Title: The catharsis and the healing
Description: South Africa occupies an important position on the world's stage - with its growing violence, the tensions and the conflicts - but it is not often that you are given such a sensitive vision of its problems, viewed from so many enlightening angles, and presented in such an accessible manner, as in this powerful account.

The Catharsis and the Healing: South Africa in the 1990s is a significant story, told by a scholar and a journalist with insight, intellectual honesty, passion and hope, about a country in a state of enormous change.

In order to grasp the magnitude and the complexity of this process, the author has adopted an eclectic and comprehensive approach. The multitudinous facets of the South African reality are conveyed both in broad outline and in cameos of detail.

There are, for example, detailed accounts of the negotiations between the government and the ANC, of the author's discussions with the progressive politician Frederik Van Zyl Slabbert and the leading ANC leader Pallo Jordan, as well as with white landowning families and business people. South Africa's vast social problems are portrayed in descriptions of the author's visits to the rural areas and to the squatter camps and townships of Soweto and Khayelitsha and the Port Elizabeth/Uitenhage area, where he met both black and white community leaders. The national leadership question is covered in chapters on De Klerk, Mandela and Buthelezi, and recorded interviews with writers of significance, such as Es'Kia Mphahlele and Jan Rabie, offer a further dimension to South African life.

Finally, there is a short political history that places the current situation in perspective.
Subjects: Economic conditions, History, Politics and government, Race relations, Social conditions, Economic history
Places: South Africa
Time periods: 1961-, 1989-1994, 1991-, 20th century