Review by Booklist Review
What it's like to grow up under apartheid is the focus of this collection of scholarly essays by South Africans, originally published in South Africa in 1986. Some of the research, with its use of technical jargon and statistical charts, will be too dense for the general reader, but most of the studies show with immediacy that children expose "the nerve of outrage" in a society where extremes of privilege and deprivation are entrenched by law. Children interviewed include Afrikaners and Jews, Indians working on a sugar plantation, and mixed race "strollers" on the streets of Cape Town. There are essays about the Soweto school boycotts where children face police whips, tear gas, and bullets; and on children detained and tortured in prison. Most searing is the case study of the "Surplus People," forcibly removed from their homes to rural slums: in those children the researcher finds "blank, exhausted silence." Includes photographs, references and notes, glossary, and introductions by Archbishop Tutu and by Harvard child psychiatrist Robert Coles. To be indexed. --Hazel Rochman
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
