Patrick Charles - Mother to Mother von Sindiwe Magona. Königs Erläuterungen Spezial.

Characters:

Mandisa and her son Mxolisi are central to everything that happens and everything the novel is about.

Mandisa

the narrator, mother of three children

she became accidentally pregnant when she was 14

Mxolisi

Mandisas eldest son, who kills the white girl

Lunga and Siziwe

Mandisas second son and her daughter

China, Lungile & Dwadwa

Mandisa’s three husbands and the fathers of her children

Mandisa’s extended family(Mama, Tata, Khaya, et al.)

Other characterslike Chinas family, Mandisas friends and neighbours or the white girl and her mother

Themes:

The themes we will look at in this study guide are issues of identity and inequality: violence and oppression; communities, families and traditions; and grief, guilt, hope and despair. There is a larger theme behind all of these which organises the structure of the narrative, and that is an investigation of the past.

Style and language:

The style of the novel moves between a clear and direct address (from “me” to “you”) and a richer, poetic style. The language is an interesting combination of unusual English diction and structures and a mixture of the various languages people of Mandisa’s status would speak – English, Afrikaans and Xhosa.

Interpretations:

Mother to Mother can be interpreted and read as both an informative, semi-autobiographical fictionalised account of the killing of Amy Biehl and as a look at bigger historical issues and symbolism.

Sindiwe Magona (*1943)

© picture alliance/Scanpix TT NEWS AGENCY

ZUSAMMENFASSUNG

Mother to Mother is set in the Western Cape province of South Africa and covers a period from the early 1970s up until 1993.

The book describes the era and aftermath of apartheid in South Africa and is the real world backdrop to the murder of Amy Biehl in August 1993.

Mother to Mother is set in the Western Cape provinceof South Africa and covers a period from the early 1970s up until 1993. The story is largely situated in a black township near Cape Town called Guguletu. Other locations include the squatters’ settlement of Blouvlei, where Mandisa grew up, and her ancestral village Gungululu, where her grandmother still lives. All the African characters in the novel belong to the Xhosa people, and we see many examples of tribal customs and traditions.

The book describes the era and aftermath of apartheid in South Africa, a period of extreme racial oppression, state neglect, police brutality and political turmoil and violence. This is the real world backdrop to the murder of Amy Biehl in August 1993(see p. 32); the novel is a fictionalised account of the killing.

Geography

Guguletu

The majority of the book – and the entirety of its present-day time frame, in 1993 – is set in the township of Guguletu, which is 15 kilometres outside Cape Town, in the Western Cape province of South Africa. Today Guguletu has a population of over 98,000, and more than 98% are black African s. The primary language spoken in the township is Xhosa.

Guguletu (which comes from the Xhosa phrase for “our pride”, igugu lethu) was founded in the 1960s as a home for the black people of the Cape Town district of Langa. During apartheid, blacks in the region were not allowed to live in Cape Town and were forced to live in one district, which became desperately overcrowded. Residents were relocated to Guguletu and other newly-founded townships, where overcrowding, lack of education , jobs and adequate infrastructure(electricity, running water, waste removal, etc.) greatly increased social tensions. Guguletu is infamous for its high levels of crime, including world-famous murders like that of Amy Biehl, and it remains a troubled and problem-ridden community even in the 21st century, with an estimated murder every two and a half days between 2005 and 2010[2].

Blouvlei

Blouvlei is the squatters’ settlement where Mandisa remembers growing up, before her family was forcibly relocated to Guguletu. Blouvlei was founded by squatters – people who occupy land or buildings without permission and without paying rent. It was one of three major squatters’ settlements, the others being Windermere and Epping Forest, which were founded by people coming south to find work in Cape Town during and after the Second World War. They were estimated to be home to roughly 20,000 people each. Cape Town was a “closed city”(blacks were not allowed to live there) and there was very little employment or hope for jobs. Poverty was widespread amongst the black population.[3]

Successive governments made efforts to redirect some of the migrants to a “reception depot” in Langa, which itself became terribly overcrowded. After the war, some settlers were allowed by the local council to buy the land they had occupied, but the national government took control of everything related to housing across the country and began to relocate black Africansas a part of the efforts to enforce segregation.