Still, Lamb describes the news situation--a virtual monopoly over African news by four large Western news organizations--as "unhealthy." Because local or national newspapers do not play a significant role in African society, "someone in Uganda has to turn on a BBC broadcast 6000 miles away to find out what's going on in his own backyard," Lamb says. After Idi Amin was overthrown, Lamb and another reporter traveled down a dirt road in rural Uganda and discovered that the appearance of two unescorted whites was the only sign. Ugnadans had of Amin's departure. Because African newspapers do not cover their own continent, they are forced to turn to the very news agencies whose credibility they suspect.

Although Lamb, who attended the University of Maine, says he hopes that Third World governments will train their own professional journalists and give them freedom to report objectively, he doubts this will soon occur because "most African governments feel things are still too insecure to tolerate criticism."

Despite allegations that African news is slighted by the West, Lamb says that the amount of space devoted to Africa in American publications increased by 60 per cent last year and that Africa is now covered as well as other areas of the Third World. "The average housewife in Santa Monica does not want 30 per cent or even 5 per cent of her newspaper devoted to what's happening in Burundi," he adds, noting, that even Nigerians do not care to read about Burundi.

Lamb maintains that the way to get the Santa Monica housewife more interested in what happens in Africa is by appealing to Americans' sympathies with Africans

"I try to write about the problems of the aged, the infirm, of children growing up in Africa. Maybe that way readers will eventually come to take an interest in African political events."

Nieman Fellow Fleur de Villiers possesses the poise and verbal dexterity of Margaret Thatcher. She inhales quickly from her everpresent cigarette and speaks with deliberation.

For the past 25 years, she has stood among the leading divas of the South African "opposition press"--so--called because it represents English-speakers in a country dominated by conservative Afrikaaners. But trying to understand de Villiers' ideas about South Africans mean by "opposition".

De Villiers is a correspondent for the Johannesburg Sunday Times, the most widely circulated paper in South Africa. Although more whites speak Afrikaans than English, English-language newspapers outnumber their Afrikaans counterparts. The Pretoria-educated de Villiers notes that the "opposition press" has long spoken out against the more heinous forms of apartheid, with little success.

Nevertheless, she expresses confidence that South Africa will undergo meaningful change, noting Prime Minister P.W. Botha's cabinet overhaul this year and constitutional and legal reforms coming from top levels of government. De Villiers says Botha has "effectively abolished job-reservation laws," which barred Africans from high-level employment.

Liberals abroad might contradict de Villier's optimistic view. The South African government has started establishing within its borders "autonomous homelands," or bantustans for each indigenous ethnic group Those who oppose the program say that it allocates only 13 per cent of the land to 80 per cent of the population and that the land is that which Europeans do not want--the poorest in mineral wealth and agricultural productivity. Moreover, opponents argue, even Africans who have never lived in those areas will lose all rights of citizenship in the Republic of South Africa and will be forced to return to the bantustans when they cannot find work in white South Africa.

But the concept of the bantustans does not perturb de Villiers. She sees democracy as a distant prospect in South Africa's future, explaining that it is possible only within a "confederal framework" comgining the banstustans--which will represent the Africans--with the all-white Republic. Saying it is on "the back burner," de Villiers similarly accepts another issue that provokes international objections: South Africa's continued occupation of Namibia and invasions of neighboring Angola.

International observers note a dramatic and thorough build-up in South African military strength and anticipate the country's entrance into the nuclear arena, events which de Villiers ascribes to South Africa's current liberalization. "A society in the midst of change is at its most vulnerable," she notes. "The intellectual elite are expressing themselves daily in favor of profound political and economic change," she says, adding, "But of course, this has elicited a reaction from the conservative wing." In spite of questionable popular approval, the Nationalist government has legalized full African participation in trade unions. However, last August, Johannesburg officials arrested and deported 1200 African municipal workers striking for union privileges authorized in the reform.

De Villiers says the Johannesburg arrests do not lead her to doubt South Africa's potential for peaceful reform. "You have to give people time to adjust," she explains. Positive that gradualism will bring change to South Africa, de Villiers has come to grips with Afrikaaner recalcitrance and foresees a workable peace in the future.

De Villiers disapproves of American divestiture, saying, "As an instrument of international pressure, disinvestment is a rather unguided missile." Because U.S. corporate involvement in South Africa is relatively small, de Villiers thinks withdrawal would lack the desired effect for several reasons:

*The United States would lose any leverage it had;