inside and outside South Africa, met to transform a once secret, illegal
movement into a mass political party with a broader and more democratic
management. Since Oliver Tambo, who had held the ANC together during
the later apartheid years, was not a candidate (he had had a stroke and
died in 1993), there was no possible rival to Mandela; the delegates
elected him president, although many of them still had reservations. For
secretary-general they rejected Alfred Nzo, Mandela's candidate and a se-
nior member of the ANC in exile, in favor of Cyril Ramaphosa, who had
built COSATU into a powerful opponent of apartheid and had become a
conspicuous leader of the United Democratic Front. They also elected a
sixty-six-member National Executive Committee (NEC), which included
numerous men and women who had been active in the UDP and were vir-
tually unknown to the formerly imprisoned or exiled members. Thereafter
Mandela was the unchallenged head of the ANC, but he had to be careful
to work in cooperation with the NEC. 34
Meanwhile, as the violence escalated in KwaZulu and the Witwater-
srand townships, relations between Mandela, de Klerk, and Buthelezi de-
generated. On September 14, 1991, concerned South African church,