Jump to content

The Diary of Maria Tholo

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Diary of Maria Tholo
First edition
AuthorMaria Tholo
LanguageEnglish
GenreDiary
PublisherRavan Press
Publication date
1979
Publication placeSouth Africa
ISBN978-0869751787

The Diary of Maria Tholo was a series of interviews with a South African resident of Soweto, Maria Tholo, which were published by Ravan Press as Tholo's 'diary' in 1979.[1]

Maria Tholo was interviewed each week by a researcher, Carol Hermer, over a year starting in February 1976. Hermer chose to present the material "in diary format [...] to lend immediacy to the events."[2]

The interviews spanned a period of time which included the Soweto uprising, in which police infamously fired on schoolchildren. Maria Tholo provided eyewitness testimony of the township rioting and its after-effects, juxtaposed with quotidian detail of her own immediate family life. This gave her account of the uprising "the ambivalence and complexity that history and hindsight sometimes erase".[1]

References

[edit]
  1. ^ a b Barbara Fister (1995). "The Diary of Maria Tholo". Third World Women's Literatures: A Dictionary and Guide to Materials in English. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 86. ISBN 978-0-313-28988-0.
  2. ^ The Diary of Maria Tholo, p.ix. Quoted in Nahem Yousaf (2001). Apartheid Narratives. Rodopi. p. 176. ISBN 90-420-1516-0.
[edit]