Volume 38, Number 15 · September 26, 1991
African Americans & African Africans
By George M. Fredrickson
Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare
by James H. Cone
Orbis Books, 358 pp., $22.95
The Unbreakable Thread: Non-Racialism in South Africa
by Julie Frederikse
Indiana University Press, 294 pp., $15.95 (paper)
Sobukwe and Apartheid
by Benjamin Pogrund
Rutgers University Press, 406 pp., $14.95 (paper)
Close comparisons of the 'freedom struggles' of African Americans and of black South Africans are difficult to make because of the great differences in the situation and the prospects of people of color in the two societies. One fundamental difference was brought home to me in the spring of 1989 when I visited the Reverend Allan Boesak, then a leading figure in the domestic resistance to apartheid, in his office in a 'Coloured' suburb of Cape Town. In both his inner and his outer offices, Boesak had hung large portraits of Martin Luther King, Jr. I knew also that he had written a dissertation in theology at the University of Leiden on the ethics of Dr. King and Malcolm X.[1] But when I asked him to reflect on the relationship between the black American movements of the Sixties and his own anti-apartheid campaign, he argued that there was a big difference between a minority's battle for equality in a predominantly white society and a black majority's effort to overthrow the rule of a white minority. The distinction that he made between an essentially reformist civil rights movement and a revolutionary effort to empower a disenfranchised majority seemed totally persuasive.
Review, 9391 words
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