Volume 36, Number 16 · October 26, 1989
Can South Africa Change?
By George M. Fredrickson
In the Name of Apartheid: South Africa in the Postwar Period
by Martin Meredith
Harper and Row, 252 pp., $25.00
South Africa: No Turning Back
edited by Shaun Johnson, foreword by Lord Bullock
Indiana University Press, 390 pp., $32.50
Inside Apartheid: One Woman's Struggle in South Africa
by Janet Levine
Contemporary Books, 287 pp., $18.95
Democratic Liberalism in South Africa: Its History and Prospect
edited by Jeffrey Butler, edited by Richard Elphick, edited by David Welsh
Wesleyan University Press, 426 pp., $14.95 (paper)
After Apartheid: The Solution for South Africa
by Frances Kendall, by Leon Louw, foreword by Samuel Motsuenyane
Institute for Contemporary Studies, 253 pp., $17.95
Uprooting Poverty: The South African Challenge
by Francis Wilson, by Mamphela Ramphele
Norton, 380 pp., $27.50
Can South Africa Survive? Five Minutes to Midnight
edited by John D. Brewer
St. Martin's, 350 pp., $49.95
In the spring of 1989 I visited South Africa for the first time in fifteen years. When I had been there in 1974, apartheid was flourishing. Signs designating facilities for 'whites only' or 'non-whites only' were omnipresent, and I had the unforgettable experience of riding in unproud isolation on the lower deck of a double-decker bus in Cape Town, the top of which was filled to capacity with the black people who had been fortunate enough to get aboard at all. The sight of blacks left on the curb rather than taking seats in the virtually empty 'white' part of the bus brought home the meaning of segregation as social humiliation and personal hardship.
Review, 9198 words
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