FOR many years now, media reports about Mrs Winnie Mandela have been liberally sprinkled with the words "survivor" and "fighter".

Mrs Mandela has never flinched from a fight and never surrendered. She has survived terrible blows and always hit back. But that is not to say she is a good fighter, or a comfortable survivor. The truth is that Winnie always blows it, spectacularly, and through nobody's fault but her own.

It is worth remembering this week that she could have been a contender. Few people in South Africa doubt that if the 60 year old Winnie had known who to fight, and when and how, she would now be a sure bet to succeed her frail 77 year old husband as president.

Instead, she has systematically antagonised and alienated the leadership of her own African National Congress party, which now stands grimly united between her and power. The country's wealthy whites are terrified of her. The world thinks she is mad.

This week, she even forced her estranged husband, the only person in South Africa whom the black masses love more, to take the stand in a public divorce hearing he had strenuously tried to avoid.

Mr Mandela had never denounced or disowned his wife before not even in 1992 when she was implicated in fraud, adultery and murder not even last year, when he sacked her from government. But forced into the Rand Supreme Court this week, Mr Mandela told the world the reason he wanted a divorce was because his wife was an adulteress and a spendthrift, whose infidelity and brazen conduct had publicly humiliated him.

Winnie had suffered much during the freedom struggle, Mr Mandela said, but other women had suffered more. After he was released from prison she had never once entered our bedroom while I was awake". Living in her house he had been "the loneliest man" in South Africa.

It soon became clear that Winnie had no defence to the flurry of blows which she had received from her husband. Local divorce lawyers queued up to explain to journalists that she had no real business bringing the case to court.

RS Mandela was not contesting the key complaint of infidelity although it soon became clear that she would attempt to call Mr Paul Erasmus, a former apartheid spook who claimed the adultery and murder stories were linked to a government smear campaign against her.

But Judge Frikkie Eloff refused to adjourn the case so Erasmus could he called, saying Mrs Mandela's lawyers had to address themselves to the specific infidelity, alleged in Mr Mandela's petition. He also refused to postpone the case so Mrs Mandela could put in the stand a Xhosa tribal chief who, she claimed, could mediate a reconciliation.

She then attempted a pathetic ruse, sacking her lawyer in open court and asking for a postponement so she could hire a new one. Instead, the judge ordered her to present her own case.

Nelson Mandela's sadness and embarrassment were evident as he watched his wife and former comrade dithering before the world's press. She had no argument and no witnesses. It took Judge Eloff only a few words to dissolve one of the most famous marriages of the 20th century.

Winnie still had a claim on half her husband's estate worth, in her estimation, $5 million - but she blew that too, failing to turn up in court the next day. President Mandela nevertheless offered her an ex gratia payment. She responded with typical grace, announcing she was appealing the whole divorce to the South African constitutional court. Again, the experts say she has no case.

By now many people must think that Mrs Madikizela Mandela - as she now wants to be called - has become crazed. In fact, she has always been like this. Even back in the 1980s, when Winnie was the defiant and visible face of the African National Congress, her conduct was beginning to worry her political allies.

In 1986 she horrified moderate anti apartheid opinion - and the exiled leadership of the ANC - by publicly lauding the necklacing (burning to death) of "sell outs" and collaborators.

On her return to Soweto from her banishment in the Orange Free State, Mrs Mandela surrounded herself with a group of bodyguards, nicknamed "Mandela United", who quickly became known for thuggery. In 1988, she was burned out of her house by black high school pupils angered by the rape of a local girl by one of her bodyguards.

In the same year, Mrs Mandela accused a White minister working in the Orlando area of abusing local street children. Others said the minister had angered Winnie by opposing her influence in the area. Whatever the cause, members of her bodyguard abducted and assaulted four of the children, who later claimed Mrs Mandela took an active part. One of them, 14 year old Stompie Seipei, was later found beaten to death. A doctor who was a potential witness in the case was mysteriously killed.

Soweto was simmering against Winnie Mandela. The ANC leadership within South Africa quietly disowned her. Her house was turned into a fortress.

Her fortunes were dramatically restored in 1990 when a jubilant Winnie appeared by Nelson Mandela's side as he walked to freedom. The Stompie case was gathering steam, however, and in 1992 Mrs Mandela was convicted of kidnap and assault and sentenced to six years in prison.

The same year saw the publication of a letter from Mrs Mandela to the young ANC lawyer Dali Mpofu. Not only did the letter make it clear that Mrs Mandela was having an affair with Mpofu it also showed the two had taken £80,000 for their own use from ANC bank accounts. Mr Mandela who had sat by his wife throughout the trial, announced their separation "for personal reasons" a month later.

Following the revelation of embezzlement, the defiant Mrs Mandela was forced to resign her position as ANC Women's League president. But a year later when her prison sentence was reduced on appeal to a fine, she struck back and easily regained the position.

A fiery populist who appealed to urban squatters, rural peasants and tribal leaders alike, Mrs Mandela is still seen as "the mother of the nation" by many who came to know her in her days of fist clenching defiance. It was thanks to their loyalty that she won a high position on the ANC list of candidates for the historic 1994 election and was subsequently appointed junior minister of arts, science and technology.

But having survived the early scandals, Mrs Mandela proceeded to enmesh herself in new ones. In the first three months of 1995, for instance, a leasing company accused her of failing to pay for a Lear jet she had chartered for an illegal diamond buying trip to Angola.

Her bank said she was defaulting on her mortgage, and detectives raided her house in an unsuccessful attempt to prove she was demanding cash in return for influencing the award of housing contracts.

Most of the leading members of the ANC Women's League resigned after she signed the league up for a commercial tourism venture with actor Omar Sharif. There was also controversy over the funding of her housing project for squatters, which had yet to build a house. This list is far from exhaustive.

In March of last year she was finally sacked from government after she publicly criticised her party's conciliatory line with whites and then pointedly failed to present herself before a disciplinary committee. Characteristically, she refused to accept her dismissal and took the matter to the courts on a technicality. Drama became farce as her estranged husband was forced to rehire her and then sack her again.

Although her behaviour has disgusted many within the ANC, Mrs Mandela retains sympathy and respect among the black population. This week, some expressed their sadness at the case; others said they were angry at the treatment she had received from her husband.

Many blacks, in particular the poorer, less educated ones, feel Mr Mandela erred by criticising his wife and fellow freedom fighter in public. They know little about the western jurisprudence which obliged him to come out swinging in court this week. But even the angry ones are likely to forgive Mr Mandela, just as they have forgiven Winnie for her assaults on the unity of their beloved ANC.

South Africa's whites, on the other hand, have been as impressed by the dignity of Mr Mandela's conduct in the case as they were thrilled by the intimacy of his revelations. They dislike Winnie more than ever, but their late blooming love affair with her former husband continues to deepen.

WINNIE is likely to survive the divorce case, albeit weaker and more marginalised than before. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu said of her this week: "she's a toughie. She has more lives than a cat". It is even possible that she could still become president if the moderates ever lose control of the ANC.

Even as things are, one suspects Winnie will still throw her hat into the ring when the time comes to replace Mr Mandela, who plans to retire in 1999. Judging from her form, Winnie will always put her head down and charge, regardless of the opposition, the odds or the justice of the cause.

Unlike her husband, the trained boxer and master politician, it seems she has never known how to pick her fights, or even how to tell one struggle from another. Even in her days of glory, one suspects, she never quite saw the difference between fighting the apartheid state and beating the defiance from a 14 year old boy.