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Diary from a South African Prison — Tshenuwani Simon Farisani
Tshenuwani Simon Farisani
Fortress Press, Philadelphia · 1987
First Edition · First Printing
The Book: True first edition, first printing of Tshenuwani Simon Farisani’s Diary from a South African Prison, edited by John A. Evenson. The copyright page bears the original 1987 Fortress Press copyright and the printer’s code 3004E87, with no statement of a later printing, subsequent impression, revised edition, or reissue. Original publisher’s pictorial paper wrappers as issued. No evidence of later issue points, book-club manufacture, or subsequent reprint observed.
Condition: Very Good+. The original pictorial wrappers exhibit moderate edge wear, light rubbing, minor creasing, and small areas of chipping. The binding remains tight and the interior clean, with no ownership markings observed.
Story Of The Book
Apartheid tried to isolate its prisoners from the world. Tshenuwani Simon Farisani turned imprisonment into testimony.
A Lutheran pastor and anti-apartheid activist, Farisani was repeatedly imprisoned, interrogated, and tortured by South African authorities. Diary from a South African Prison records that experience from inside the system itself, preserving not a later historian’s reconstruction but the voice of someone who personally endured the machinery of political repression.
Published in 1987, while apartheid still remained in force, the book brought Farisani’s account of detention and abuse into international circulation. His testimony reveals political imprisonment not simply as confinement, but as an attempt to break the individual psychologically, morally, and spiritually—to make continued opposition appear impossible.
Farisani’s religious identity gives the book another dimension. His resistance was inseparable from conscience: the state could control his physical circumstances, but it could not easily dictate the moral obligations by which he understood them.
The book therefore preserves the collision between two forms of authority—one enforced by prisons and coercion, the other grounded in conscience.
Why It’s In The Collection
Diary from a South African Prison belongs in the collection because it documents authoritarian power from the perspective of the person subjected to it.
Farisani does not describe political imprisonment as an abstraction. He records what interrogation, torture, detention, and state intimidation actually do to a human being. That makes the book an especially direct form of witness literature: the institutions of apartheid appear not merely as laws or historical structures, but as forces acting upon an individual body and conscience.
Its publication date matters as well. This was not testimony assembled after apartheid had fallen. The first edition appeared while the system Farisani condemned still possessed the power to imprison its opponents. Publication therefore carried his experience beyond the institutions attempting to contain him and placed that testimony before readers elsewhere in the world.
Within the collection, the book demonstrates one of the essential functions of witness: power may control a prisoner’s circumstances, but publication can prevent it from controlling the final account of what happened there.
Collection Categories: Political Imprisonment · Witness Literature · Memoir & Testimony · Human Rights · Anti-Authoritarianism · Religious Conscience
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Authentication Evidence
• Title page identifies Fortress Press, Philadelphia, consistent with the original publisher of the work.
• Copyright page bears the original 1987 Fortress Press copyright with no indication of a later edition, revised edition, or reissue.
• The book was originally published by Fortress Press in 1987, consistent with the first edition.
• Copyright page contains the original printer's code 3004E87, consistent with the initial printing.
• Copyright page contains no statement of a later printing, subsequent impression, or reprint.
• The original pictorial paper wrappers match those found on documented first-printing examples.
• No evidence of later issue points, book club manufacture, or subsequent reprint observed.
• The observed bibliographic evidence is consistent with a true first edition, first printing.
Tshenuwani Simon Farisani
Fortress Press, Philadelphia · 1987
First Edition · First Printing
The Book: True first edition, first printing of Tshenuwani Simon Farisani’s Diary from a South African Prison, edited by John A. Evenson. The copyright page bears the original 1987 Fortress Press copyright and the printer’s code 3004E87, with no statement of a later printing, subsequent impression, revised edition, or reissue. Original publisher’s pictorial paper wrappers as issued. No evidence of later issue points, book-club manufacture, or subsequent reprint observed.
Condition: Very Good+. The original pictorial wrappers exhibit moderate edge wear, light rubbing, minor creasing, and small areas of chipping. The binding remains tight and the interior clean, with no ownership markings observed.
Story Of The Book
Apartheid tried to isolate its prisoners from the world. Tshenuwani Simon Farisani turned imprisonment into testimony.
A Lutheran pastor and anti-apartheid activist, Farisani was repeatedly imprisoned, interrogated, and tortured by South African authorities. Diary from a South African Prison records that experience from inside the system itself, preserving not a later historian’s reconstruction but the voice of someone who personally endured the machinery of political repression.
Published in 1987, while apartheid still remained in force, the book brought Farisani’s account of detention and abuse into international circulation. His testimony reveals political imprisonment not simply as confinement, but as an attempt to break the individual psychologically, morally, and spiritually—to make continued opposition appear impossible.
Farisani’s religious identity gives the book another dimension. His resistance was inseparable from conscience: the state could control his physical circumstances, but it could not easily dictate the moral obligations by which he understood them.
The book therefore preserves the collision between two forms of authority—one enforced by prisons and coercion, the other grounded in conscience.
Why It’s In The Collection
Diary from a South African Prison belongs in the collection because it documents authoritarian power from the perspective of the person subjected to it.
Farisani does not describe political imprisonment as an abstraction. He records what interrogation, torture, detention, and state intimidation actually do to a human being. That makes the book an especially direct form of witness literature: the institutions of apartheid appear not merely as laws or historical structures, but as forces acting upon an individual body and conscience.
Its publication date matters as well. This was not testimony assembled after apartheid had fallen. The first edition appeared while the system Farisani condemned still possessed the power to imprison its opponents. Publication therefore carried his experience beyond the institutions attempting to contain him and placed that testimony before readers elsewhere in the world.
Within the collection, the book demonstrates one of the essential functions of witness: power may control a prisoner’s circumstances, but publication can prevent it from controlling the final account of what happened there.
Collection Categories: Political Imprisonment · Witness Literature · Memoir & Testimony · Human Rights · Anti-Authoritarianism · Religious Conscience
———
Authentication Evidence
• Title page identifies Fortress Press, Philadelphia, consistent with the original publisher of the work.
• Copyright page bears the original 1987 Fortress Press copyright with no indication of a later edition, revised edition, or reissue.
• The book was originally published by Fortress Press in 1987, consistent with the first edition.
• Copyright page contains the original printer's code 3004E87, consistent with the initial printing.
• Copyright page contains no statement of a later printing, subsequent impression, or reprint.
• The original pictorial paper wrappers match those found on documented first-printing examples.
• No evidence of later issue points, book club manufacture, or subsequent reprint observed.
• The observed bibliographic evidence is consistent with a true first edition, first printing.