cover image Move Your Shadow

Move Your Shadow

Joseph Lelyveld. Crown Publishers, $18.95 (390pp) ISBN 978-0-8129-1237-1

Returning to South Africa after 14 years, New York Times correspondent Lelyveld discovered that the ""reforms'' that occurred or were said to have taken place actually resulted in less freedom and stricter controls for most blacks. In this empathetic examination of that country's racial policies and their effects both on its people and on himself, he shows that although some blacks have joined the middle class and are not discriminated against by American businesses, all blacks have been deprived of their citizenship and many have been forcibly removed to inhospitable ``tribal homelands'' headed by a privileged few. Although the miscegenation law has been repealed, mixed couples are barred from living in white areas. The major black political organizations are largely ineffective, riddled with government informers, and at times have been manipulated and stage-managed by Communists, Lelyveld charges. Repression has made compromise impossible, he adds, and a revolutionary stance and settlement the only one most politically active blacks can imagine supporting. South Africansand foreignerswho believe in the reform process display ``substantial elements of duplicity, deceit, faulty assumptions and purposeful blindness.'' A book of power and compassion. November