Patriarchal forms of national community in post-apartheid literature: Re-examining ubuntu and gender in Sindiwe Magona’s Mother to Mother (1998) and Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness (2000)

Abstract

Despite having been celebrated for autochthonous renewal, Sindiwe Magona’s Mother to Mother (1998) and Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness (2000) perpetuate ontological discourses of ubuntu that uphold patriarchal forms of national community. In these discourses of personhood, men function as subjects entitled to “moral arrival” whilst women are represented as women-in-community. Women are never in positions of authority. Consequently, neither men nor women can become fully human in the manner proposed by ubuntu in these texts.