Move Your Shadow

"Move Your Shadow" is one of the very best journalistic/popular accounts ever written on South Africa, or any other part of the continent for that matter. I was momentarily shocked to learn that this moving and insightful book is now out of print, until I recalled how ruthlessly the bottom line increasingly determines publishing these days. Lelyveld was a NY Times reporter in South Africa in the early 1980s, thoroughly exploring the most important issues throughout that bitterly divided country. Few works convey so well the routine indignity and daily horror imposed on black South Africans by the white-supremacist regime from 1948 up to the 1994 elections achieving majority rule. Perhaps the best chapter is on the long-distance bus rides erquired of migrant workers forced to live far from their jobs, by laws mandating residence in impoverished rural "homelands" (read: dumping grounds for unwanted "surplus" population). The major omission in this book is the relative lack of coverage of the political resistance to apartheid. Though it gets a 5-star rating to highlight its merits, the missing political dimension means that "Move Your Shadow" probably deserves 4 1/2 stars. While Lelyveld's insight and compassion make this a superior account, one must turn elsewhere for fuller treatment of the African National Congress, Pan-Africanist Congress and other less formal movements. For a similar journalistic account also encompassing politics, read William Finnegan, "Crossing the Line." There's also Tom Lodge, "Black Politics in South Africa Since 1945," Stephen Davis, "Apartheid's Rebels," and Allister Sparks' exciting if overdramatized "Tomorrow Is Another Country." But for the best understanding, one must read what BLACK South Africans have written, including Mamphela Ramphele, "A Bed Called Home" and Elsa Joubert, "Poppie Nongena" among many others.