Loosing the Bonds: The United States and South Africa in the Apartheid Years.

• Author: Grabish, Beatrice
• Position: Review

By Robert Kinloch Massie Illustrated. 896 pp. New York. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 1998

Besides business, South Africa and the United States share another common bond - their citizens' continuing struggle for racial equality.

From 1948, when South Africa first installed its racist apartheid regime, until 1994, when Nelson Mandela walked out of prison after more than 10,000 days of incarceration, the United States has been forced to reflect upon its own policies towards African Americans. And what it saw in this "mottled mirror" was not always the fairest.

Loosing the Bonds: The United States and South Africa in the Apartheid Years, by Robert Massie chronicles the overlapping histories of the United States and South Africa for the past 50 years. The book opens with Robert Kennedy's 1966 speech at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, which draws comparisons between the two countries. Both were settled by the Dutch, conquered by the British, fought hard for independence, and left a long-standing legacy of racial disharmony.

Massie describes the deep ambivalence of United States presidents toward South Africa. When black United Nations diplomats were denied service in Maryland restaurants lining the highway, President John E Kennedy suggested a quick fix - flying to Washington, D.C. instead of driving. A tip from the American CIA led to Nelson Mandela's arrest after years of underground African National Congress (ANC) activity. And Ronald Reagan continued to sell arms to South Africa even though he knew that they were being used to violate the human rights of non-white residents.

Throughout the vacillations of American politics, the United Nations provided an international forum that kept key issues in focus. I spoke to Robert Massie soon after the book's publication. "In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s", says Massie, "the United Nations promoted the independence of Namibia from South African control; it pursued the question of white supremacist regimes and imposed sanctions in Rhodesia, Angola and Mozambique; it appointed the Special Committee on Apartheid, which kept the focus of the larger world on the less powerful voices of the oppressed; it created an outlet for the airing of the divestment debate and of ANC voices at a time when they were being shut out; and it decided to divest its own money in South Africa to express...