WHITE BOY RUNNING <i> by Christopher Hope Anchor: $8.95 </i>

As a Caucasian boy growing up in the Transvaal, Christopher Hope enjoyed some of the benefits of the apartheid system; but as an English-speaking Catholic, he was considered an outsider by its Protestant Afrikaner architects. He blends autobiography, history and political reportage in this devastating account of the key South African parliamentary elections in 1987.

Crisscrossing the country by rail, Hope sketches vivid portraits of groups that uneasily coexist. He walks amid luxurious, guarded homes in Johannesburg and reads his fiction to a black audience in Soweto. He watches the police use tear gas on aging professors during a protest at Witwatersrand University and attends a patriotic rally led by the neo-Fascist Eugene Terre’Blanche.

Hope dissects the campaign rhetoric with mordant irony, exposing the oxymoronic spectacle of an ostensibly democratic election that excludes nearly 80% of the people. Dismissing the electoral process as governmental legerdemain, he concludes that blacks and whites have tacitly agreed on the inevitability of violent change: The only question that remains is when it will occur.

An exceptional book that should be read by anyone interested in the continuing tragedy of South Africa.