Several of these essays were published in the early 1970s and others apparently were written before the installation of the FRELIMO government in Mozambique in 1975: the book thus serves at one level as a particularly mortifying example of languid publishing processes. Much of the material on internal forces within South Africa and on prospects for revolutionary or evolutionary change (the best are by Heribert Adam, John Daniel and Randall Stokes) do stand the test of time, perhaps indicating that in South Africa plus ça change. . . .