NONFICTION - March 14, 1993

A LIFE’S MOSAIC by Phyllis Ntantala (University of California Press: $25; 248 pp.) In South Africa in the 1920s, Phyllis Ntantala’s father taught her that women were as good as men, blacks as good as whites. She took the lesson to heart, becoming a feminist and an anti-apartheid activist, first in her native country and later in the United States.

This autobiography was written, Ntantala says, to “leave a record of my life for my children and my grandchildren and all those other friends I have met.” For the American reader, the most interesting section is the beginning, in which she describes growing up in the Transkei region among well-to-do, Christianized black farmers whose life was a rich, if uneasy, blend of European and African customs.

Here Ntantala’s story has an intimacy that fades later on, after she goes to college, marries scholar A.C. Jordan and, as a teacher in the Orange Free State, confronts the racism that denies her students a future. She connects this with capitalism: “not the ill-will of any individual white person or group of them, but a system of exploitation that benefited only a few and saw the rest of mankind as units of labor.”

In Cape Town, she and her husband fought against the tightening of apartheid in the early 1960s, including the creation of a separate and inferior system of “Bantu education” for black children. Then they moved to the United States. Jordan taught at the University of Wisconsin; Ntantala involved herself in the civil-rights and anti-Vietnam War movements while continuing to speak and write against apartheid. The political life crowds out the personal. In the second half of the book, Ntantala disappears into rehashes of history, only to emerge now and then as her stubborn, principled self. When one of her sons received a Selective Service notice in 1966, Ntantala says, she marched into the draft office and told officials: “ ‘Send your U.S. citizens first to go die in Vietnam. . . . Not my child.’ I put that notice on (the) desk and left.”