Janet Levine
"Only a few people in the world can tell this particular story. Janet Levine has done so with candor and courage.",â€” from the Foreword by Carolyn Forche,In ,Inside Apartheid,, South African-born Janet Levine recounts the horrors of and the ongoing struggles against the minority white government's brutal system of repression from the rare perspective of a white woman who worked within the system even as she fought to transform it.,Levine skillfully interweaves her personal story of a privileged white citizen's growing awareness of the evils of apartheid with a moving account of the increasing violence and radical polarization of South Africa, whose people are now trapped within a brutal civil war.,As a student activist, as a journalist, and as an elected member of the Johannesburg City Council, Levine openly attacked the government's policies in hundreds of speeches and articles, led the campaign of the Progressive Federal Party's member of parliament Helen Suzman, and was associated with Steve BViko and other less internationally famous but equally omportant South African figures. Levine was a fouunding member of the first black taxi cooperative and was instrumental in getting hundreds of illegally fired worker reinstated with back pay after the Johannesburg strikes of 1980.,Inside Apartheid, brings to life both the unsurpassed physical beauty and the institutionalized brutality of the country Levine loves so deeply. We accompany Levine on a daring trip to the devastated black township of Soweto immediately following the riots of 1976, on a visit to the home of a "colored" family with no way out of apartheid-induced poverty, and on a journey through the black "homelands," where Levine discovers firsthand the horrifying evidence of the long-term genocide of three million people.,We feel Levine's pain when she finally comes to the soul-searing realization that a white liberal activist could no longer be effective in South Africa. This book, in which from exile she bears witness to what is happening to her country, could be her most important act of all.,[,from the book's dust jacket,]
Southern Africa,South Africa
Inside Apartheid One Woman's Struggle in South Africa