Sindiwe Magona Climbing Higher

The primary aim of this book is to create a literary biography of Sindiwe Magona, a significant black South African woman, whose writings act as a testimony, a historical record, an appeal, and an invitation to experience a culture, literary style and language marginalized by colonization.

Magonas works provide us with a window to the soul of the beleaguered domestic (Living, Loving and Lying Awake at Night), the impoverished single parent (To My Childrens Children), the struggling black woman educator and activist (Forced to Grow), the anguished mother (Mother to Mother), the rape victim (Vukani!), the successful African professional woman battling cultural and patriarchal sexual restrictions that may result in AIDS infection, female subjective states relevant to both the old and new South Africa. The trope of bridge building is a new perspective on her work, which elucidates the current intellectual interest in the literary crossings of the local and global.

This publication examines the genre of life writing which validates someones lived experiences, provides representation for others enduring similar oppression, and instructs the uninformed about a unique life. The authors autobiographies, plays, poems, short stories, published and unpublished novels are analyzed through an African feminist lens allowing her literature to reflect their contextualized and localized content.

This is a literary biography that places the author and her works within the political and socio-economic framework in which they were written and published. Although consideration is given to her twenty years of voluntary exile, when she lived and worked in New York for the media department of the United Nations translating and disseminating information from South Africa to the world about the oppression of the apartheid regime, special attention is be paid to the nature and impact of her oral and literary voice on the South African and global community as she explicates the issues facing black African women.

Paperback. English. David Philip. 2013. Good Condition.