The Economics of Apartheid by Stephen R. LewisReview by: William Diebold Jr.Foreign Affairs, Vol. 69, No. 2 (Spring, 1990), p. 188Published by: Council on Foreign RelationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20044386 .

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188 FOREIGN AFFAIRS

Africa

Jennifer Seymour Whitaker

ISARA: A VOYAGE AROUND "ESSAY." By Wole Soyinka. New York:

Random House, 1989, 262 pp. $18.95.

Following on his Nobel Prize-winning autobiographical Ake, Nigeria's master writer limns a magisterial portrait of his father, in a fictionalized

account of his central role in a chieftaincy struggle in his Yoruba town. Like

Ake, Isara gently illuminates the often ambiguous relationship between

Africans and the West; the same confident rendering of punctilious Western embroidery upon the rich fabric of Africa that permeated the

earlier book continues to evoke pleasure and nostalgia for another era.

THE UNITED STATES AND SOUTH AFRICA: THE REAGAN YEARS. By Pauline H. Baker. New York: Ford Foundation/Foreign Policy Association, 1989, 158 pp.

Leading off this comprehensive update of an influential 1981 Ford

Foundation study is an essay on the Reagan years and the policy of

Assistant Secretary of State Chester Crocker that sums up the final epoch of the Cold War in southern Africa. Its usefulness is enhanced by the

inclusion of several chronologies (of U.S.-South African relations and events in South Africa), a bibliography and appendices chronicling major

watersheds.

THE ECONOMICS OF APARTHEID. By Stephen R. Lewis, Jr. New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1990, 195 pp. $17.95 (paper).

"The South African economy is too far advanced to be able to sustain

apartheid." Why this striking conclusion makes sense and how the heavily state-run economy reached that point are explained in some detail in this

interesting and timely volume. The limited but real effects of external

pressure are carefully analyzed, and there is an imaginative examination of

what directions might be taken by a post-apartheid economy. The author, an economist with a good bit of African experience, is president of

Carleton College. William Diebold, Jr.

DEMOCRACY IN BLACK AFRICA: SURVIVAL AND REVIVAL. By John A. Wiseman. New York: Paragon House, 1990, 224 pp. $22.95.

A British scholar looking at the surviving examples of democracy in

Africa seeks to "change the focus from failure to success." His method

involves detailed narration of the history of democratic politics in post colonial Botswana, Gambia and Mauritius, and also of the revived democ

racy of Senegal, as well as that of other countries where democracy has

flickered on and off since the post-independence coups of the 1960s. He

does not probe the democratic aspirations among Africa's people, though this is surely important in understanding the surprising tenacity of democ

racy in often inhospitable circumstances.

SADCC: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF DEVELOPMENT IN SOUTHERN AFRICA. By Margaret C. Lee. Nashville (TN): Winston

Derek, 1989, 307 pp. $16.95 (paper). This study takes a comprehensive look at the economies of the SADCC

countries (Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland,

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