Through a mosaic of interviews with black, Afrikaner and English women, a former Christian Science Monitor correspondent in South Africa depicts the social and political attitudes shaping race relations in that country. Her protagonist is a young Black Consciousness leader, five times detained and tortured, who is ambivalent about the means of struggle but not about the goal. The black domestics at the other end of the scale of activism, though acknowledging their dependence on whites and fear of politics, locate their allegiances firmly outside the apartheid system. For almost all the whites, from confirmed supporters to avowed opponents of apartheid, their self-definition within the system is much more equivocal-and must continue to be so while the forcibly maintained gap between their privileges and black deprivation continues. Across that gap, as Goodwin shows, they talk to each other less and less.
