About the time Nelson Mandela went to jail 27 years ago, Lenford Ganyile fled South Africa after a violent encounter that cost him all his teeth and most of an ear. A South African policeman's rifle butt knocked out his teeth, Ganyile said, and a bayonet sliced off the ear. Ganyile, 68, has been in exile since, first in Botswana and then in Zambia, where Mandela's African National Congress set up its headquarters. In February, President F.W. de Klerk of South Africa legalized the ANC and freed Mandela. ``I am waiting for Comrade Mandela to tell me what to do next,'' said Ganyile, a respected elder on the ANC's 7,200-acre Chongela collective farm in Zambia's fertile Ngwerere district, 25 miles north of Lusaka. Although he is eager to go home, Ganyile has difficulty remembering the wife and three children he left behind. ``In the early years, I sent them letters but had no reply,'' he said. ``I was afraid they would get into trouble, so I stopped writing.'' Occasionally, he heard news of his wife from newly arrived exiles. Then he lost all contact. ``The struggle became my family,'' Ganyile said. ``I saw my ear was not there and it reminded me always that I wanted all our people to be free.'' He is one of thousands of South African exiles scattered through the world whose lives were transformed by the lifting of a 30-year ban on the African National Congress and Mandela's release Feb. 12. The ANC has said most of its exiles probably would be home by the end of 1990. ``It is a dream to me,'' said Ganyile, a veteran of the Pondo rebellion of the late 1950s, when scores of blacks were killed in riots against South Africa's official apartheid policy of race segregation. Ganyile, who spent 20 months in jail, said he was arrested for leading ANC protesters in the Pondoland region near Mandela's home in Transkei. ``We were fighting one of the worst devils on earth, the Bantu Authorities Act'' and its discriminatory laws, he said. After fleeing South Africa, Ganyile used his farming experience to teach other exiles. He is on the Chongela farm's management committee. Farm manager Leslie Ponusamy said the property, three adjoining farms owned by whites before independence from Britain in 1964, feeds about three-quarters of the 2,000 ANC members who live in Zambia. Vegetables and maize grow on the farm, and the residents raise cattle, sheep, pigs and ducks. ``We don't produce everything for a balanced diet,'' said Ponusamy, a veterinarian who was a student activist in South Africa's Natal province. ``We sell the surplus of one thing to buy other things we need.'' Young exiles are sent by ANC headquarters in Lusaka to learn practical skills on the farm. Foreign donations help finance a dairy, slaughterhouse, several workshops and an auto repair shop. ``Most of our young people interrupted their educations when they left South Africa,'' Ponusamy said. Dan Twala, 22, said he fled after being assaulted by police in 1987, during a disturbance in a black township. ``I came to join the struggle,'' he said. ``Now all I want to do is to go back to see the family.'' What will happen to the farm when everyone returns home? ``Perhaps we will give it to the Zambian government,'' Ponusamy said. ``When we no longer need it, we will leave it as a momument, some sort of remembrance, to our struggle.''
