AGAINST THE WORLD: Attitudes of South Africa

Brown is an assistant editor of the Tory Sunday Telegraph with journalistic experience in South Africa and a quaint habit of referring to groups as ""races."" Despite the title, he says little about outside pressure and possible intervention. He describes past and present relations between Boers and English-speakers, the political results, and the diverse milieus within this ""colonial"" country. He stresses the fact that the ""colonies at home"" of 13.5 million black Africans make a mixed blessing out of the centralized economy's fantastic growth: skilled labor needs require an economic integration which may undermine the structure of this ""nation of slaveholders."" Brown is at his best on the evolution of apartheid as a principle, its administrative realities, and differences of white opinion on the subject. He succeeds in making his central point: that the whites aren't monsters, but their system (which ""mirrors the world at large"") is a monstrous and intransigent one. Within the above limitations, good general reading, comparable to Kahn's recent The Separated People (p. 86), directed more toward the state-of-siege climate of feeling and belief.