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

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 its solidarity with the antiapartheid movement."

An ordained Episcopalian minister and a Harvard-minted doctor of business, Massie is particularly well suited to explain the moral and economic complexities underlying the struggle for black rights.

Though he is thorough in explaining the corporate and governmental policies, Massie maintains a human thread throughout the narrative. He describes black school children facing riot police in Birmingham, Alabama, who blasted them with high-pressure water hoses that "pummeled and shoved the young people aside

like pieces of crumpled paper"; Nelson Mandela speaking his peace at his trial; the imperturbability of South African leaders who, convinced of the rectitude of their own policies, willfully ignore the sufferings of nonwhite natives.

He did not want to write a book that "only a foreign-policy expert could read". To strike a balance between average readers and policy wonks, Massie made decisions "sentence by sentence" about how much background information to provide.

The book - and the anti-apartheid movement - is more than the sum of the individual personalities involved. "It's about the ocean rather than the corks floating on top", says Massie. Yet the book provides many compelling portraits of South African and American leaders who fought for change. These include Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu and Stephen Biko, on the African side, and Reverend Leon Sullivan, who introduced a set of ethical guidelines for corporations investing in South Africa known as the Sullivan Principles, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy on the American side.

"Thousands of articles had been written about apartheid", says Massie, "but no real book had existed on the subject before Loosing the Bonds." He took this omission as his personal mandate to tell the complete South African story. He truly does justice to his topic, and his work stands as a monument both to his own effort and to the thousands of voices he represents.