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

While many of these young people wanted to become lawyers or politicians and active, professional members of society, most of them had little or no official education. Mandisa first mentions the student protests and education boycotts on page 10, describing how a student organisation (COSAS) told students to boycott schools out of solidarity with striking teachers. For Mandisa, this playing at politics and social unrest is unreal, a dangerous and stupid gamewhich is stopping the young people from understanding life – as she sees it, by wasting their youth and not going to school, they all but guaranteeing that their lives as adults will be no better than her generation’s: “if they’re not careful, they’ll end up in the kitchens and gardens of white homes … just like us, their mothers and fathers” (p. 10).

ZUSAMMENFASSUNG

Sindiwe Magona has written a two-volume autobiography (the first part of which was her first published work), a biography of Archbishop Ndungane, as well as short story collections, poetry and novels. She has also written more than 100 books for children – we won’t be looking at these in this study guide, however.

The novels

Mother to Motherwas Magona’s first published novel, and it remains her most famous and successful work. The Best Meal Everis set in a South African township and is about a girl having to look after her younger siblings. Beauty’s Giftis a novel about a group of women and how they deal with the HIV/AIDS-related death of one of their circle of friends.

Short story collections

As with her novels, Magona’s short storiesdraw on her personal experiences and are all concerned with South African social issues, in particular those affecting women.

Poetry

Autobiographies

To My Children’s Children, Magona’s first published work, is an open letter to her grandchildren in which she tells the story of her own life up to the age of 23, and shares what she can of Xhosa culture and traditions. She presents herself explicitly as a “Xhosa grandmother”, and the book is of interest as a personal memoir, as an eyewitness account of the apartheid era, as an anthropological study of Xhosa tribal customs and folklore, and as a study of how women of all ages suffer and are oppressed under patriarchal social systems. Forced to Growcontinues her autobiography from the age of 23 on.

Biography

This is a biography of Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane, who was a pioneering anti-apartheid activist who was imprisoned on Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela also spent many years in prison. After being released from jail he continued to work to end apartheid, and campaigned for the rights of HIV positive people, equal rights for women and protecting the poor and dispossessed.

Children’s books

Magona has written more than 100 books for children over the years. This forthcoming series of books[9] for children will be published in four South African languages as well as in English. These tales are intended by Magona to promote readingin general – she worries that South Africa lacks a culture of reading – as well as supporting and promoting literacy in African languages.

ZUSAMMENFASSUNG

Mother to Mother is a fictionalised account of the murder in August 1993 of American student Amy Biehl in the South African township of Gugulethu (Guguletu in the novel, also known as Guguleto). It draws heavily on author Sindiwe Magona’s own life: she was born in Gugululu, lived in Guguletu, worked as a maid in white family’s homes, and lived through the apartheid era and its aftermath.

Guguletu

Mandisa describes the township (see pp. 27–34, for example) as she experienced it, having been forced to move there with her family when she was 10, and talks about the mistakes that had been made in how it was set up – mistakes that range from the evil to the incompetent.

The name Guguletu is a shortened form of the Xhosa phrase “igugu lethu”, which means “our pride” – a name which acquires a particularly bitter irony, both historically and in the fictional context of the novel. The township was established in the 1960s and was infamous for its high levels of unrest and crime. As presented in the novel, it is a crowded place with high unemployment, a lot of poverty and social neglect, and an intimidating, militarised police presence. Mandisa describes a depressing environmentwith little support for young people, who are left to wander the streets feeling frustrated and neglected. As well as being the site of the actual murder of Amy Biehl in 1993, Guguletu is a microcosm of South Africa’s racial and social troubles, and for this reason it is one of the most significant original inspirations for the novel. With its extraordinarily high levels of violent crime and racially segregated, socially troubled population, the township provides a grimly ideal setting for the author’s intentions, as outlined in her preface, to look at what lessons can be learned from a tragedy like the murder of Amy Biehl, and to more closely examine the failures of a society which is corrupted by injustice and brutality.

The author Sindiwe Magona grew up in Guguletu, and she would have seen and experienced the apartheid era in its entirety. Her familiarity with the township is evident in her strong evocation of its history and chaotic life.

The murder of Amy Biehl

Athol Fugard says he was sickened last summer when he learned of the murder of Amy Elizabeth Biehl, the white Fulbright scholar from Newport Beach who was pulled from her car and stabbed by a mob screaming anti-white slogans in the black township of Guguleto, South Africa.

“Her death was horrible, awful,” he said, recalling that the idealistic, 26-year-old Biehl had been studying the role of women during South Africas current political changes.

“The slogan that crowd was chanting --One settler! One bullet!-- is one of the bitter fruits of apartheid. Its not just the young men who are chanting it, you know, but the young women as well.”