Mother to Mother von Sindiwe Magona. Königs Erläuterungen Spezial.

The novel is very much about the apartheid era – about the forces (racism and colonialism) which made it possible, the terrible consequences it had for society as a whole, and for tribes, families and individuals. Sindiwe Magona is a generation older than her main character, Mandisa, and Mandisa’s experiences are based on Magona’s own life, specifically the places she was forced to live and the pressures on her as a black woman and a young mother. Magona was born in 1943 and witnessed the apartheid era in its entirety; as an adult she campaigned ceaselessly from the UN in New York for an end to apartheid.

The Xhosa

Mandisa and her family (and the other African characters we see in the novel) are all Xhosa. There are 8 million Xhosa people living in South Africa (roughly 18% of the population, according to the 2011 census). They are an ethnic sub-group of the Bantu peoples, which is the umbrella term for the hundreds of ethnic groups in Africa who speak variants of the Bantu languages. The language spoken by the Xhosa is called isiXhosa, and it is the second most commonly spoken language in South Africa (after Zulu).

During apartheid, the Xhosa were denied South African citizenship, and were instead allowed to live in self-governed so-called “homelands”, called Transkei and Ciskei.

The cattle killing movement: “The hatred has but multiplied.”

The cattle killing movement of 1854–1858 was a near-catastrophic act of self-destruction committed by the Xhosa, based on a prophecy by a young girl. Cattle introduced by the white settlers had spread new diseases to the native cattle, many of which died. The loss of cattle – which were for the Xhosa an important status symbol as well as being a source of food and leather (see pp. 176–177) – was a serious problem. The girl, Nongqawuse, told her father that she had encountered spirits out in the fields, and that they had told her that the Xhosa should kill all of their cattle. The spirits of all the dead Xhosa would then return to drive out the white settlers, and bring back all the cattle with them (p. 180).

Her prophecy made its way to the chief of the Xhosa, who ordered the tribe to kill all their cattle and destroy all their grain supplies. Some Xhosa allegedly believed the prophecy to be genuine, and some simply followed orders. Whatever their reasons may have been, the results were disastrous. Famine struck, the Xhosa had no food, the prophesied return of the ancestors never happened and the dead cattle never reappeared. Instead, the white European settlers were forbidden by their governor Sir George Grey from helping the starving, helpless Xhosa unless the tribespeople signed labour contracts with the white landowners. The Xhosa were then bound to work in the mines, labouring for the white colonists.

This is told to Mandisa by her grandfather Tatomkhulu (see Chapter 10, pp. 175–183). A true story and an important episode in Xhosa history, the story has additional significance to the novel. Mandisa has been taught that the Xhosa followed the prophecy because they were “superstitious and ignorant” (p. 175). But her grandfather teaches her that it was an act of desperation, fed by their hatred of the white settlers who had stolen absolutely everything from the native peoples of the country they had colonised – a colossal, catastrophic act of self-harm. Mandisa comes to believe that the story reveals something honourable rather than merely being a display of disastrous ignorance. Her grandfather positions it in a sequence of protests and uprisings against the white settlers through the colonial history of South Africa, pointing out efforts by the black inhabitants of the country to reclaim their land which had been stolen from them, and to resist the “button without a hole” – meaning coins, because money was unknown to pre-colonial South Africa – because of the damaging effect money would have on a purely agrarian culture.

The symbolism of this history of honourable but doomed protests and violent, apocalyptic uprisings against the hated white oppressors is of great relevance to the tragic story of the killing of the white girl in Guguletu – the story at the heart of Mother to Mother. The same hatred of colonists who had stolen everything can be seen in both the cattle killing movement of 1857 and the “one settler, one bullet!” war cry of the furious anti-apartheid protests of the 1980s and 1990s, and the mob who killed Amy Biehl.

Rites of passage and traditions: Marriage, parenthood and gender

We see different examples of traditional customs and rites of passage in the novel, and learn about the traditions which organise marriage, the business of parenthood and the roles and interaction of men and women. These traditions are seen with a degree of ambivalence: While Mandisa is frustrated by the unfairness of the limits imposed on her as a woman and a young mother, and is equally annoyed by the dominance allowed to males within the culture, she also sees how a lack of traditions and respect for customs and cultural roles can damage and break a society.

We will look at the role played by traditional initiation rites and customs in the chapter on themes in the novel (see p. 100). These include:

 Marriage arrangements and ceremonies

 Circumcision and coming of age rites for young men

 Naming customs

 The patriarchal structure of tribal society

 Tribal legends and myths

 Faith healers (Sangomas)

Education and politics

“Boycotts, strikes and indifference have plagued the schools in the last two decades. Our children have paid the price.”

(Mandisa, p. 72)

Poster from 1985 protesting and demanding reform of the education system.[5]

The combination of inadequate education, social neglect and bad politics (at once irresponsible, oppressive politics proved to be explosive in the immediate aftermath of the apartheid regime. The protests and explosions of violence which Sindiwe Magona talks about in Mother to Mother were shocking to many – to locals and neighbours as well as outsiders and foreign observers.

The apartheid system influenced education as well as every other aspect of life in South Africa. From the early 1980s, black schools were legally required to conduct the majority of their lessons in English and Afrikaans, with the native languages only allowed to be used for subjects like art and music. The government’s goal was to make sure that all black people in South Africa knew how to communicate with white people in “white” languages. There were widespread and at times violent protests against this, as many students didn’t want to speak Afrikaans. There were strikes and boycotts of schools throughout the townships.

Multilingual colonial societies have an interesting side-effect when it comes to languages. Organising a society along racial lines – as in apartheid South Africa, with whites on the top and blacks on the bottom – and enforcing the language(s) of the minority ruling class means that the lower classes are forced by circumstance and by law to learn the colonisers’ languages. But they also grow up speaking their own tribal language. In the case of the black characters in Mother to Mother, that language is Xhosa.

The result of this structure, with black native languages forbidden from being taught in schools but being the main form of communication at home, is that the blacks grow up speaking at least three languages – a tribal mother tongue, English and Afrikaans – whereas the white ruling classes will usually be limited to speaking only the official “white” languages.

The fluid ease with which Mandisa and her family switch between these languages and the interesting way in which the languages interact with and influence each other are looked at in this study guide in the chapter on Style and Language (p. 114).

The quality of teaching was also an issue. Over 90% of all the teachers in white schools were properly trained and certified teachers[6] whereas only about 15% of the teachers in black schools were trained teachers. The pass rate for exams and graduating among black students was less than half what it was for white students.

The issue of education is very important in Mother to Mother – Mandisa talks about it on pages 71–72, for example – but more as a matter of context and environment. It is another one of those outside influences contributing to the violence and unrest of the society and more specifically to Mxolisi’s development and behaviour as a young man. The generally low quality and restrictive nature of segregated education in the apartheid state had the effect of increasing ignorance, unemployment and despair throughout the black population. With no real education – we can see how Mandisa is constantly frustrated in her efforts to educate herself – people have no chance to get well-paying jobs or to improve their position within society. The lack of perspectives creates more despair and frustration, on the one hand: and on the other hand, it provokes radical and at times violent resistance and protest.

The student protests

The school boycott was sparked by the deteriorating quality of education in black schools, the school age limit of twenty, and the policy that denied students representation by a democratically elected Student Representative Council.[7]

The student protests of the “Young Lions” in 1993 which Mandisa talks about were part of a long tradition of protest and resistance, but in this year they were particularly energized by the frustratingly slow pace of change and improvement in society and politics following the release of Mandela, among other developments. Mandela had called the Young Lions “the government-in-waiting”[8] because so many of their leaders were gifted, intelligent and energetic individuals who spoke passionately and articulately about the need for change in South Africa and an end to the oppression of the blacks. But many of these young people had come out of a nation-wide movement which had boycotted schools, protesting the state-led efforts to keep the black population in a state of passivity and ignorance.

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 game which 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 Mother was Magona’s first published novel, and it remains her most famous and successful work. The Best Meal Ever is set in a South African township and is about a girl having to look after her younger siblings. Beauty’s Gift is 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 stories draw 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 Grow continues 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 reading in 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 environment with 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.”

Nevertheless, Fugard adds, white South Africa bears as much responsibility for Biehls death as the black youths who actually wielded the murder weapons and shouted the slogans.

“That violence and that rage were created by the system,” he said.

“Im not absolving those young people of responsibility. But I would be so blind, I would be guilty of such terrible complacency if I didnt acknowledge that it is the system of white privilege and white domination that created two generations of lost young men and women for whom violence is the only way forward, as they see it.”[10]

Amy Biehl (1967–1993) was a white US American student who was killed by a mob of black South Africans in Guguletu. Four men were convicted of the murder, but their convictions were later overturned and they were freed by the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Amy Biehl had been a student at Stanford University (USA) and was studying at the University of the Western Cape on a scholarship from the Fulbright Program. She was an anti-apartheid activist and, as shown in the novel, she was friends with black students. The account of her death in Mother to Mother is largely accurate: she had offered to drive black friends back home to Guguletu, where an already-active mob of black youths spotted her and stabbed and stoned her to death.

As Sindiwe Magona points out in her preface to the novel (pp. v–vi), there is an irony, however morbid, in Amy having been killed by precisely the people she was most trying to help. Her stated aim in writing the novel is to present the world which produced Mxolisi (who here stands as a fictional representative of the four convicted killers), and by doing so to attempt to show and explain how the dehumanising brutality and injustice of the apartheid system made the young black population of South Africa capable of such violent and destructive impulses.

Amy Biehl’s murder was one of the most high profile cases in South African history. Although many white tourists have been killed over the years while in the country, something about the Biehl case resonated far beyond the usual limits of shock, outrage and grief. This is probably not due simply to the fact that a young white American girl was murdered by black African men, but rather to the anti-apartheid, politically and socially active role she had been playing in the country prior to her death. As Nelson Mandela mentioned in his speech accepting the Congressional Gold Medal[11], Amy Biehl “made our aspirations her own” – she was working actively towards achieving the dreams of a free and just society in South Africa, liberated of racist government oppression and strong enough to tackle the post-apartheid turmoil.

Amy Biehl has, since her death, been held up as an example of conscience-driven social activism. Her father welcomed the amnesty granted to her killers in the spirit of forgiveness and understanding, and he and her mother have founded a Foundation Trust to benefit township youths.[12]

Police

“When have the Guguletu Police been known for being reasonable, to say nothing of polite? Courteous? HA! Don’t make me laugh.” (Mandisa, p. 164)

As the most visible and present face of an oppressive regime, the police appear in Mother to Mother in a very negative light. We see them rampaging through Mandisa’s family’s house, murdering suspects, and lurking in their fortress-like stations with the fearsome 6-wheel armoured Saracens[13] intimidating the locals. They are something to be feared and avoided at all costs: very far from the “friend and helper” of Germany, or from the “protect and serve” ideal of the USA. As a group they are frightening and menacing, and individual police officers appearing in the novel only reinforce this impression. For black residents of the townships, white police officers provide no security and protection.

As one of the enforcement agencies of the white supremacist apartheid regime, the police force in South Africa is shown here to be still riddled with a violent and racist approach to policing which considers blacks to be beneath the law, and grants them fewer rights. A key scene in the long history of Mandisa and Mxolisi is the incident when Mxolisi was 4 years old, and saw police officers shoot and kill two boys after he told the police where they were hiding (pp. 146–148). The incident traumatises Mxolisi for years to come and obviously shapes his attitude towards white people, authorities, the police and life in general. Another pivotal incident also concerns the police, when they storm into Mandisa’s house in search of Mxolisi (Chapter 6).

The violence and racism of the white police is a major influence on the world presented in Mother to Mother – the police stand for the brutal racism of apartheid, a crushing and very real presence in the lives of the black population.

The author’s life and experiences

To summarise these points which are raised in this chapter and elsewhere in this study guide, Mother to Mother draws heavily on the author’s own life and experiences, but is far from being an autobiography. Sindiwe Magona is a writer who is motivated by social awareness and a moral and activist sense of what is important and what is right. The novel reflects this approach by tackling a real-life crime (the murder of Amy Biehl) which was the product of historical, social and political forces, movements and crimes – but not as crime fiction or as a drama about the tragedy of the girl’s death, but instead as a portrait of the world and history which made it possible.

To make this real, convincing and truthful, the author draws on her own life. Like Mandisa, Sindiwe Magona:

 Lived as a black woman in South Africa under apartheid

 Was born in Gungululu

 Grew up in Gugulethu

 Became a mother at a young age (Magona was 19, Mandisa 15)

 Was abandoned by the husband of her first child

 Was a gifted student and wanted to study and educate herself

 Worked as a maid in the homes of rich white families