ANTIDOTE FOR GLOBAL FEMINIST GAPS
AS ENCODED IN SINDIWE MAGONA’S BLACK
SOUTH AFRICAN AUTOBIOGRAPHIES
Lesibana Rafapa
University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa

Corresponding author: Lesibana Rafapa. University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa. E-mail: rafaplj@
unisa.ac.za.
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ABSTRACT
The relatively new black woman South African writer Sindiwe Magona’s
autobiographies To My Children’s Children (1990) and Mother to Mother (1998) urge the
agency of oppressed black South African women in a nuanced manner. That she portrays
female characters from a characteristically feminist perspective framed normatively
within a milieu in which women are confronted by and confront challenges in a racialized
and gendered context should not misidentify her as a discursively indistinct feminist
writer. This chapter argues that Magona’s category of writings epitomized mostly in her
two major works hinges on female protagonists reinventing themselves in an exploitative
and discriminatory atmosphere not in a way compatible with what are conventionally
acknowledged as the types and evolutionary features of dominant feminist theory. I
analyze Magona’s works with the objective of illustrating how they are anchored in fresh
explanations of aspects of black south African cultures as mindful of and sympathetic to
the social position of women. By a close look at Magona’s work and some aspects of
black South African cultures constituting the fabric of her art, I engage earlier feminist
interpretations reached by Magona analysts through what I demonstrate to be distorting
lenses that deny self-description through (mis)representation. I make a distinction
between Magona’s individual character depiction dwelling on disposition coalescing into
what may be understood as individual trait unfolding within a specific cultural matrix, as
opposed to a kind of characterization identifiable as metonymically symbolic of
communal ethos. The study seeks to highlight how discourse in Magona’s novels
contributes to a theory of feminism accommodative of social vantage points hitherto
repressed in dominant feminist discourse tilted towards the more powerful centre.
MAGONA’S DEVELOPMENT OF A
WOMANIST REFRACTED VOICE WITHIN
GLOBAL POLYVOCALITY
In this chapter I consider how in her autobiographies To My Children’s Children (1990)
and Mother to Mother (1998) the black South African woman writer Sindiwe Magona
displays a profound critique of dominant feminist theory as well as apply it to the discourse of
her narratives in a distinctive manner deserving of critical attention. While Magona’s relative
under-appreciation as a writer of fiction can be ascribed to the fact that as recently as 1999
she could be described as “a recent practitioner of the novel form … not that widely known
outside South Africa” (Boehmer 1999:159, 160), the niche she has now carved for herself
warrants more dedicated critical attention.
Due to the autobiographical element of her fiction (see Daymond 2002:331; Masemola
2010:117), I integrate my scrutiny of Magona’s novels or autobiographies within what I assert
as her real life discursive progression within the feminist conceptual framework the
distinctive inflection of which I am pursuing in this study. A character like Joyce in Magona’s
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1991 short story collection Living, Loving and Lying Awake at Night incarnates some aspect
of Magona’s theoretical immersion in the former’s fictionalized view that “a feminist
perspective in South Africa is inhibited by racism” (Magona 1991:59). Even a critic such as
Loflin (1990:112) does shed light on this kind of characterization, albeit from a historically
periodising vantage point paying scant attention to what may be described as the short
narratives’ dialectical theoretical matrix of feminism. Magona’s life journey testifies that she
has been exposed to and influenced by feminist theory in interesting ways this chapter seeks
to outline. Intellectually equipped with academic and professional qualifications including
degrees from Colombia University, with an experience of working for the United Nations in
New York and living there for twenty three years, it cannot make sense that she has not
grappled with feminist ideas forming part of the global intellectual context at least from the
time “issues like race and class … were an integral part of the feminism of the 1960s and
1970s” (Mann and Huffman 2005:60). One feature of Magona’s ‘moulding’ by feminist
theory is her appropriation of the 1980s postcolonial theoretical feature of “global feminism.”
According to Mann and Huffman (2005:66), this tenet of feminism highlights “relations
between local and global processes affect[ing] women in different social locations across the
globe.” I intend to include this criterion in my scrutiny of the discourse of Magona’s selected
novels. In addition to testing the discourse of Magona’s narratives against major feminist
postcolonial theoretical orientations, I shall probe evidence from them of feminist postmodernist and post-structuralist views of identity as “simply a construct of language,
discourse, and cultural practices” (Mann and Huffman 2005:63). In this way I should show
how Magona’s influence by feminist theory bears some correlation with its evolving tenets
across the ages. As further testimony of Magona’s comprehensiveness in subsuming
feminism in order to consolidate her own trope of womanist social commentary, I explore
also how the discourse of Magona’s fiction points to a space in her feminist evolution
identifiable with 1970s “third wave” feminists in their refinement of second wave tendencies
to “factionalize” women unified internally by a “sisterhood” that yet ended up treating
“oppressions as separate and distinct” and hierarchisizing oppressions by treating “one form
as more fundamental than another” (Mann and Huffman 2005: 59).
In keeping with the global evolution of feminist theory , there is evidence in Magona’s
fiction of what may be seen as her commonality with a section of the 1970s “third wave” or
new generation feminists is their moving of “subjugated voices from the margins to the
centre, thus decentering dominant discourse” (Mann and Huffman 2005:65). Magona’s
critical identification with the intersectional position of the second wave counter-faction of
feminist women of colour who viewed “identity politics as the key to liberation” (Mann and
Huffman 2005:58), in reaction to what may be described as dominant white women’s pushing
of black women from the centre of then dominant feminist theory strongly taking root in
America, is further evidence of her familiarity with the different streams of feminism as the
theory developed across geographical space. Intersectional thinking, according to Mann and
Huffman (2005:58), arose “in the United States … from within the second wave … [sharing]
a focus on difference … that embraced identity politics as the key to liberation”, while one
faction co-existing with it “saw freedom in resistance to identity.” Intersectional views
negated those of the second wave of American feminists for “alleged essentialism, white
solipsism, and failure to adequately address the simultaneous and multiple oppressions” of
women across race and class (Mann and Huffman 2005:58). Such a strand of third wave
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feminists was later “exemplified by postmodernist and post-structuralist feminists who
critically questioned the notion of coherent identities and viewed freedom as resistance to
categorization or identity,” as Mann and Huffman (2005:58) explain. I argue that Magona’s
novels display a typically feminist defiance of binary exclusivism, in both common and
unique ways setting apart both her literary project and brand of feminism.
As I analyse the three novels by mapping the evolution of global feminism onto
Magona’s progressive immersion in the theory, I illustrate how close she is to some
womanist, intersectional and polyvocal problematisation of what would otherwise be a
regurgitated affirmation of dominant discourse within feminism. As Mann and Huffman
(2005:65) explain, polyvocality embraces the view that “No one view is inherently superior to
another and any claim to having a clear view of the truth is simply a masternarrative – a
partial perspective that assumes dominance and privilege.” I argue that a polyvocal stance
frames Magona’s discourse in the two novels, identifiable with the manner in which,
according to Mann and Huffman (2005:63-64,) the common epistemological ground joining
intersectionality with postmodernism and post-structuralism is the way in which exponents of
the crisscrossing streams “call for … more localized mini-narratives to give voice to the
multiple realities that arise from diverse social locations.” The womanism I will use data
collected from Magona’s novels to trace, is one Alice Walker sees lived by a “communal
mother … who is committed to the integrity, survival and wholeness of entire peoples due to
her sense of self and her love for her culture” (Mehta 2000:397).
AGENCY URGED FOR BLACK SOUTH AFRICANS WITHIN A
COMPLACENT APARTHEID NATION: TO MY CHILDREN’S
CHILDREN AND MAGONA’S WOMANIST DISCOURSE
Magona’s autobiography To my Children’s Children (1990) opens with an implied
interpretation by the South African woman writer herself of her work as an attempt at
performing a written preservation of the black South Africans’ socio-political history, which
normally would have been transmitted verbally for the reason that theirs “is an oral tradition”
(1). She tells not only her own life story as she describes what it was like “living in the 1940s
onwards … in the times of your great, grandmother, me” (1). Simultaneously she hints at the
entire narrative carrying out an explication of the history of a people, by making it clear that
the autobiography details how “Heavy, indeed, was the yoke that black people bore” due to
apartheid conditions created by a patriarchal and racist white rule in which “the white man …
had set himself up as their god” (1). Her anti-racist stand is reinforced when the symbol of
patriarchy is expanded to include blackness, as in her authorial statement concerning her
authoritarian father whose sense of “being powerful” would never leave her (2). That
Magona’s conception of feminism includes the view that “macroeconomic policies have
gendered effects” (Berik et al. 2009:3) is borne out when right at the opening of the
autobiography she conjures an atmosphere of economic domination in phrases like “pounds,
shillings, and pennies” and “rands and cents” (1). One more crucial element of Magona’s
discourse in this long narrative is her projection of a religious pluralist ideal, by referring to
white people imposing themselves as the” god” of black South Africans under apartheid.
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Among the defining features of the cosmology of the black South Africans living in the
village of Gungululu with the protagonist, are spiritualities symbolized by the phrases
“Ootikoloshe, the little people, and izithunzela, the zombies” (10), “believed thunder was God
speaking” (11), “spill beer on the ground before drinking that the ancestors may partake
thereof” (12) and “suffered through at church” (15). By acknowledging the presence of
western Christian churches among the black villagers, Magona feministically lets go of what
would otherwise be an ethnocentric view of spirituality. After earlier referring to whites
imagining themselves as the “god” of oppressed black South Africans, her childhood memory
of lighting invokes a hybrid conception of the natural phenomenon as “God”, speaking – this
time a deity spelt with capital “G”. However, the narrator’s confession that during her
childhood she found Sunday church services in the black village of Gungululu “unispiring”
(15) is Magona’s foregrounding and prioritization of the indigenous religion of her people
practised with abandon (12). A religious culture in which people believe in witchcraft related
creatures like zombies and revere their ancestors as Magona’s fellow villagers do, do not see
their indigenous consciousness and lifestyles in a hierarchical relationship with Christianity.
By such a stylistic manipulation, Magona enriches her domestication of global feminism in a
complex and questioning manner typical of the feminist project, especially in its advanced
historical evolutionary stage of feminist postcoloniality.
The cultural aesthetic of oral storytelling intensifies the indigenous cultural complex of
which indigenous spirituality is a constituent. Apart from a strategic encapsulation of the
written mode of narration within what the opening paragraphs of the autobiography inculcate
as an originally verbal narration of the contents, Magona makes clear that the traditional
folktales and riddles form the texture of how children in Gungululu were brought up (13). The
observation that “In her autobiography, Sindiwe Magona draws on two sets of narrative
conventions – those of Xhosa orature and those of western writing – and the resultant text is
dialogic” (Daymond 2002:331) should accurately be seen as true not only of Mother to
Mother (1998) which the writer specifically focuses on. Magona’s debut autobiography To
My Children’s Children (1990) proves to be the fountainhead of a stylistic feature refracting
Magona’s brand of feminism, later pervading her other works as I illustrate in the next
sections of this chapter.
One pertinent aspect of feminist postcoloniality is its orientation towards the kind of
religious pluralism encoded in the discourse of To My Children’s Children. That is why
Trexler (2007:46) states that “a feminist theology of religious pluralism” is committed to
eradicating “hierarchy wherever it is found”, thus aiding “religious pluralism in undermining
claims of Christian superiority.” It is important to note that as a member of oppressed blacks
in the setting of the narrative, Magona creates an atmosphere of a myriad concurring
religions, first as a way of defying an imposed hierarchical precedence of religions extraneous
to the lifestyles of the indigenous blacks. Secondly, Magona acknowledges the existence of
these other religions, believing that they are equal to the religion of her own community of
fellow blacks and should be acknowledged as such. Yet in a manner identifying her with
global feminists believing in intersectional group identity and the equality of the various
blocks held together by varying identities, the narration of Magona’s autobiography does not
posit homogenized intersectionality at the cost of the kind of cultural identity holding together
the black South Africans. Historically, such a recognition of the simultaneous and nonhierarchical nature of oppressions” (Mann and Huffman 2005:60) is not unprecedented, yet
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Magona’s addition of South African blackness and black womanness to the polyvocality of
global feminisms is unparalleled in giving voice to what Mann and Huffman (2005:65)
describe as “multiple realities that arise from diverse social locations.”
Economic exploitation tied to her being a black woman is exposed when Magona moves
from one domestic work to another, after losing a teaching job in which she and other black
women are exploited in a manner worse that how black men are exploited and doomed to
inhuman working conditions. While working for the Garlands as a domestic, she works “from
seven in the morning to eight-thirty at night, Monday to Friday; and seven to two-thirty in the
afternoon on Saturday; and Sunday, eight to ten-thirty” (124).
Even migrant whites display racist solidarity with white apartheid rulers (137). As an
expression of awareness of the hierarchical centering of white oligarchic exploitation of the
subaltern globally, Magona bitterly protests that it is this migrant group of whites that she
finds “hardest to swallow” (137).
Magona’s weaving of her personal with national histories from the perspective of
exploited black South African males and females during apartheid, characterizes her regard
for the socio-political history of her people with the seriousness the African theorist Es’kia
Mphahlele articulates as the “burden of our history we cannot afford to ignore” (Mphahlele
2002:83). From a black South African cultural point of view, Mphahlele (2004:27) sees the
writer as someone consciously wanting “to give an account of himself as a product of
historical process.” Magona should rightly be understood as a writer using autobiography to
affirm the cultural perspectives of fellow black South Africans needing to have the agency to
counteract white ruling class hegemony. This includes refined, nuanced cultural affinities
such as those expressed by Mphahlele (2004:27) on the place of history and the writer within
black South African culture threatened by apartheid oppression. It is for this reason that
Loflin (1997:220) stresses Magona’s dissolution of self in her feminist discourse, with the
remark that “Magona describes the oppressive conditions of black domestic workers under
apartheid.” In a typically simultaneous feminist conforming and negating of global feminists
concepts like womanism, Magona thus displays a complex delineation of the womanist Alice
Walker (Mehta 2000:397) has described as a “communal mother … who is committed to the
integrity, survival and wholeness of entire peoples due to her sense of self and her love for her
culture.”
Such a uniquely reconstructed womanism adds to the other concepts within a global
feminist framework that Magona has appropriated in order to lend a ring of original
peculiarity to the agency she represents in To My Children’s Children (1990) If Magona
believes in feminist post-modernist and post-structuralist views of identity as “simply a
construct of language, discourse, and cultural practices” (Mann and Huffman 2005:63), the
cultural practices encoded into To My Children’s Children (1990) by means of her discourse
using language as I demonstrate above are specifically black South African under apartheid
conditions.
In the same way the stylistic and discursive aspects of To My Children’s Children
germinate seeds that continue to grow in Magona’s later work Mother to Mother (1998), her
position also manifests itself in her short story collection Living, Loving and Lying Awake at
Night (1991), and in Forced to Grow (1992), her sequel to To My Children’s Children (1990).
This is seen when Magona describes her domestic worker character Joyce in the short story
collection as realizing that “a feminist perspective in South Africa is inhibited by racism”
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(Magona 1991:59). This is testimony to Magona’s feminist project illustrated above to have
started developing in To My Children’s Children (1990), when she declares her view that
place for her “means less a geographical locality and more a group of people with whom I am
connected and to whom I belong” (Magona 1990:1-2).
Magona here concurrently associates with and dissociates herself from a layer of
feminists characterized as transcontinental postcolonials known for downplaying the
significance of identity attachment to a specific locale. It is such a Magonaesque feminist bent
that has led to Boehmer (1999:169) observing that in Magona’s Mother to Mother (1998),
“contrary to transcontinental post-colonials, home is experienced as being at once grounded,
even if temporarily, and up in the air, in the sense of provisional” (Boehmer 1999:169).
Before I move on to a discussion of Magona’s Mother to Mother (1998), it is worthwhile to
show continued removal of racist discrimination in Magona’s urge for anti-patriarchal agency
starting to show in To My Children’s Children (1990). Among the many autobiographical
segments Magona chooses to put under a magnifying glass in Forced to Grow (1992) more
than she does in To My Children’s Children (1990), is her transition from working under
exploitative conditions as a teacher under the apartheid Bantu Education Department, to
“nearly doubling [her] monthly earnings from forty-seven to seventy-two rand” working for
yet another department of apartheid government called Bantu Administration (Magona
1992:82).
Upon learning of Magona’s resignation from the school he heads, the male principal
named Tabane reacts in a manner that paternalistically implies an objectification denying the
fact that Magona herself has worked her way up the economic ladder, by remarking “now that
I have scrubbed you, they all want you” (Magona 1991:82).
Yet another black, a township ‘landlord’ named Ngambu, sympathizes with the
patriarchal school principal by throwing Magona out of her rented room which, unlike the rest
of the black township, “was large … had inside running water, hot as well as cold … had
electricity” (Magona 1992:82). Magona (1992:82) purposely juxtaposes her plight with the
fact that as a woman she “absolutely had no hope of being allowed to rent or buy a council
house.”
Inclusion of the restrictive impact of apartheid government’s macro-economic policies on
the protagonist of Forced to Grow (1992) serves to clarify the comprehensiveness of
Magona’s feminism in the way she handles autobiography.
It is a recognized tenet of global feminism to foster “a clear understanding of how gender
relations can affect progress toward [the formulation of] efficacious policies to promote
societal development and raise living standards” (Berik et al. 2009:13).
The township in which Magona rents a room in order to be close to her teaching job at
Moshesh Higher Primary School does not have sufficient space and amenities for adequate
human occupation (Magona 1992: 82). This situation is a product of conscious macroeconomic policy formulation by the white apartheid ruling class. While post-apartheid South
Africa’s macro-economic policy may enjoy a limited role of national government due to
restriction by post-national macro-economic dynamics characterizing today’s globalized
economy, the apartheid government mostly afforded national monopoly of economic policy at
the cost of international macro-economics. Besides, world economics between 1948 when the
national party assumed rule in South Africa and 1994 when a new democratic South Africa
dawned have not always been as post-structuralist or postmodernist and relatively
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deracialized as today. In an interrogation of Magona’s feminist discourse displayed by her
autobiographies, it is thus pertinent to pose the global feminist question Berik et al. (2009:13)
concern themselves with, regarding “how gender and the macroeconomy interact.”
The immortalization of Magona’s socio-economic holding down by both members of her
black community and the macro-economics of the white apartheid state should be understood
simultaneously as her shift to a deliberate painting of the whites running apartheid South
Africa, symbolized the word “council” (Magona 1992:82), with the same patriarchal brush as
the black school principal and ‘landlord’. Magona later explains that by council she is
referring to the Cape Town City Council functioning under the Bantu Administration
Department that is “charged specifically with the regulation of Africans,” where as an
employee she “learn[s] a lot about [her] special hell as an African” (Magona 1992:83). Apart
from achieving the kind of deracialized agentive display of both internal and external
exploitation by lumping black and white patriarchy together evident in her earlier work To My
Children’s Children (1990), Magona (1992:83) invokes her feminist religious pluralist
orientation by means of the word “hell.”
According to Trexler (2007:50, 52, 58) such a position is akin to a global feminist model
for religious pluralism that is described as postpatriarchal, incorporating “a variety of
resources and perspectives into theology” and leading to a stance that “all persons are created
within the body of God and, as such, cannot be subjugated because of non-Christian beliefs.”
In the same breath, Africanist theorists like Mphahlele have indicated that within African
spirituality, western Christian notions of hell as some place one may be doomed to in the
hereafter are replaced by notions of ‘paradisial’ well-being and possible lived hell in the here
and now (Mphahlele 2002:154).
In this way, by describing the life of black women under apartheid as hell Magona is
simultaneously global and African, congruous to her pinning down of global feminism to be
inflected in terms of her specifically South African notion of home. Such a feminist
simultaneity renders Magona amenable even to global notions of what writers like Mann and
Huffman (2005:81) conceive as a “decentering of the West” emanating from postmodernist
feminism. The socio-political agency Magona urges through her discourse starting with her
autobiography To My Children’s Children is achieved through a global womanism, poststructuralism or postmodernism and feminist postcoloniality that she inflects individually to
account for her specific black South African home impinged upon by an apartheid national
macro-economics.
AGENCY URGED FOR BLACK SOUTH AFRICANS WITHIN THE
APARTHEID NATION ON THE BRINK OF A COLLAPSE: MOTHER
TO MOTHER AND MAGONA’S KIND OF INFLECTED FEMINISM
Published four years into the new South Africa’s democracy inaugurated in 1994,
Magona’s autobiography Mother to Mother (1998) aptly critiques an apartheid state
turbulently shaken out of complacency by an intensifying struggle for the liberation of
oppressed blacks, led by the blacks themselves. The narrative is set within the height of the
liberation struggle when the ANC and other black liberation movements in exile and their
supporters within the borders of a moribund apartheid state had joined hands through
underground networks. Magona exemplifies such networks with the incidents leading up to
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Mxolisi’s mother Mandisa meeting her son who is hiding away from apartheid police,
through an intricate route arranged by freedom fighter comrades (Magona 1998:196-210). I
will show that Magona continues gainfully to experiment with her feminism, sustaining the
devices appearing in her earlier works.
Magona opens the narrative in such a way that she creates an aura of orality, bridging the
distance between herself and the murdered girl’s mother by means of a direct, I-narrator
voice. Magona modulates the narrator Mandisa’s voice, transforming it from what would be a
somewhat detached written kind of communication by means of an epistolary medium. The
shocking salutation of the missive from the murderer son’s mother Mandisa to the mother of
the slain white young American woman Amy Biehl is “My son killed your daughter” (1).
Within the effective tautness of the monologue, a richly dialogic discourse unfolds, stretching
the subject matter from the specific to the contextual, and from the self to the black and white
nations of Mxolisi’s and Amy Biehl’s mothers. The many questions Mother to Mother (1998)
opens with, chart the parameters of such a varied multidimensionality of focus, preparing the
reader for the answers the narration implicitly undertakes to provide. Such a style reinforces
Magona’s feminist perspective. Brisolara (2003:30) highlights the primacy of questioning
within feminist theory, by pointing out that “Questioning leads to dialogue, which leads
(though not necessarily) to organization or action toward changes.” At one time Magona’s
questioning assumes the form of question, at the other a statement expressing a challenge to
some (mis)perception. Phrases like “people look at me”, “where she does not belong”, “if
she’s American”, “Where did she think she was going?” and “no white people in this place?”,
all urge an agency that will change the status quo (Magona 1998:7, 8). What may
simplistically be seen as a shirking of parental responsibility in the words “people look at me
as if I’m the one” (7) and heartlessness in the accusation of the slain girl as a “white girl with
nothing better to do than hang around in Guguletu, where she does not belong” (7), are
technical shifts of focus from blaming the killer boy Mxolisi and his mother for the incident,
to indicting apartheid rulers for creating and maintaining social conditions that render
abnormality a normality. This comes out more literally in the narrator’s remark, “these
monsters our children have become” (8). With such a shift effected, it is now understandable
why the mother of the black boy is “not surprised” that her son has killed the addressee’s
daughter. Boehmer is aware of the significance of Magona’s complex use of voice with one
effect I show above, in her observation that “the narrator in Mother to Mother expresses deep
bitterness at the nationalist rhetoric which has produced … the irrational violence that has
engulfed her son” (Boehmer 1999:161).
Of course, as I demonstrate, the bitterness is directed even beyond the national,
commensurate with the complexity of Magona’s application of feminist ideas.
Magona is quick to confine such a state in the upbringing of children to the black areas of
“Guguletu, or … Langa, or Nyanga or Khayelitsha”, prefacing the phrase with a “Here” that
associates the writer with the blacks and their locale, as opposed to opulent white areas of
South Africa occupied only by whites in the heyday of the Group Areas and other
discriminatory and oppressive apartheid legislation. It is such an aspect that Boehmer
captures in her remark that for Magona “home is still an important concept, a core site of
selfhood” (Boehmer 1999: 168). Magona reveals the geographically disjointed oneness of
hers and her people’s home, with the suggestion that the white girl could actually have been
killed by any other black South African child “in another far-away township in the vastness of
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this country” (8). There is a telling tension in the expressions “if she’s American, all the
better” (7), “where did she think she was going?” (8), “she probably saw that coming from the
authorities, who might either hamper and hinder her” (9), “did she not go to school?” (8),
“You don’t see big words … because one of us kills somebody, here in the townships” (9)
and “the story was all over the place” (9).
Among the many ‘silent’ statements Magona is giving a feminist voice to by these
expressions, is that some fellow black South Africans have been so hardened by apartheid
suffering that they cannot distinguish between what they dislike about the Reagan American
administration of the time and the likeable mission of the white girl who has fallen victim to
spiraling violence in black townships. At the same time, the white girl’s miscalculated visit to
Guguletu is blamed on American blindness to the positioned nature of macro-economics and
other fronts for global expansionism, where the girl personifies the American state with her
failure to “go to school” properly on the reality of the apartheid South African situation. That
the white girl banked on apartheid police to protect her from danger on the night she was is an
acute assertion that at this point of South African black people’s appropriation of power, state
machinery was powerless, with the power then in the hands of the ordinary black people in
their numbers. Magona brings out her lampooning of the senseless economic policies of the
apartheid state in her questioning why the government ironically “pays for [Mxolisi’s] food,
his clothes, the roof over his head” (10) only now that he is imprisoned for ‘killing’ the
naively innocent American visiting university student Amy Biehl. Here Magona’s global
feminism is revealed, in her characterization echoing the postmodernist and post-structuralist
feminist viewpoint shifting power for bringing about change to the masses, in her
undermining of “structural views of oppression” and “treatment of power as more ephemeral
and ubiquitous” (Brisolara 2003:64). Magona projects the powerless black masses as the now
powerful in bringing about change. In the same vein, Magona externalizes her feminist
sensibility of censuring an arrogant hegemony of the centre, this time represented by both
apartheid South Africa and the United States of America of the time, in the way west
controlled or manipulated media selectively report on the victims of violence along colour
lines. It is one of the many feminist views that “What is spoken and who is silenced shapes
the perception of reality” (Brisolara 2003:31). In recognition of this aspect of Magona’s
feminism, McHaney (2008:176) remarks that Magona “seeks understanding by imagining the
circumstances of the killers in lieu of hearing the story via the typical media attention given to
the victim.” One more thread continuing in Mother to Mother (1998) is Magona’s
encapsulation of local black South African lifestyles and consciousness within an atmosphere
of indigenous spirituality and artistic form.
Upon receiving news of Magona’s pregnancy out of wedlock, one of the worries
uppermost in her mother’s mind is “What will the church people say?” (123). Implicitly
Magona ties her overall discrimination on the basis of gender to her mother’s subjugated
ingestion of the Christian ideas of sin. Magona satirizes the non-cultural notion of sin more
explicitly at the start of the narrative, when she pleads for her murderer son in the words
“Forgive him this terrible, terrible sin” (10). Calling the act a sin and not a mistake is in
keeping with Magona’s subtle ascription of blame for his son’s beastly actions at least to
apartheid conditions under which blacks live. Christianity, especially it Calvinist version, is
one prominently known part of the fabric of apartheid South Africa. By invoking the foreign
idea of sin, Magona implies that only white apartheid South Africa and the complicit
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American state of the time are blind to the fact that what has happened is not a fault of her
son’s.
While what Daymond (2002:331) says concerning Magona’s fusion of a South African
indigenous narrative style of orature with a conventionally western one is true, this should be
stretched to include the fact that the indigenous takes precedence over the western. This
justifies why Tatamkhulu even recasts the cattle killing Xhosa incident from portraying the
black people of South Africa and their culture as less sensible and nuanced than the written
history of the whites (185-195). As a retort to the child Magona’s distorted interpretation of
the story of Nongqawuse, Tatamkhulu heightens the blame from individual teachers to the
apartheid state employing them and the Bantu Education system, in the words, “These liars,
your teachers … But, what can one expect? After all they are paid by the same boer
government … the same people who stole our land” (188). When Tatamkhulu regales the
young Magona with a genuine version of the cattle killing historical event, he ends up reciting
“in the voice of an imbongi of the people” (188). Contrary to the blaming of gender related
devaluing on what is often called cultural patriarchy of males within black communities in the
west’s othering black South Africans, here we have a male elder displaying a profound
valuing of the female by undertaking intimately to teach her the true story of her people. The
raising of Tatamkhulu’s role to the traditional cultural one of a prophetic elder called imbongi
imbues the character of Tatamkhulu with an epic dimension. In addition, this hoists the black
indigenous story above that of the white oppressors.
Magona achieves the same thematic effect with her characterization of Magona’s father
not as a caricature always manipulated to live true to the western role of a traditional black
South African male stereotyped by the west as paternalistic. While Magona’s mother does not
relent in her ostricization of Magona for falling pregnant with Mxolisi, Magona delineates the
character of Magona’s father as accommodative of what has happened (Magona 1998:138139). For this reason, the views of writers such as Loflin (1997: 213) that Magona’s suffering
after she has fallen pregnant was motivated by the patriarchal state of black South African
cultures not accepting that their daughters have matured into adulthood, seem to me to
contradict Magona’s more nuanced discourse in this autobiography.
CONCLUSION
While Magona does apply global feminist ideas in the discourse of her autobiographies,
she does so alongside distilling her own kind of feminism uniquely foregrounding black
South Africans as a positioned focus of what would otherwise be an ineffectual,
overgeneralizing global feminism.
Not only is Magona “aware of the role of the apartheid State in the breakdown of
communities, demanding interventions at community level” (Masemola 2010:116). She
considers the community of black South African men and women first as the primary section
of global society required to show agency and change the plight of her people, before she can
resonate intersectionally with the other oppressed of the world. In this way Magona can be
said to embrace the feminist economics insight recognizing that “Increased global economic
integration … has caused income and wealth inequality to expand,” thus working against
development by generating “intergroup inequality in gender, race/ethnicity, and class terms
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(Berik et al. 2009:1). This position comfortably characterizes Magona as a world feminist,
according to the global feminist aspect expressed by Trexler (2007: 47), of not only asserting
“that women should be treated equally”, but broadening to maintain that “all people
worldwide ought to be treated as equals.” It is thus noteworthy that Magona pushes forward
the development of feminist theory on a world scale even as she provides an antidote to some
hegemonic misperceptions concerning black South Africans as cultural groups. Some peoples
belonging to the periphery will never be treated as equals within the feminist project for as
long as their cultural identities are distortedly represented by feminists from the centre. One
such distortion is what Magona rectifies in her discourse, that black South African cultures,
though patriarchal like most western societies, are not inherently sexist because of this. Hence
her characterization of male characters as culturally empowering and socially benevolent,
while some woman characters come across as gender discrimination incarnate, meted out to
same gender characters. Magona even apportions epic assertion of the black South African
cultural voice within a global feminist framework to the male character Tatamkhulu (Mother
to Mother 1998). It is Tatamkhulu who performs the agentive task of what (Loflin 1997: 220)
sees as “preserving the knowledge of apartheid’s oppression for future generations.” This is
why Tatamkhulu re-tells the cattle killing Xhosa historical event with a black voice, linking
the historical freedom struggle to the liberation struggle within which Mother to Mother
(1998) is set.
One way Magona attains her unique enrichment of global feminism by bending it
dialectically to account for the distinctive plight of black South Africans under apartheid, is
by stressing stylistically that apartheid in South Africa has queerly conflated gender, class and
race discrimination. This Magona achieves in an complex way of using the dynamics of local
oppression of women and blacks to dovetail within global feminism’s stand that “sex and
gender relations cannot be separated from race, class, sexual orientation or preference, and
physical ability” (Brisolara 2003:27), and that feminism has “proven ability to understand
diversity, complexity, and power, to give voice to what has long been silenced” (Brisolara
2003:33). Magona’s autobiographies deny a cultural silencing, including apartheid’s denial of
what black South Africans among the oppressed of the world would gain from feminism’s
inclination towards a postpatriarchal religious pluralism. It is through Magona’s refracted
model of global feminist postcoloniality that the cosmology of black South Africans,
including their own understanding of associating with the body of God through ancestral
veneration, can be enlisted in the gains of feminist-driven social emancipation.
While on a world scale children, the disabled and the poor may be the ones feminist
approaches seek to rescue from discrimination and oppression, on the South African scene
apartheid artificially constructed society such that poor and disabled coincided with black.
This is why the protagonists of Magona’s autobiographies are painted as a confluence of
economic, gender and apartheid oppression, as we see with the characters Sindiwe (To My
Children’s Children 1990), Joyce (Living, Loving and Lying Awake at Night 1991), Magona
herself as narrator (Forced to Grow 1992) and Magona’s alter ego Mandisa (Mother to
Mother 1998). Such a vantage point has led to MacHaney (2008:167, 180) correctly
describing Magona simultaneously as offering “transnational intertextual readings” and a
“polyphonic dialogism of [her] story of apartheid from the black South African point of
view.” The launching pad of Magona’s dialogism and adding of a voice to global feminism
on behalf of herself and her people, is her black South African home impinged upon by
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apartheid restrictions. With such a voice, she engages in dialogue with apartheid rule, global
feminism and global macro-economic politics (as with the United States of America or broad
western hegemony in Mother to Mother 1998) – in true feminist polyphonic fashion.
Among the many achievements towards urging agency against the apartheid status quo,
“Magona describes the oppressive conditions of black domestic workers under apartheid”
(Loflin 1997: 220). As my scrutiny of Magona’s biographies has demonstrated, what sweeps
through all of them is a typically feminist attitude towards the past, the present and the future,
especially in the way it is associated with what are historically known as third wave feminists
(Mann and Huffman 2005:75). Right from To My Children’s Children (1990) through to
Mother to Mother (1998), the overriding moral is, as Loflin (1997:220) comments about the
discourse of the short stories in the collection Living, Loving and Lying Awake at Night
(1991), that “the systematic exploitation of black women’s labour … is coming to an end.”
However, Magona’s feminist pessimism with the present and optimism with the future is
much more profound than just urging agency for black South African woman emancipation.
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