TRY, THE BELOVED COUNTRY

By Richard Stengel

Few journalists get to make the history they write about. When Nelson Mandela was rehearsing for his only debate with President F.W. de Klerk before South Africa's elections last year, he called on Allister Sparks to pose as his Afrikaner antagonist. That selection may seem curious, but South Africa has long been a place where liberal English-speaking journalists like Sparks believed their job was not simply to record the struggle against apartheid but participate in it as well.

Allister Sparks is South Africa's Walter Lippmann: knowing, patrician and a mite holier than thou. Like Lippmann, he is both chronicler and confidant of the alite. He was the editor of the Rand Daily Mail, a crusading antiapartheid newspaper, and wrote The Mind of South Africa, a tour-de-force history of apartheid, published in 1990. In Tomorrow Is Another Country (Hill and Wang; 254 pages; $22), which Sparks calls a sequel to that book, he has crafted a narrative of the momentous events of the past decade that culminated in the election of Nelson Mandela as the first President of a democratic South Africa.

Tomorrow Is Another Country is an oddly bifurcated book. The first half is a splendid and original history of the cloak-and-dagger negotiations that led to Mandela's release in 1990. It is precisely the kind of tale that only a journalistic insider with trusted access to all the players could put together. The second half is less compelling: a more workmanlike, cut-and-paste retelling of the events since 1990, lacking the back-room detail and color that make the book's first half a page turner.

The tale of the secret negotiations began with a coincidence: Winnie Mandela, on her way to see her husband, who was in a hospital recovering from prostate surgery, happened to be on the same flight to Cape Town in 1985 as Kobie Coetsee, then South Africa's Justice Minister. She boldly marched up to the plane's first-class section and engaged the Justice Minister in conversation. The following day Coetsee paid an impromptu, unannounced visit to the world's most famous political prisoner. Mandela, dressed only in his hospital gown, greeted Coetsee not as his jailer-which he technically was-but as if he were a dear old colleague. Coetsee recalls that he saw in Mandela the ancient Roman virtues of "dignitas, gravitas, honestas, simplicitas," and wondered whether white South Africa's Public Enemy No. 1 was in fact the man who might someday unite a divided nation.

Once back in prison, Mandela bombarded Coetsee with letters urging contacts between the two sides, which had never officially talked to each other. A secret committee was set up including Coetsee, Mandela and Niel Barnard, the head of South Africa's intelligence service. Mandela pressed for a meeting with South Africa's President, P.W. Botha, known as the Great Crocodile for his blustery temper. An off-the-record courtesy call was finally arranged in 1989. So anxious was Barnard, the intelligence chief, about the meeting that seconds before the two men were to shake hands, he knelt down to fix Mandela's clumsily tied shoes. (Prisoners were forbidden shoelaces, and Mandela was long out of the habit of tying them.)

Sparks' skillful weaving of myriad strands-Mandela's secret sessions with the committee, the clandestine talks in England between the African National Congress and the government, the back-channel communications between Mandela and the a.n.c. in exile, the trepidation of Botha and the apparent transformation of his successor, De Klerk-possesses the drama and intrigue of a diplomatic whodunit. Sparks uncovers fresh details about Mandela's secret outings around Cape Town with his jailers (one of whom covertly brought the grandfatherly prisoner home to meet his two small children), the vital role of Mandela's courtly lawyer, George Bizos, and the courageous actions of the wily Mac Maharaj-Mandela's former Robben Island mate and now Minister of Transportation, who once smuggled out Mandela's prison memoirs.

Unlike Mandela, who often exhorts South Africans to forget the past, Sparks wants them to remember. The object lesson of his narrative is not how complicated the negotiating process was but how dicey and tentative, how easily it might have gone off the rails. Divisions within the a.n.c. and the National Party proved more dangerous than discord between them. During the narrative, Mandela and De Klerk emerge not as ideologues or saviors but as hard-headed pragmatists and canny politicians.

As Sparks brings his story up to the present with a more perfunctory account of the events since Mandela's release, it becomes clear that he is an unabashed optimist about the future of his country. South Africa, he suggests, is a kind of laboratory for the future of race relations around the world. He predicts that the "unique balance of mutual dependency" that made apartheid unworkable will bind the nation together in a kind of multiethnic harmony. Like Mandela, Sparks believes that what unites black and white in South Africa is greater than what divides them.