Citizen Diplomat: A Black Life in America.

One of the great social causes of the twentieth century was the worldwide battle to end apartheid in South Africa. For more than four decades, millions committed the to bringing down a system that had appeared invulnerable.

Except for the decisive role the South Africans themselves played, Randall Robinson may have been the one individual central to apartheid's fall. Robinson is the founder of TransAfrica. a black lobbying group based in Washington, D.C., that began in 1977. With his considerable intellectual talents, his persuasive style, and a willingness to protest in the streets, Robinson galvanized the U.S. anti-apartheid movement and held politicians' feet to the fire.

His memoir, Defending the Spirit: A Black Life in America, is often moving. At times, he is painfully bitter, at other times cautiously hopeful. But mostly, he is full of rage. Look out, America, here is one angry black man.

Robinson is heir to a long tradition of African American citizen diplomats. Like Jesse Jackson, Robinson has battled to shine a light on human-rights issues and economic concerns facing the nations of Africa and the Caribbean. And he has confronted U.S. foreign policy, which often exacerbates the problems in these regions.

The brashness Robinson demonstrated during the trench battles against apartheid is manifest in his memoirs. Unlike many of the political tomes emerging from Washington these days, Robinson not only displays his frustrations with both foes and allies, he actually names names.

He goes after easy targets such as conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and Chester Crocker, Assistant Secretary of State for Africa. Crocker crafted the apartheid-appeasing Reagan policy of "constructive engagement." And Robinson is relentless in his exposure of Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, John McCain, Ernest "Fritz" Hollings, and other officials whose words or deeds have brought hardship to Africa and the Caribbean. He also exposes the hypocrisy of former Senator Bob Dole, who congratulated Robinson on the Senate passage of the Anti-apartheid Act of 1986, one of the rare anti-apartheid legislative victories under Reaganism. The very next day, Dole helped coordinate efforts to halt the override of Reagan's veto.

But Robinson does not simply round up the usual suspects. He also takes aim at, popular black figures, such as Vernon Jordan, the "godlike" Michael Jordan, retired General Colin Powell, and even South African President Nelson Mandela.

In one controversial (and hilarious) passage, Robinson skewers President Clintons "first friend," super-lawyer Vernon Jordan, now much in the news for his role in the Monica Lewinsky affair. Taking a page from the allegorical writing style of Derrick Bell, Robinson describes a fictional "great white" city called Privelege, where Vernon Jordan disease is rampant. This condition causes blacks inside the walls of Privilege to lose their memories of home and to be unable to hear the wails of black people outside the city walls. (U.S. policy toward Haiti forms the background of this dispute. Robinson said President Clinton was complicit in the deaths at sea of Haitian refugees whom the Administration had turned away. Jordan defended the President.)

Other blacks close to Clinton also come in for a beating. Robinson has harsh words for the now-deceased Ron Brown, Clinton's Secretary of Commerce, for his earlier collaboration with the murderous Duvalier regime in Haiti. On a more personal level, he cannot understand why former Secretary of Energy Hazel O'Leary refuses to acknowledge that she was once married to his brother Max.

Much of Robinson's case is against the naivete or blissful ignorance of African Americans about U.S. foreign policy. He borders on arrogance when he makes sweeping indictments of other African Americans who failed to be sufficiently active around Nigeria or Haiti or Lesotho or other battles he has often waged alone.

He also sees fit to upbraid Mandela. brazenly telling him: "If it were not for my organization and its efforts, you might still be in prison." Robinson charges Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC) with making unholy compromises with global corporations that had fought the anti-apartheid movement, though Robinson suggests that such compromises may have been necessary. He also accuses Mandela and the ANC of forgetting their African American supporters.

Robinson grew up in the segregated environs of Richmond, Virginia. joined a less than tolerant army, and attended. the hallowed and prejudiced halls of Harvard's law school. By the time he began to study the writings of Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, and C.L.R. James while in law school, Robinson was well on his way to becoming a racial radical.

His book is full of painful personal experiences: his first failed marriage, the death from AIDS of his brother Max (for a time, a network co-anchor), and the feeling of betrayal he felt when his former employer, Congressman Charles Diggs Jr., Democrat of Michigan, was convicted in 1978 of diverting $60,000 in staff salaries for his own personal use.

He also describes his joy in finding love with his second wife, Hazel, and in his victory in the battle to change the Clinton Administration's policy toward Haitian refugees. After a twenty-seven-day hunger strike that brought Robinson close to death, Clinton allowed Haitians entering the country to file a formal request for refugee status. Before that, Clinton was automatically sending them back.

As is the case with most autobiographies, Robinson's lenses are often narrow. Much of Defending the Spirit is about behind-the-scenes machinations and maneuverings in the policy battles over ending apartheid in South Africa, restoring Aristide to power in Haiti, and exposing the brutality of the current Abacha regime in Nigeria (and the African Americans who support it). And yet, he doesn't tell us much about what Aristide or the ANC leaders are like.

This is a book about lifelong battles and partial victories. There is no great theorizing going on here, no larger sense of meaning beyond his understandable but inadequate moral outrage. While racial rage is a prime motivation for Robinson's activism, it is not clear what his ideological or political framework is, if he has one. Undoubtedly, Robinson would claim that he is not an ideologue, but he also seems to lack a long-term strategy.

More clear is his disdain for whites. "I am left regarding white people, before knowing them individually, with irreducible mistrust and dull dislike," he writes. For those who have observed Robinson lacerating apologists for Third World dictatorships in testimony before Congress, on major television talk shows, and at numerous political rallies, his quasi-nationalist leanings may appear surprising. "I am obsessively black," he writes. "Race is an overarching aspect of my identity. America has made me this way."

Robinson is the quintessential insider who is an outsider. A former Hill staffer, he is on a first-name basis with most Congressional leaders and, due to his capacity to mobilize media and mass attention for his political causes, he is a force to be reckoned with. Although his enemies would perhaps like to see him as an Afro-Don Quixote chasing small windmills, few powerbrokers in D.C. or elsewhere can afford to ignore him.