Have you ever imagined a white South African begging for money from a black man on the street? Can you believe this black man throwing few coins at him? That is what I saw when I traveled in South Africa in 1998. In fact, South Africa has undergone a rapid and fundamental change. In four years - from 1990 to 1994 - the country succeeded in getting past a painful transition from an autocratic white minority rule to a black majority rule. Its political and economic institutions have been restructured, its society transformed. Despite the fact that the racially-based segregationist policy, Apartheid, has been smashed, the battle between the whites and the blacks has just begun.

"Disgrace," by J. M. Coetzee, is about the whites and the blacks in the newly post-apartheid South Africa no longer governed by the whites. On the one hand, the decades of white political supremacy were...