LOOSING THE BONDS: The United States and South Africa in the Apartheid Years.<i> By Robert Kinloch Massie</i> .<i> Nan A. Talese/Doubleday: 883 pp., $40</i>

Ultimately it all happened so quickly. One moment, or so it seemed, the apartheid rulers of South Africa seemed impregnable and permanently secure in their racist fantasy world; the next they were scuttling for safety and negotiating away every one of the illusory trappings with which they had surrounded themselves for decades.

In “Loosing the Bonds,” quite literally, as well as metaphorically, a monumental work, historian and divinity scholar Robert Kinloch Massie traces the course of that almost unbelievable process with particular reference to the role the United States has played in South Africa’s troubled past. It is a detailed, comprehensive and invaluable book, filling a much-needed role not only for historians but also for anyone interested in the role that ethics, morality and grass-roots movements play in international and national political and economic life.

In 1978, I directed my play, “The Biko Inquest,” off-Broadway starring Fritz Weaver and Philip Bosco. Based on the courtroom drama of the real inquest into the tragic death in a prison cell of the eponymous charismatic black South African leader Steve Biko, the play was met with considerable critical acclaim and almost universal audience indifference. It closed after five weeks! Not only were the absent theatergoers showing their lack of concern for things South African but, when being interviewed by representatives of the media in order to drum up some publicity for the foundering play, I found almost universal ignorance of South African issues among apparently otherwise sophisticated and politically aware journalists of all colors and creeds. It is hard to believe that that was less than 20 years ago.

Now in the wake of the hugely successful divestment and disinvestment campaigns of the 1980s, the release of Nelson Mandela from his Robben Island confinement and his emergence onto the world stage as a major statesman, there can be few Americans who are unaware of the iniquities of South Africa’s racial policies until the overthrow of minority rule with the universal free elections of April 1994.

The triumph of Massie’s book is its attention to detail, marred only occasionally by the odd glaring inconsistency or error. It is irritating to be told that Robben Island, the site of Mandela’s (and many other political detainees’) incarceration for close to 30 years, is 18 miles out in Table Bay outside Cape Town when it is, in fact, just over five miles from land, or to find references to South Africa’s currency in 1960 as the rand when, in fact, rands were only introduced to replace the South African pound, with its too-British overtones, in 1961. It does not help that the MCC is referred to as “a London cricket club” when it is, in fact, the English national cricket team. Similarly Massie does not help his argument by occasional lapses into hyperbole, for example, referring to “every vertical surface” being plastered with election posters in 1994, when I can testify that it was surprising how, in many regions of the country, it was almost as if no election were taking place at all, so absent was the distribution and display of election materials.

For the most part, however, he remorselessly and evocatively builds his case “that acts of protest and conscience, so often dismissed as pointless, can gradually accumulate into an irresistible force for change.” To illustrate the intertwined, but not always obvious, strands that link South Africa and the United States, Massie starts his book with an extract from Robert Kennedy’s speech to several hundred white students at the University of Cape Town in June 1966. “I come here today,” Kennedy said, apparently referring to his hosts, “because of my deep interest in and affection for a land settled by the Dutch in the 17th century, a land taken over by the British, and at last independent; a land in which the native inhabitants were at first subdued and relations with whom are a problem to this day; a land which defined itself on a hostile frontier; a land which was once an importer of slaves and must now struggle to wipe out the last traces of that form of bondage.” Pausing briefly for effect, he continued to the accompanying laughter of the crowd, “I refer, of course, to the United States of America.”

I well remember Kennedy’s visit and its importance to us opponents of the regime, as we fought what often felt like an isolated and hopeless struggle against the megalithic military, political and economic power of the state. Referring often to the words of his only recently assassinated brother, Kennedy made us feel that while we may be overwhelmed for the moment by the repressive regime of the racists, our day would one day come. It is hard to overstate the significance or the symbolic value of these gestures in keeping alive the flame of protest.

Kennedy’s visit, which, as Massie points out, had as much to do with his own electioneering inside the United States as with any factor relating to South African politics, came just over six years after the true colors of the South African regime had been revealed with the brutal shooting of 69 unarmed civilians in Sharpeville in March 1960. For the next 34 years, successive residents of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. in Washington and their various spokespersons, advisors and representatives vacillated, twisted and turned, as they tried uncomfortably to straddle the unbridgeable divide between outspoken critical rhetoric for domestic consumption and the greatest possible inaction that could be gotten away with for their South African allies. Often presidential anti-apartheid rhetoric was accompanied by a metaphorical nod and wink to the South Africans, which not only undermined any real possibility of change initiated from within but also had the effect of bolstering the regime in its determination to clamp down on internal dissent in the harshest possible manner.

By contrast, grass-roots pressure on American corporations doing business with South Africa became a significant force for change. Massie is particularly strong when he details the divestment and disinvestment campaigns at every level: from shareholder activism and proxy voting through the enormous power and influence wielded by the institutional pension funds of state governments and employees’ organizations. I remember my shock on first returning to South Africa in 1991 after an absence of more than 15 years to find almost no modern American cars or trucks on the roads, no American gas stations and no American banks. By contrast, prior to the pullout by U.S. corporations, American companies had controlled nearly 40% of all new car sales in South Africa and a higher proportion of trucks, and foreign banks had accounted for more than 73% of the banking sector.

While the Cold War cast its shadow upon American foreign policy, it was never likely that the white regimes on the tip of Africa, who cloaked themselves in the mantle of anti-communism, would ever be displaced. By the early 1990s, however, almost all the necessary elements were in place for a rapid transformation in the fortunes of South Africa’s internal and external opposition. As Massie correctly shows, the collapse of communism, the unsustainable nature of the economic and political contradictions inherent in apartheid itself, the long-term psychological effect of the cultural and sporting boycott of South Africa, the economic repercussions of the divestment and disinvestment campaigns, which culminated in partial trade sanctions, and the continuing disruption caused by the low-level externally led guerrilla campaign, combined with the never-ending internal violence, conspired to implode the whole regime. As Massie writes, “South Africa’s economy faltered not because of any simple action by a company or a country, but because of the combined repercussions on an economy which, even at its best, had serious structural flaws.” In other words, by the time F.W. de Klerk, the last white president of South Africa, agreed to dismantle the last vestiges of the abhorrent system over which he had presided and to effectively negotiate himself out of office, he was essentially sitting on a time bomb that one way or another would see him lose power sooner rather than later.

Massie’s theological training, along with his doctorate from Harvard Business School, gives him the perfect background from which to narrate this story of heroes and villains. He vividly brings to life the main characters and the ethical and ideological arguments that dominated the debate between apartheid’s defenders and its detractors. Such is the strength of his writing that this hardened reviewer once again found himself weeping at the description of Mandela’s release from incarceration that fateful day on Feb. 11, 1990.

Although, as Time magazine has pointed out, Mandela is, of course, a mere mortal; “on a more transcendent plane, where history is made and myths are forged, Mandela is a hero, a man like those described by author Joseph Campbell, who has emerged from a symbolic grave ‘reborn, made great, and filled with creative power.’ ” But Mandela is not unique in the pantheon of Southern African heroes, for it is an extraordinary fact that a small country like South Africa has produced not one but four Nobel Peace Prize laureates. It is South Africa’s good fortune that it has over the years produced not only leaders but also foot-soldiers of sufficient courage and dedication to endure years of bondage and struggle, together with many around the world who have devoted themselves to overthrowing those who would perpetuate apartheid’s inequity and injustice. Many South Africans and Americans alike are given ample space by Massie revealing their contributions to the eventual downfall of the system.

Uniquely perhaps, apartheid’s great distinction--and it is a testimonial to the long hard work put into the struggle by devoted activists worldwide--was that over the years it came to be vilified by almost everyone. As Thomas H. Kean, then-governor of New Jersey, referred to apartheid in 1985: “There are instances in human history when the gravity of evil is so clear, and the cost of its continuance so great, that government--at every level--must use every tool at their disposal to combat it.”

There is a very good joke that has been attributed to various people over the years but is ascribed in this book to Bishop Desmond Tutu, that well sums up South Africa’s troubled past. “When the white settlers first arrived,” Tutu said, “we had the land and they had the Bible. Then they said, ‘Let us pray’ and we closed our eyes. When we opened them again, they had the land, and we had the Bible.” While no one dare foretell how things will eventually develop, beset as the society is by violent crime, massive majority aspirations that cannot be instantly gratified and the terrible legacy of inequality, ignorance and deprivation left behind by apartheid, there will be no turning back to the days when bigoted minority governments sought to justify their brutality by reference to Testaments, Old and New.