mutely in front of the stage under a huge banner that proclaimed “Never Again!”

The solemn scene took on a festive air, however, when the former inmates, many now balding and bulging, paraded and danced around the dusty track under college-like banners marking their alma maters: “Death Row,” “Pretoria Central,” “Robben Island” and other notorious political prisons of the apartheid years.

The audience was in no mood for anything more formal.

They surged into a block of seats reserved for dignitaries and cheerfully ignored an announcer who vainly appealed through a microphone, “Please comrades, a revolutionary call is made on you to leave that area.”

Meantime, formality was the order of the night at the National Party congress at the World Trade Center in Kempton Park, outside Johannesburg.

There, De Klerk launched his party’s campaign by seeking--uncomfortably--to infuse several thousand of his button-down followers with a little bit of political soul.

After leading several still-born chants and cheers, a black minister tried to lead the mostly white audience in three verses of “Nkosi Sikeleli i’Afrika,” or “God Bless Africa,” the haunting call-and-response Xhosa hymn that the ANC has used for years as a liberation anthem. It is sung with passion at the start of every ANC rally, with the audience holding clenched fists aloft and singing in unison.

But the National Party’s all-white, six-man band in ill-fitting tuxedos mangled the tune. And after a few tries, most delegates gave up and silently followed the unfamiliar lyrics distributed on sheets of paper and shown on giant video screens at the front of the hall.

De Klerk used his speech to claim credit for the liberation of the past and to issue a fervent call to arms against the ANC.

“The ANC would cast us back into the Dark Ages,” he warned, as the crowd politely waved tiny flags. “It is a party secretly controlled by Communists, militants and extremists.”

The ANC, he said, “lusts for power and . . . is paying no more than lip service to the rights of minorities.”

Its only political experience, he added, “has been in the politics of protest and destruction.”

For voters who missed the two events, the parties also faced off in the nation’s newspapers.

The National Party took out full-page ads in papers across the country. The ads not only claimed credit for the end of apartheid but tried to hijack Mandela’s prison ceremony as well.

“Today Mr. Nelson Mandela honors President de Klerk with a ‘Flame of Freedom,’ ” the ads read in bold type.

The fine print said De Klerk had “announced the death of apartheid and set South Africa on the road to democracy,” including releasing political prisoners, abolishing apartheid laws, negotiating a new constitution and setting the stage for elections.

In most papers, the ANC fired back with a two-page ad that was equally audacious.

A huge cartoon showed Mandela as a boxer, with a fallen figure marked “apartheid” at his feet. Outside the ring, De Klerk, wearing a white jacket and bow tie, clasped his own hands overhead in triumph, saying: “I did it! I did it!”

Beneath the cartoon, the ad warned that “the so-called ‘new National Party’ is looking remarkably similar to the old one. In their latest version of history, they are the heroes that changed South Africa. According to them, the people of this country played no part in ending apartheid oppression. . . . Next thing they’ll be telling us apartheid never existed.”

Behind the skirmishing was a day of rich political symbolism and ironies.

But it also showed how the two parties have already identified the voters they need and the issues they hope to exploit in the run-up to the country’s first democratic elections.

The voting will take place over three days; after two recent changes, it is now scheduled for April 26-28.

Despite published reports, no separate ballot is planned or likely for right-wing whites who have threatened repeatedly to launch a campaign of violence unless given the right to create a self-ruled white homeland.

Less clear, however, is whether the ANC will give in this week to growing demands by members of the Freedom Alliance, a coalition of black and white conservative leaders, for voters to be given two ballots instead of one.

Under the interim constitution, voters will mark only one ballot to show their party preference for both the national and provincial assemblies.

The Freedom Alliance, which includes Zulu Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi’s Inkatha Freedom Party, has insisted that it will boycott the elections unless voters can split the ticket and choose different parties for the different assemblies.

The ANC has argued that two ballots might be too confusing for illiterate voters and would lead to spoiled ballots.

But a growing number of business leaders, non-governmental groups and Western diplomats have urged the ANC to reconsider, saying multiple ballots have been used in several emerging democracies without ill effect.