A revealing oral historical past assortment, Profiles in Diversity comprises in-depth interviews of twenty-six girls in South Africa from varied racial, type, and age backgrounds. performed in Johannesburg, Pretoria, Bloemfontein, Vryburg, Cape city, Port Elizabeth, Grahamstown, Durban, and a rural portion of Kwa-Zulu Natal, those lifestyles histories surround various reports starting from a squatter in a township open air Cape city to an ANC activist in Port Elizabeth, who misplaced 3 sons to the fight for democracy and who herself was once imprisoned numerous instances in the course of what many in South Africa now confer with because the "civil war."  

     the majority of those girls describe their youth spent becoming up in South Africa's segregated society. 3 younger black scholars speak about the hardships they skilled in an unequal academic approach in addition to points of segregation of their adolescence. they're joined of their stories and hopes for the longer term through mature women—one now a excessive court docket pass judgement on in Durban and the opposite a linguist on the collage of South Africa in Pretoria—both of whom studied at Harvard within the usa. Nancy Charton, the 1st girl ordained as an Anglican priest in South Africa, speaks approximately her prior and what led her, in her early seventies, to a vocation within the church.  

      3 Afrikaner ladies, together with one in her overdue twenties, talk about becoming up in South Africa and articulate their issues for a destiny that, in a few respects, differs from the predictions in their English-speaking or black sisters. now-deceased participants of the South African Communist social gathering supply disparate debts of what led them to lives of lively competition to the discrimination that marked the lives of individuals of colour, lengthy prior to apartheid grew to become embedded in South Africa's criminal process. additionally integrated is an account via Dr. Goonam, an Indian lady who grew up in relative convenience within the then province of Natal, whereas Ray Alexander discusses how she witnessed the tyranny visited at the Jews of her local Latvia sooner than immigrating to the Cape.