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.
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."The Diary of Maria Tholo, p.ix. Quoted in
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".
References
External links The Diary of Maria Tholo by Carol Hermer