(FORTUNE Magazine) – THE ACTIONS and plans of American business have figured nearly as prominently in many stories about South Africa as the fires in Soweto. As business confidence waned following P. W. Botha's August failure to propose major reforms, a team of FORTUNE staff members set out to find answers to the grave and complex questions that now face U.S. companies in South Africa. The results of their inquiry appear in the four-part special report that begins on page 18. ''The moral issue of apartheid is black and white, but hardly anything else is clear in South African politics and economics,'' says associate editor John Nielsen. ''The challenge is to extract useful business information from the web of events.'' Assisted by reporter John Steinbreder, Nielsen analyzes what would happen if American business were to withdraw from South Africa entirely (page 18). Associate editor Steven Flax and reporter Alan Farnham probe U.S. dependence on South African strategic metals (page 23) -- and find surprisingly little to fear in the prospect of an embargo. In an exclusive interview (page 21), South African business giant Harry Oppenheimer reflects on the likely course of events. Associate editor Felix Kessler and reporter Lynn Fleary reveal how South Africa and the domestic pressures to disinvest appear from inside the boardroom at Goodyear, one of the top U.S. employers there (page 24). Nielsen and Kessler bring to the assignment decades of international journalistic experience. Nielsen began his career as a freelancer in Spain and Belgium, and subsequently wrote international stories for Newsweek and Time. Kessler spent 16 years as a Wall Street Journal correspondent in Europe, with ^ frequent side trips to Africa. Reporter Steinbreder, who studied for a college semester at the University of Nairobi, last year spent nine days in South Africa reporting for FORTUNE on the social policies of U.S. companies there. When he contacted the same sources this time around, Steinbreder says, they were ''less rhetorical'' in answering his questions. ''I was no longer asking how they proposed to deal with a moral dilemma,'' he says, ''but why it's worth putting up with such turbulence.''