Mother to Mother - Sindiwe Magona ( the Amy Biehl killing)

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South Africa

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msc

Bob Shop ID

643802917

Published by David Philip, 1998, softcover, 210 pages, condition: as new.

Mother to Mother is an epistolary novel by South African writer Sindiwe Magona. The story of Mother to Mother is based on the real events from 1993 peaking in Amy Biehl's death in Cape Town's Gugulethu township.

"This novel focuses on an event in South Africa in August 1993. An American Fulbright scholar Amy Biehl, was killed by a group of black youth in Guguletu. She was in the country to help prepare for democratic elections. Her death took place close to Siniwe Magonas house and one of the boys responsible for the killing was the son of her neighbour. Magona has also adapted this into a play.

The novel is a letter from the mother of the boy mentioned above to the mother of the girl who was murdered. It is a passionate and heartfelt description of life under apartheid and its trials and horrors; not an apology for murder but a laying out of a map of how things got to where they did. The mother, Mandisa, tells of her own life and the history of her son Mxolisi and touches on the history of the colonisation, including the Xhosa cattle-killing of 1856-7 (also significant in Zakes Mdas Heart of Redness). There is a great strength and descriptive power, and no glossing over the situation:
"For that is what he had become at the time when he killed your daughter. My son was only an agent, executing the long-simmering dark desires of his race. Burned hatred for the oppressor possessed his being. It saw through his eyes; walked with his feet and wielded the knife that tore mercilessly into her flesh. The resentment of three hundred years plugged his ears; deaf to her pitiful entreaties"
And there is a sense of generational conflict;
"These tyrants our children have become, power crazed, at the drop of a hat, they make these often absurd demands on us, their parents."
Magona charts the tensions between generations and differing opinions about the struggle against oppression and puts it this way:
In writing Mother to Mother I needed to explain the problems that confronted this boy and our history as a people. It is not just the boy, it is the society. It goes much farther back; it is the stories with which we grow up. It is the hatred that we are taught when we are children. It is the suspicion with which we regarded white people. It is all these things and the irresponsibility of learned grown people who teach children slogans like One settler, one bullet! that they themselves know they will never translate to reality - but the children, being children perhaps do. Some psychologists believe that when someone cracks in a family, the schism is not necessarily the problem, This is the manifestation of what is not right in the family, and the child who has a breakdown may just happen to be the most sensitive, not necessarily the most troubled. People like these four boys who killed Amy Biehl may have been the most sensitive and susceptible among us, not necessarily the most cruel or the most evil.
At its heart though, this is a biography of a people and their struggle told though Mandisa and her son Mxolisi and very powerful it is."

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