FAULT LINES

The transformation of South Africa from apartheid to democracy traced sometimes prosaically, sometimes astutely through the lives of eight representative South Africans. Goodman, an activist and journalist whose work has appeared in the Boston Globe and Christian Science Monitor, et al., knows South Africa well, from extensive reportorial stints, but the whiff of the slightly uncomprehending outsider still wafts through this book. He witnesses a great deal but doesn—t always completely understand, blinkered by his own cultural constructions and prejudices. Yet it is precisely this baggage that sometimes allows him the kind of unflinching honesty many native South Africans would never dare. He sees all too clearly the failed promises of uhuru (liberation), the promised houses, promised jobs, promised social justice that never quite materializes as the emerging black middle class focuses more on its own material well- being than on general uplift of the poor. In choosing his subjects, Goodman has cleverly tried to pair opposites: an anti-apartheid activist and the security policeman who plotted his assassination; one of the architects of apartheid and his radical grandson; a struggling black activist maid and a successful black woman entrepreneur; a white and a black farmer. When he is actively recounting the lives and struggles of these people, Goodman is superb. His portraits of the policeman, incapacitated by the horrors he has wrought, and the entrepreneur, an “apartheid jujitsu artist,” are first-rate. But he does not trust his characters enough to bring out the larger issues he’s so concerned about. So he takes extended detours into conventional historicizing and tired polemicizing, often reducing these usually fascinating flesh-and-blood people to little more than vague points of reference. (b&w photos, not seen