Move Your Shadow
by Joseph Lelyveld
Summary
Joseph Lelyveld first reported from South Africa for The New York Times in the mid 1960s, and the government that ran the country under apartheid expelled him in 1966 and barred him from returning for years afterward. Move Your Shadow grew out of the reporting he did once he finally went back in the early 1980s, and it carries both encounters with the country inside it, an early witness to a system still hardening into place and a later one returning to find it still standing. Lelyveld builds the book from direct observation of daily life organized by race, following Black and white South Africans through the separate, unequal terms apartheid set for where each could live, work and move, rather than treating the system as a matter of law and policy alone.
Lelyveld writes as a reporter rather than a historian or a polemicist, and the book stays close to what he actually saw and the people he actually spoke with across two extended stretches in the country nearly two decades apart. It suits a reader who wants apartheid described from the ground, through the accumulated weight of specific encounters, rather than through statistics or legal analysis, and who is drawn to a journalist's account written by someone the government itself had once tried to keep out.
The pass laws run through the book as its clearest case: Lelyveld watched from a Johannesburg hotel window as police rounded up Black men for the crime of being in the city without the right papers, and he sets that scene against the figure of more than 120,000 such arrests a year in Johannesburg alone. The government had expelled him in 1966, and the book carries the anger of a reporter who came back a generation later to find the machinery not only intact but routine.
Historical Context & Significance
The Pulitzer board gave the 1986 award for general nonfiction jointly to Lelyveld's Move Your Shadow and to J. Anthony Lukas's Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families, a split award the board has used only rarely. Move Your Shadow also won the 1986 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest, and that year's Pulitzer finalist list included Robert N. Bellah's Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life.
Lelyveld spent nearly four decades at The New York Times after joining in 1962, rising from copy editor to foreign correspondent within three years and eventually serving as the paper's executive editor from 1994 to 2001. Move Your Shadow remains the book most closely tied to his reputation as a journalist who covered apartheid South Africa across two distinct periods of its history, separated by his own years of being barred from the country.