Voyage in South Africa

...North's reports of direct experiences are interlarded with dabs of history and political analysis...

...Considering how deeply South Africa's security apparatus has managed to penetrate both Swaziland and the African National Congress, it is at least questionable whether the officials were really taken in by this enterprising and relatively innocent ruse for four years...

...Although his vignettes are of somewhat uneven quality, the talk of a large and variegated cast of characters resonates effectively with the contradictory reality he describes...

...He enjoyed the place, liked the people he met, including the bigots, and as a result succeeds in presenting a country as well as a problem...

...It is still more tendentious to suggest that Pretoria's plan for Namibia may include "mass killing...

...James North, a pseudonymous young American and nonaccr edited journalist, proved to be an excellent listener on the periodic forays he made into South Africa during the more than four years he lived in the adjacent black kingdom of Swaziland...

...Endemic malnutrition and the legally mandated separation of families are among the cruel consequences of the homeland system, but they do not add up to even a proximate definition of genocide...

...Nevertheless, he has given us the first reportorial overview of South Africa by an American since E.J...

...Itisamisuseoflanguage, Iwould argue, to characterize the appalling conditions that exist for most blacks in their indigent so-called homelands as "approximating genocide.' Some things are not easily approximated and genocide is one of them...

...And BishopDesmond Tutu was not jailed at the time of a crackdown on black leaders in 1977, if merely because he was then stationed in independent Lesotho...

...But there's a door as well...

...South Africans, particularly whites, have been gradually conditioned to believe that the foreigner' s sympathies can have a material impact on the conflict in their country...

...Sophisticated blacks place a somewhat lower value on the passive sympathy of the outside world, since it has never gotten them very far...

...North allows himself room and time to recount the jokes, racial epithets and superstitions that he hears...

...Not infrequently, the reader notices, these are bartenders and waiters, yet North forms genuine friendships and, more often than not, manages to portray lives as well as snatches of conversation...

...nor should it locate Nelson Mandela in the Robben Island prison (nearly three years after he was shifted to a j ail on the mainland...

...The car, it turns out, was a Mercedes...

...However disingenuously, he represents " the decent opinion of mankind," which at the tip of Africa signifies something other than the Jeffer-sonian abstraction...

...The foreigner, by contrast, is not so easily classified...

...author, "Move Your Shadow," to be published this fall A persistent foreign traveler in South Africa—especially in this era of Rea-ganite "constructive engagement," an American paleskin—enjoys an access to the apartheid society that no native, white or black, can normally conceive ofhaving.AnySouth African is instantly typed, not only by law through the pernicious system of racial classification but also by language and accent...

...The great strength of Freedom Rising, his account of his experiences in the white-ruled Republic and nearby territories, is his ability to capture the voices of ordinary blacks and whites whose existence and prospects are inescapably defined—and deformed— by the deepening racial conflict...

...In the rare instance that a South African's loyalties extend beyond his own racial or ethnic group, he automatically risks being cast out as a renegade...

...With a white man at the wheel, it was the very symbol of the lifestyle Pretoria is fighting to defend and therefore unlikely to arouse suspicion...

...Now, the wall is still there...

...A book published in 198 5 should not say that blacks cannot own their homes in Soweto (over two years after it became possible for them to take out conventional mortgages...

...His infrequent lapses into agitprop are less typical than his affecting description of a black Zimbabwean's summing up of what "freedom" has meant...

...His judgments mostly strike me as sound—he foresees no early or easy end to the conflict—and he usually manages to keep a light touch as heglidesfromareal encounter to a brief essay on land tenure or the history of nonviolence as a political tactic in South Africa...

...Swanson stated on his visa applications that he was a geographer, so that James North could go on filing articles to liberal and left-of-cen-ter journals in the United States...

...Race, language and accent, indeed, are usually all you need to know in order to infer a political stance...

...Nothing of the sort has happened...

...Nonetheless, puzzlingly, it withholds his real name, which then is divulged between parentheses in a press release from his publisher...

...At its best—when the young American thumbs his way across the veld from one truck stop to the next, or insinuates himself into thelockerroomofa championship black soccer team that today fields one or two whites—Freedom Rising becomes a picaresque narrative...

...If he seems just a little receptive, they will bend his ear out of shape, truculently insisting all the while that they couldn't care less about his attitude toward their government and way of life...

...They are often brutally repressive, but they are skilled in doublethink, which enables them to retain a theoretical attachment to legal forms and institutions...

...We knock'—he smiled with further joy at his originality—'we knock, and sometimes, sometimes, we hear someone on the other side, running to open...

...Kahn Jr., Allen Drury and Jim Hoagland wrote theirs in 1967,1968 and 1972, respectively...

...The military wing of the African National Congress undoubtedly has a minuscule and shadowy presence inside South Africa, but it is hardly " firmly established" as yet in any sense that could have operational significance...

...He enjoys telling a yarn as much as he does scoring a polemical point, though, and lets sheer curiosity lead him into remote byways...

...The jacket of Freedom Rising comes perilously close to blowing North's cover by providing essential facts of his biography, such as his undergraduate tenure as president of the Harvard Crimson, plus a photograph...

...Unfortunately, the casualness that graces the narrative sometimes extends to matters of fact, in part because the manuscript appears to have been brought up to date haphazardly onitswaytothe printer...

...Perhaps the most endearing quality of this book is the author's ability to convey, without gushing or finding his language in the propagandist's lexicon, the admiration he came to feel for blacks and whites who struggle against the racial system—people "who fight bravely, who are not afraid to be kind, to believe in and trust each other, who do not become cynical...

...In fact, it is an orchestration of experiences from many trips in South Africa, loosely organized according to themes instead of strict chronology...

...His book is structured as if it were the story of a voyage...

...With nearly 12 million blacks living at present in these rural ghettoes, wouldn't at least 50,000— fewer than 1 per cent—have to be violently done in before such a usage could be justified...

...But their need to be heard remains overwhelming...

...Only occasionally does the reader notice that he is being spoon-fed...

...In the final 15 pages, as he strains a little to complete a political summation, North errs in my opinion on matters of substance as well as detail...

...The case against the regime in South Africa requires no polemical overkill...

...Rather than haranguing his readers, he takes them along...

...North's friend does not attempt to rationalize the generally high-handed and occasionally authoritarian tendencies of Robert Mugabe's government, but he has no doubt that the collapse of white hegemony has improved his lot: "'Before we lived on one side of an impenetrable wall.' His eyes brightened [North writes] as the image formed in his head...

...He misreads them badly when he asserts that they would like to shut down the judicial system and the opposition press, or crush trade unions...

...North adopts the stance of a "committed" journalist, one who is committed in this context to the "liberation struggle" as represented by the underground African National Congress...

...The passport James North presented numerous times to the South African authorities accurately identified him as Dan Swanson...

...In any event, what matters to the reader is that Swanson-North traveled with a sense of adventure and discovery, even if he was not precisely on the "dangerous adventure" and "four-year clandestine journey through Southern Africa" that the blurbs for his book trumpet...

...He was really concealing his vocation, not his identity, because a freelance correspondent for the Nation and/rc These Times could wait a lifetime before getting a visa from Pretoria...

...that is to say, they value their own good opinion of themselves, little as they may deserve it, and only would be likely to conform to the totalitarian caricature North imagines in the very final act of a racial showdown...

...Thus with normal tact, a little guile and plenty of stamina, a good listener from the outside becomes a sounding board for eager monologists of all hues who have little or no experience speaking to each other, thanks to the system of noncommunication known as apartheid...

...The subject grows more timely by the day and he stayed longer than those predecessors...

...It is doubtful, also, that South Africa has ever found it necessary to station more than 30,000 troops in the disputed territory of Namibia, let alone 100,000 as North asserts...

...North would have strengthened his book by editing himself more rigorously...

...North's own modus operandi as an underground reporter precluded contacts with important Afrikaner politicians and officials...

...North is romantic enough to savor a little cloak-and-dagger stealth and mystification for their own sake—he never, for instance, gets around to explaining his use of an alias—but he cannot resist letting us in on the secret that he occasionally carried messages and in one case even chauffeured an automobile across South Africa's border for the insurgent movement...