Books: Out of Africa

NOTEBOOKS 1960-1977 by Athol Fugard; Knopf 238 pages; $14.95

Shades of gray are hard to come by in South Africa. That beautiful, terrible land invariably tempts writers to reduce it to black-and-white terms, to find a moral in its every predicament, a sermon in its every scene. Playwright Athol Fugard, 51, has won international acclaim by resisting the impulse to moralize. Such dramas as "Master Harold" . . . and the Boys, Boesman and Lena and A Lesson from Aloes do not preach against the evils of apartheid; they give institutionalized racism a human...