Perspectives on Southern Africa

Ntantala has written a rather dry account of a vivid and interesting life. Born to a well-to-do black family in the Transkei, in South Africa, she describes her awakening social conscience in the 1940s and her subsequent activities in the teachers' union. But she matter-of-factly retraces her experiences while revealing little about her emotional states. Writing of how much she and her husband expected of their children intellectually, she posits that the children ``lived in a world of ideas.'' She makes much of the fact that she came from a well-off family, and hints at a struggle between her principles and her social position, particularly in a section about how her children always forced her and her husband to treat their employees better. There is also some underlying conflict with her more straitlaced husband, who, she says, in one of her few blunt moments, ``never was a lover, but a husband,'' but these tensions are touched upon only briefly. Some excitement builds when the family arrives in the U.S. in the 1960s, and the comparisons between racism in South Africa and in Madison, Wis., where her husband taught, are telling, but marred by Ntantala's frustrating habit of drifting from one subject to the next. (Feb.)