ABSTRACT
The book suggests that the new South Africa has to work with apartheid's legacy of widespread unemployment, poverty, a dangerous mix of unrealistic expectation and hopelessness, racial and ethnic tensions, high levels of violent crime, and militarization of the general population. The symbol of the new South Africa holds within it the promise of reconciliation between the unendurable knowledge of the past and the primal yearning for renewal, absolution and redress. In their life-writing, many – but not all – white South Africans are striving to measure up to the ideals of the new South Africa. Although F. W. de Klerk life-story does not depict a person engaged in intense self-examination, the text is clearly an attempt to locate a home in what the author recognizes is indeed a new South Africa. Throughout the narrative, authors literally and figuratively come to terms with pain-laced fragments of history.
