Crapanzano, Vincent

New York. 1985. April 1985. Random House. 1st Edition. Very Good in Dustjacket. 0394509862. 358 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by R. Adelson. keywords: South Africa Politics History. FROM THE PUBLISHER - Today South Africa is in the consciousness and on the conscience of all Americans, but most know it only from the headlines. Now, in Waiting, a leading anthropologist, focusing on the white inhabitants, English and Afrikaner, of a village near Capetown, has re-created for us as a novelist might the richness and complexity of its particular social reality, one in which a minority, making up roughly 17 percent of the population of the country, systematically controls the fate of the remaining 83 percent. Insofar as possible, the author allows the whites of ‘Wyndal' - farmers, ministers, entrepreneurs, teachers, a doctor, their spouses and children - to tell their stories for themselves, and in words that are often movingly eloquent, as often filled with anger and contempt they speak of their past and their future, of violence and politics, of their upbringing and their feelings about marriage, home, religion, Blacks and Coloureds. In so doing they reveal the bitter divisions among them: they use different languages, follow different faiths, have different histories, feel differently about the land and its people. But the author discovers certain symmetries underlying the discord. Above all, he writes, the whites of South Africa are ‘caught, wittingly or unwittingly, in the peculiar, the paralytic time of waiting, waiting compounded by fear, waiting for something, anything to happen. For them, the present is always secondary to the future, without Elan, vitality, creative force, a rehearsal for the day of reckoning.' Thus Waiting is far more than a powerful portrait of the whites of one South African village. It is a moving examination of the effects of domination on the everyday lives of those who dominate - human beings who, privileged by power, paradoxically are victims of it too. inventory #2249 ISBN: 0394509862.