Review by Robert Press from the May 23, 2006 edition of CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR--http: //www.csmonitor.com/2006/0523/p14s01-bogn.html Swept up by history The Mashinini brothers of South Africa became heroes when one of them dared to organize a march. By Robert M. Press He liked to play softball and tennis, he loved to dance, and he was chairman of his school debating team. But on June 16, 1976, young Tsietsi Mashinini became a political activist, leading high school students on a protest that would change his country and sweep his family into the human rights struggle against South Africa''s white minority and the iron grip with which they ruled the vast black majority. A Burning Hunger is an example of a genre one writer has labeled the "struggle biography" - the true story of someone who overcomes.

But in this case, what journalist Lynda Schuster has given us is really a five-way biography. It tells the true story of the five brothers in the Mashinini family, all of whom emerged as political heroes during South Africa''s struggles against apartheid in the 1970s and ''80s. Although Tsietsi was the one who achieved fame during the horrific events of June 16 - when South African police shot at dozens of children - his siblings Rocks, Mpho, Dee, and Tsehpiso all became activists who ultimately followed their Tsietsi into hiding, prison, and exile. The brothers were living in South Africa at a pivotal moment. Most of the rest of the sub-Saharan African continent had been independent since the late 1950s or early 1960s, ruled by a black majority, though the new rulers often turned out to be autocratic. But in South Africa, in 1960, police had massacred 69 Africans, most of them shot in theback, at a demonstration in Sharpeville against laws requiring blacks to have a pass to move about the country. In 1964, Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for trying to bring democracy to his country; he would not be released until 1990 but then went on to be elected president in 1994 with blacks finally free to vote. South Africa was not the first place to see youth who step to the forefront in a national test of wills in the name of freedom.

Student protesters have been killed in Ethiopia, Mali, Kenya, Chile, and many other countries including the United States. (In Birmingham, Ala., in 1963, for example, with most adult protesters under arrest, hundreds of youths braved arrest and some faced skin-peeling fire hoses and police attack dogs in a civil rights protest that caught the country''s attention.) But now it was young Tsietsi''s turn. He led a swelling tide of students on a peaceful protest march through the streets of the black South African township of Soweto. Police that day killed 25 and wounded 200 others. When it was over, "large swaths of Soweto lay in ruins. South Africa, and the Mashinini family, would never be the same," Schuster tells us.

Tsietsi would flee the country; others in the family would join the rebellion, some with guns. Some would know capture, torture, exile. Schuster, a journalist who has written for this paper as well as The Wall Street Journal, bases her book on 70 hours of taped interviews telling the story of the Mashinini family and how their children were swept into the rough currents of history. This is not, as she wisely points out, the definitive book on the struggle against apartheid, that rigid system of keeping races separate, apart, to the maximumextent possible in South Africa under Afrikaner rule. This is a story of one family; but along the way one learns a good deal about South African history from the ground up. The advantage of a book like this is that it takes the reader beyond the well-known leaders of a cause - most notably, in this case, Nelson Mandela. Schuster reminds us that behind the world-known giants that lead resistance movements are ranks of little-known but equally brave activists - the "foot soldiers" for freedom. Key among their contributions is doing the legwork to organize turnouts for.