Cries of The Beloved Country

By Stefan Kanfer

THE MIND OF SOUTH AFRICA by Allister Sparks; Knopf; 448 pages; $24.95

JANUARY SUN by Richard Stengel; Simon & Schuster; 202 pages; $19.95

MY TRAITOR'S HEART by Rian Malan; Atlantic Monthly; 349 pages; $19.95

Three million years ago, humanity was born in East Africa. Last February it was reborn in South Africa. More than one man was liberated when Nelson Mandela stepped into the sunlight; an entire nation appealed for release from the prison of apartheid.

Allister Sparks, a white journalist, was born and raised in that prison, and his authoritative work -- one of three investigations into South Africa being published just as that nation has assumed a new moral significance -- reduces previous histories to the status of antiques. His title, The Mind of South Africa, is a misnomer: the nation has many minds, most of them in conflict. The sharpest divisions, Sparks observes, originated in the 19th century, when immigrant Boers -- the Dutch word for farmers -- feuded with their English overlords in the Cape Colony. When Britain forbade slavery, the Boers' Great Trek began. Kipling caught their spirit: "His neighbours' smoke shall vex his eyes, their voices break his rest./ He shall go forth till south is north, sullen and dispossessed."

En route the trekkers were outnumbered by hostile Zulu warriors, but spears were no match for cannons. Any hope for reconciliation vanished when diamonds and gold were found in the interior. The discovery, says Sparks, produced "the watershed event in South African history. Overnight it turned a pastoral country into an industrial one, sucking country folk into the city and changing their lives." By-products of the mines included pass laws; "native" compounds that separated workers from their families; escalating categories of black, colored and European; ruthless cartels; and the world's first concentration camps, built by Britain during the Boer War of 1899-1902.

By the 1920s de facto apartheid was a feature of South African life. The poorest whites possessed something that the most prosperous blacks could never have: the vote. Subsequent governments flirted with Nazi Germany, then embraced liberal policies, but the racism endured. With all the warm pronunciations of President F.W. de Klerk, it prevails even amid the current talk of reforms.

Sparks is familiar with life in the townships and cities, but the ethos of contemporary South Africa is conveyed with even greater intensity in Richard Stengel's January Sun. Stengel, a TIME contributor, has the eye of a Leica and the sensitivity of a light meter. He focuses on a single day in the Transvaal town of Brits, where three men spend their separate, unequal lives. Ronald de la Rey, a white veterinarian, parrots the Boer tradition: "I think the idea of apartheid makes you more aware of the differences between people than the similarities. It's in our subconscious. But we like it that way. Everyone keeps their own identity."

For a placid taxi driver called Life, that identity means confinement to a segregated township. There, boredom and despair are as palpable as the omnipresent automobile carcasses and piles of beer cans. Jaiprakash Bhula is an educated Indian haberdasher, contemptuous of racial decrees. His question gnaws at South African policy: If whites really believed they were better, "would it be necessary to create laws guaranteeing social, monetary, and political superiority?"

Throughout, Stengel maintains a tone of cool detachment, but his epilogue contains a mordant irony: De la Rey and Bhula carry on, but on the morning of May 21, 1989, Life is stabbed to death, presumably by black men who believe the driver was "too conciliatory to the authorities." The burial occurs on a work day. "Under the state's emergency regulations, funerals like Life's cannot be held on weekends. Only a handful of people made it to the burial."

In My Traitor's Heart, Rian Malan, a young white South African journalist, has one major subject: Rian Malan. His intense and angry memoir offers a series of South African impressions: the author as exiled hippie in America; the author as pariah in his native land; blacks under fire, with a prominent & figure of the author.

As the most personal of the books, it is in some ways the most powerful. But Malan's self-absorption obscures his extraordinary credentials. He is a relative of Daniel F. Malan, one of the architects of apartheid. Rian becomes the righteous recorder of black rage in the "charnel house" of Soweto, the largest black township created by that apartheid. Alas, the conflict of genealogy and emotion tends to produce more heat than light. In a typical episode, Malan recalls a psychopath who murdered whites with a hammer; Simon Mpungose's story "seemed to unfold like the story of a saint, deeply disturbing in its biblical parallels." This romantic notion of violence feels like a hangover from the '60s, and it has no place in a South Africa that aspires to a place in the community of civilized nations.

Yet for all of his apocalyptic outrage, Malan succeeds by making the same leap of faith as his colleagues: he too believes that South Africa is capable of change. Thus far the evidence supports them. Only a few years ago, the government in Pretoria vowed to hold the racial line forever. Today it has come to recognize the inarguable truth that underlies all three books. George Bernard Shaw uttered it long ago, when apartheid was young: "Whilst we have prisons it matters little which of us occupies the cells."