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Patrick Neill Charles, Sindiwe Magona

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KÖNIGS ERLÄUTERUNGEN SPEZIAL

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Textanalyse und Interpretation zu

Sindiwe Magona

MOTHER TO MOTHER

Patrick Charles

Analyse | Interpretation in englischer Sprache

Zitierte Ausgaben: Magona, Sindiwe: Mother to Mother. Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Sprachen, 2016.

Über den Autor dieser Erläuterung: Patrick Charles wurde 1973 in Bournemouth, Südengland, geboren und studierte englische Literatur an der Universität von Newcastle. 1993 zog er nach Berlin, wo er eine Ausbildung zum Buchhändler machte und zehn Jahre lang als Buchhändler arbeitete. Seit 2004 ist er als freiberuflicher Autor von Schulüchern und Lernhilfen und als Übersetzer im Kulturbereich tätig. Er lebt mit seiner Familie in Berlin.

1. Auflage 2018

ISBN 978-3-8044-4132-3

Titelabbildung: © svetazi/Fotolia

Hinweise zur Bedienung

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INHALT

1. At a glance – the most important points

2. Sindiwe Magona: Life & Works

2.1 Biography

2.2 Contemporary Background

Geography

Apartheid in South Africa

The Xhosa

2.3 Notes on Other Important Works

3. Analyses and Interpretations

3.1 Origins and Sources

Guguletu

The murder of Amy Biehl

Police

The author’s life and experiences

3.2 Summaries

1 - Mandisa’s Lament (p. 1)

2 - Mowbray – Wednesday 25 August 1993 (p. 5)

3 - 5.15 pm – Wednesday 25 August 1993 (p. 20)

4 - 7.30 pm (p. 40)

5 (p. 48)

6 - 4 am – Thursday 28 August 1993 (p. 79)

7 (p. 88)

8 (p. 115)

9 - 6 am Thursday 26 August (p. 164)

10 (p. 173)

11 (p. 198)

12 (p. 203)

3.3 Structure

The narrative perspective – mother to mother

Layers of memories

Thoughts and memories – an introspective narrative

3.4 Characters

Mandisa

Mxolisi

Lunga

Siziwe

China

Lungile

Dwadwa

Mandisa’s extended family

China’s family

Friends and neighbours

The other mother

The dead white girl

Other secondary characters

Constellations

3.5 Themes

IDENTITY & INEQUALITY

VIOLENCE, HATRED & DEHUMANISATION

COMMUNITY, FAMILY, TRADITION & HISTORY

GUILT, HOPE, DESPAIR & COPING WITH GRIEF

THE ORGANISING THEME

3.6 Style and Language

A subjective and emotional narrative voice

Use of Xhosa

Archaic and unusual diction

3.7 Approaches to Interpretation

4. Critical Reception

5. Materials

A brief overview of the history of South Africa

Amy Biehl

Some useful terms

6. Sample Exam Questions and Answers

Task 1: **

Task 2: **

Task 3: ***

Literatur

Edition used for this study guide

About the author

Secondary literature on Mother to Mother

About South Africa

About Amy Biehl

Others

1.	Das Wichtigste auf einen Blick – Schnellübersicht

This study guide to Sindiwe Magona’s novel Mother to Mother is designed to provide an easy-to-use overview of the structure, context, themes and characters of the novel. Here is a quick rundown of the most important points.

Part 2 takes a brief look at Sindiwe Magona and her career.

Magona was born in 1943 in the village of Gungululu in South Africa. She has written a multi-volume autobiography, novels, short stories, poetry and biographies.

Mother to Mother is a semi-autobiographical fictionalised account of the murder of a white american girl (Amy Biehl) and describes the era and aftermath of apartheid in South Africa.

Part 3 offers analyses and interpretations of the novel.

Mother to Mother – Origins and sources:

The novel is set in places where Magona lived and during a time when she was also living there. It draws heavily on her own life and experience, and looks at the lives of Xhosa people in the townships of South Africa.

Summaries:

The narrator is a mother of three called Mandisa. Her eldest son Mxolisi has been involved with a group of student protesters in the township of Guguletu, near Cape Town. In August 1993 he gets caught up in a mob which assaults and kills a white girl in a car.

The novel is in the form of Mandisa’s address directly to the dead girl’s mother. She tells the story of her life and how she had Mxolisi when she was just 15. Her story covers her childhood in the slums of Blouvlei, the government-ordered forced resettlement of the people from there to the township of Guguletu near Cape Town, where families and communities were torn apart, and her struggles to raise her children. Throughout her life she and her children have been witness to and victims of racist oppression and brutality from the police. She moves back and forth in time as she tells her story, explaining how things happened the way they did.

Structure:

The novel is about the origins of events and their consequences, so it moves back and forth in time to illustrate how Mxolisi came to be the troubled, disobedient and violent young man he is in 1993. It also includes descriptions of specific episodes in South African history, as well as stories from Xhosa history and the origins of the hatred and racism in the country.

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 characters like 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.

2.	Sindiwe Magona: Leben und Werk

Sindiwe Magona (*1943)

2.1

Biografie

YEAR	PLACE	EVENT	AGE
1943	Gungululu (village in what is now called the Eastern Cape, formerly Transkei), South Africa	27 August: Sindiwe Magona is born, eldest of eight children
1962	Gugulethu	She works for years as a junior school teacher.	19
1966	Gugulethu	Already the mother of two children, Magona is now pregnant with a third when her husband leaves the family.	23
1981	Gugulethu	Completes a graduate degree (her third academic degree) from Columbia University (USA) via post.	38
1980s–2000s	New York, USA	Magona moves with her family to New York to work at the United Nations.	Late 30s–60
1993	New York	Awarded an Honorary Degree in Humane Letters by Hartwick College in Oneonta (New York State, USA).	50
Up to 1994	New York	Works for the UN, presenting anti-apartheid radio programmes.	51
1990	Cape Town, South Africa	Publication of the first part of her autobiography To My Childrens Children.	47
1998	Cape Town	Mother to Mother was published.	55
2003	New York/Cape Town	Magona has been working for the UN’s Public Information Department before retiring in 2003 and moving back to South Africa.	60
2003–now	Cape Town	Writer in Residence at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town; also works for Georgia State University (USA).
2007	South Africa	In this year, Magona is awarded several major prizes. She is presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award for her contributions to South African Literature, as well as other prizes recognising her literary work, her social activism and her efforts to promote and celebrate Xhosa culture.	64
2012	South Africa	2012 she is joint winner with Nadine Gordimer of the Mbokodo Award in Creative Writing.[1]	69

2.2	Zeitgeschichtlicher Hintergrund

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 province of 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 Africans. 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 Africans as a part of the efforts to enforce segregation.

There were groups of civil rights activists in Blouvlei who worked to resist the forced relocations as part of their struggles against the apartheid system. As Mandisa explains in the novel, however, these efforts were futile, because the government used police and the military to literally destroy the settlements, forcing the inhabitants cross-country to the newly-founded segregated townships like Guguletu.

Gungululu

Mandisa is sent away from Guguletu to live with her grandmother in the ancestral village where her mother was born. This is a very different world from the one she has known so far in her fourteen years: It is a traditional tribal village where old customs are still in effect and there are none of the amenities of even the township slums. Mandisa is lovesick for China and does not adapt easily to the village.

Gungululu is the name of a district as well as of the village, and is situated in the Eastern Cape region – Mandisa describes it as comprising “some twenty or so villages” (p. 101). This is also where the author Sindiwe Magona was born (see Chapter 2.1). At the time covered in the novel, the village and the region were a part of the Transkei, which existed as a state (although unrecognised by the South African government) from 1976 to 1994.

The village is presented in an ambiguous way in the novel (pp. 88–114). Mandisa’s reaction is predictably and even understandably negative – she is a teenager from a bustling township, torn away from her boyfriend and stuck in a backwards village in the middle of nowhere. She complains that the village is “remote”, but worse, she is “separated from China” (p. 108). But there is a simplicity and a calm in the village which she appreciates, and she admits that the place isn’t bad and that the school is good (p. 108). As is the case with the traditions and customs that have so much influence over her life, Mandisa is frustrated and restrained by rural life, yet appreciates its rooted, solid essence.

Apartheid in South Africa

Apartheid (meaning literally “separateness”) was a system of racial segregation in South Africa. It existed as a state-ordered policy determining South African society from 1948 until 1991.[4]

Segregation is the act or policy of separating people of different races, religions or genders, and treating them differently. Many cultures across the world and throughout history, from 8th century China to 13th century Europe and the USA in the 20th century, have practiced segregation in order to separate people of different races in daily life. Even following the end of apartheid in South Africa, segregation by race, religion and gender still exists in various countries all around the world.

The apartheid system was based on a very simple ideology – white supremacy. The fundamental idea was that white-skinned people are in every way superior to darker-skinned people, and that blacks must be repressed and segregated in order to benefit the white ruling class. This repression and segregation was the form that apartheid took and the guiding principle for how society was structured. The white rulers were predominantly Afrikaners, who were descended from the Dutch colonists of the 17th and 18th centuries. They maintained a firm grip on politics, the economy and land ownership and had, since the 17th century, enforced increasingly strict and regulated racial divisions and separations. The development of apartheid – from isolated, casual racist oppression within regions and communities to outright national policy – was gradual, taking over two centuries, and it then lasted in its most strict and brutal form for a little less than fifty years.

A very brief history of apartheid

Pre-20th century racial oppression and discrimination was more freewheeling and casual: there was a slave era, the increasing theft of land and resources from native peoples by European (mostly Dutch) settlers, and with the coming of the British there was a rise in industrialisation and a great expansion of mining projects (South Africa is home to some of the most profitable diamond mines on the planet, with roughly 49% of all diamonds still being mined in Central and South Africa). Black people were pushed off their land when the white settlers wanted to use it themselves; they were forbidden from living in certain places and doing certain work; they were not allowed to vote or enter white churches; and criminal acts against blacks were barely noticed and rarely dealt with seriously by white authorities. The Dutch settlers had already introduced a hierarchy of race, with whites at the top, Indians and Asians somewhere in the middle, and blacks at the very bottom.

By the mid-20th century, however, the central government began to institute stricter and more precise legislation to enforce the system of white supremacy.

The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act in 1949 is considered to be the first step in the institutionalisation of white supremacy as state policy. This law, and the Immorality Act of the following year, made it a crime to marry or have sexual relationships across racial lines.

Another 1950 law, the Population Registration Act, defined the four legal racial groups: black, white, coloured and Indian. Your race defined where you could live, what job you could have, and who you were allowed to interact with. Identification papers included these racial designations, and citizens were not able to cross the boundaries of their assigned region without these papers.

In 1953 the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act defined racially-specific public services, such as hospitals, universities and public parks, which were not allowed to be used by members of other races.

Also passed in 1953, the Bantu Education Act segregated national education, effectively cutting black South Africans off from the better-financed and organised educational infrastructure, which was from this point on only available to whites.

In the 1950s the government also created the “pass laws”, which stopped black South Africans from being able to travel freely in the country. The pass laws in particular limited blacks’ ability to enter urban areas; black South Africans were now required to provide authorisation from a white employer to be able to enter specific towns and cities (when China vanishes, Mandisa first believes he may have been arrested for just this crime: “Maybe he had been arrested for a pass offence”, p. 144).

These laws led to the forced relocations of the 1960s–1980s, during which millions of non-white Africans were removed from their homes and made to live in so-called “tribal homelands” – although these areas often had no historical validity or relevance for the tribes. These regions were also largely unsuitable for larger populations, with very poor agricultural potential and little or no infrastructure. Some of these so-called bantustans became independent republics. The goal of the white supremacist governments was to strip black Africans of their South African citizenship as they moved into the bantustans, thus removing all remaining rights from the blacks and freeing the white rulers of all remaining responsibility for the blacks.

Petty and grand apartheid – Very broadly speaking, apartheid in South Africa came in two forms. Petty apartheid is the segregation of public facilities (hospitals, public toilets, churches, public transport etc.) and social events, meaning that blacks and whites are not allowed – by law – to share these facilities or to mix with one another in “social events”. Grand apartheid is concerned with housing and employment. So the relocations which play such a huge role in Mandisa’s youth are an example of grand apartheid: the government telling her and her family where they are allowed to live (see p. 28, where Mandisa describes the shock of being relocated to Guguletu). Black labour was necessary to uphold South Africa’s industries – particularly mining – because the blacks could be exploited with poor wages, little or no labour law protections, and inadequate security for dangerous jobs. This government control of work is also a case of grand apartheid.

The apartheid system was hugely controversial and widely denounced all around the world. As well as activism and resistance within South Africa, there were global movements aimed at stopping and removing the institution of white supremacy as state policy. Many countries joined in arms and trade embargoes against South Africa. In 1973 the United Nations officially defined the apartheid system as a crime against humanity, which would allow criminal prosecution of individuals responsible for upholding and enforcing the system. Not all member states signed the declaration: by 2008, nearly 90 states had still not signed.

Sport under apartheid – The world of sports is not relevant to Mother to Mother, but a brief look at the subject highlights the injustice and absurdity of white supremacist policies on a social as well as international level. Because the apartheid system forbids multiracial sports teams, it was almost impossible for teams from other countries to play any kind of sports in South Africa. No teams were permitted to compete if they contained members of different races.

The International Table Tennis Federation cut all ties to the South African table tennis organisations in protest. South Africa was banned from the 1964 Olympics, and again in 1968.

The Australian Cricketing Association refused to compete in South Africa or against South African teams as long as they selected their teams on a purely racial basis. In the Chess Olympiad of 1970, the Albanian team forfeited rather than face a team of chess players from an apartheid state. South Africa was suspended from FIFA (the international governing body for football) in 1963. The South African tennis team was banned from the 1970 Davis Cup tournament, and when they were allowed to participate in 1974 they won because the Indian team refused to travel to South Africa to compete in the final.

Following the end of apartheid in 1991, the various boycotts against South African athletes and teams also quickly ended.

By the 1980s increasing number of Western companies and organisations were withdrawing from South Africa in response to louder and louder calls for boycotts and embargoes, taking their money with them, and this, combined with structural flaws in the South African economy, was having a devastating effect on the country. These economic pressures combined with increasingly potent and at times violent resistance within the country, as militant and activist groups grew bolder and angrier. Under increased pressure from within and from the rest of the world, the South African government began to release anti-apartheid political prisoners, which further electrified and revitalised anti-apartheid activism within the country as these political prisoners – or, in the phrase made famous by Amnesty International, “prisoners of conscience” – were welcomed back as heroes and martyrs by the anti-apartheid movement.

Attempts made by the central government to reform apartheid – such as giving “coloureds” and “Indians” voting rights in 1983 – were widely seen as inadequate responses to the problem. The government under P. W. Botha (1916–2006, leader of South Africa from 1978 to 1989) claimed it was about to make reforms to the apartheid laws which never came true.

By the end of the 1980s the South African economy was in terrible shape, and when Botha suffered a stroke and resigned as leader, F. W. de Klerk became the leader of the state, and moved quickly to begin dismantling the discriminatory legislation underpinning apartheid. The changes he initiated included lifting the bans on anti-apartheid groups and organisations like Nelson Mandela’s ANC (African National Congress). De Klerk also ordered the release from prison of Mandela after 27 years, restored the freedom of the press and suspended the death penalty. De Klerk was the country’s president in 1993, when the contemporary events surrounding the murder of the white girl are described in the novel.

The end of apartheid was finalised in a series of negotiations in the years 1990 and 1991, ending in the general elections of 1994 (a year following the events described in Mother to Mother), the first time in the country’s history that all South Africans were allowed to vote. The process was violent, with both “black on black” violence erupting all over the country as well as white supremacist attacks on anti-apartheid activists and even assassinations of anti-apartheid leaders. The negotiations were repeatedly interrupted by protests from groups and organisations representing the far-right white racist minority. The violence continued right up until the day of the general election, with car bombs exploding and people being killed. On April 27, 1994, the apartheid state officially ceased to exist, and South Africa raised its new flag and sang the new official national anthem, “God Bless Africa”.