In his searing account of a seven-year imprisonment, the Afrikaner poet Breytenbach impales his inquisitors and jailers, finding the essence of apartheid (indeed of all forcible domination) in their tireless quest for the weakness that will feed their strength. Crapanzano, an American anthropologist, wanders on the mild side, with a lengthy excursion through a small South African country town that is more a microcosm of a very particular group of South African whites than an exemplification of the white condition in that country today.
