SAVING THE DAY ANATOMY OF A MIRACLE The End of Apartheid and the Birth of the New South Africa By Patti Waldmeir Norton 303pp $27.50 It was 1985, and South Africa was on a descent into hell. The townships were in revolt as blacks took up the African National Congress' call to make apartheid unworkable. Police reprisals were swift and cruel. The international community had cut off financing. The only conceivable outcome, it seemed, was a conflagration. But all the while, key Afrikaners were beginning to see apartheid's endgame. From top spymasters in the National Intelligence Service to vaunted Afrikaner leaders, a handful of whites was moving to make clandestine contact with exiled black leaders and the imprisoned Nelson Mandela. By 1986, Mandela was regularly being whisked out of prison to meet--in total secrecy--with Justice Minister Kobie Coetsee. Soon after, Thabo Mbeki, now South Africa's Deputy President and heir apparent to Mandela, began having secret parleys with an Afrikaner professor and government ''channel'' in London. The willingness of these few blacks and whites to talk to each other--and recognize their mutual dependence--kept alive the prospect of a negotiated revolution even in the darkest times. Patti Waldmeir's Anatomy of a Miracle provides a thorough account of these improbable developments. Although the outlines of South Africa's tumultuous decades are familiar to most readers, Waldmeir, ex-bureau chief in Johannesburg for the Financial Times, fleshes out the story with rich, insider anecdotes and sharp insight into the key players. Waldmeir spends most of the book recounting in great detail the fits and starts of rapprochement between the camps. She takes too little time exploring the forces impelling the negotiators forward. But when she does, she makes a compelling case that an inexorable logic drove South Africa toward majority rule, even if the players couldn't see then. Separating the races had turned out to be an obstacle to economic growth--distorting labor markets, dampening black consumer demand, and retarding modernization. Nothing if not pragmatic, the Afrikaner Establishment took short-term steps to modify the system, unaware of their long-range effects, leading inevitably to black political demands and, ultimately, black majority rule. Waldmeir traces this pattern back to 1973, when Pretoria opened skilled jobs to black Africans to tackle a serious skills shortage. It was a crucial crack in the color wall. Suddenly, it made sense to spend more on black schools in order to raise skill levels. Most important, in 1979, the government legalized black trade unions in hopes of smoothing industrial relations. Incredibly, after two decades of strife, South Africa's tale has a happy ending. If there's a key fault in Waldmeir's account, it's that she relies too much on the Great Man theory of history--the notion that individual leaders determine the outcome of events. But in this case, who can blame her? Anatomy of a Miracle portrays the players in the transition--and those who now have the awesome job of making the new South Africa work--as indeed a courageous lot. By ELIZABETH WEINER RELATED ITEMS PHOTO: Cover, ''Anatomy of a Miracle'' Return to top of story

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