cover image South Africa: The Cordoned Heart

South Africa: The Cordoned Heart

Francis Wilson. W. W. Norton & Company, $25 (186pp) ISBN 978-0-393-02341-1

A project of the Second Carnegie Inquiry into Poverty and Development in Southernstet Africa (whose activities, funded by the Carnegie Corp., included a conference in Cape Town in 1984), this collection of 136 pictures taken by 20 South African photographers poignantly documents the evils of apartheid. Wendy Schwegmann captures a black man dismantling his home in Mogopa as he prepares to be resettled by the government in his tribal ""homeland.'' Lesley Lawson shows a shabbily dressed black maid polishing a table in a lavish corporate conference room. Ben MacIennan records four black workers in their ``dormitory'' in front of tiers of concrete beds, which resemble bathtubs. The introduction and extensive commentaries by Wilson, a professor at the University of Cape Town, offer an impassioned, statistical account of the extent and horror of poverty in South Africa. (May)