Profiles in Diversity: Women in the New South Africa FROM THE PUBLISHER
Three Afrikaner women, including one in her late twenties, speak about growing up in South Africa and articulate their concerns for a future that, in some respects, differs from the predictions of their English-speaking or black sisters. Two now-deceased members of the South African Communist Party provide disparate accounts of what led them to lives of active opposition to the discrimination that marked the lives of people of color, long before apartheid became embedded in South Africa's legal system. Also included is an account by Dr. Goonam, an Indian woman who grew up in relative comfort in the then province of Natal, while Ray Alexander discusses how she witnessed the tyranny visited on the Jews of her native Latvia before immigrating to the Cape.
FROM THE CRITICS
Booknews
Presents in-depth interviews of 26 women in South Africa from different racial, class, and age backgroundsthe Afrikaners, the so-called coloreds, and Jewish, African, Indian, and English-speaking white women. Their histories encompass diverse experiences ranging from a squatter in a township outside Cape Town to political activists, and all of them have in common the strong religious faith (whether Jewish, Catholic, Muslim, Hindu, or traditionalist) that is typical of South African society as a whole. Many of the women describe their formative years spent growing up in a segregated society, and some of them express their concerns for the future. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.