UNFOLDING THE DOCUMENTARY. By Matshidiso Taleng

Unfolding The Documentary by South African female writer, Matshidiso Taleng, is a fiction novel, with Tshepang as the protagonist. Tshepang is an adopted young beautiful woman who faces challenges growing up, from mixing with the wrong crowd that introduced her to substance abuse, then one of her friends got her to date one of the biggest most notorious gangster in town, who later got her pregnant and told her to have an abortion, right after she had an abortion she found out that her boyfriend was cheating on her with her best friend, the same best friend that introduced her to this guy. And if that wasn't enough... Tshepang also found out that not only the guy was cheating on her but he's actually married to another woman and they have two kids.

When she changed her ways and stopped being friends with that friend of hers, breaking up with the gangster and changing schools, just to get away from the environment and started doing poetry as well as getting her life together, she met a very nice and humble woman who was a librarian, by the name of Palesa she got close with Palesa and they became good friends, Palesa was older than her so Tshepang not only took her as her friend but like a sister she never had and a perfect mentor, Palesa was also a poet so she took Tshepang under her wing and taught her everything there was to know about performance poetry, She took her to poetry sessions and got her in to poetry clubs where Tshepang could share her work with other poets. When everything was falling into place in Tshepang's life, she then got to find out that the parents she knew and brought her up weren't her real parents, and that her real Mother was Palesa.. Her mentor/friend, she got to know that by mistakenly finding a letter that Palesa wrote and gave to her adoptive parents.

She went to confront Palesa about the letter, Palesa was shocked that Tshepang is the baby that she gave up for adoption, all this time she used to hang out with Tshepang... It never clicked not even one bit that Tshepang could be her daughter because after she gave her up she never had any contact with the adoptive parents. Tshepang heard a shocking and sad story from Palesa when Palesa told her that the reason she gave her up for adoption was that her father used to abuse her sexually since she was 9 years old till she got pregnant at 16 years old and infected with HIV. So she couldn't keep Tshepang since it was going to be a constant reminder of what had happened to her.