Sindiwe Magona Research Articles

Resistance against Gender-Based Violence and Discrimination in the Poetry of Sindiwe Magona

Sindiwe Magona (1943-) is a South African self-made black woman writer who rises out of difficult socio-economic conditions and turns out to be a well-accomplished writer who uses writing as a vehicle to struggle against the oppressive political system of apartheid, ongoing inner conflicts, criminality, and the infliction of gender-based violence. Gender-based violence remains an unresolved problem in South Africa where the apartheid regime and its adherents continue to nurture the patriarchal ideology which victimizes, alienates, and restricts women both in the domestic and public spheres. The focal point of this article, therefore, is to examine Sindiwe Magona’s Please Take Photographs (2009) which is embedded with her subversive strategy of unsettling the masculine authority constructed officially over women and conducted as a natural determinant of men and women’s unbalanced power relationship in South African society. An in-depth scrutiny of her poetry will reveal Magona’s exceptional endeavor to extricate gender-based violence out of the domestic sphere and reconfigure it as the greatest social and political problem of her country.

Epistemic Responsibility and Community Engagement in Sindiwe Magona’s Beauty’s Gift

HIV/AIDS has pervasively affected the health and well-being of South African women, as evidenced by their exacerbating mortality rates over the decades. Sindiwe Magona’s Beauty’s Gift (2008) is a critical intervention in this regard because, in focusing on the death of a young black woman owing to her infection with HIV/AIDS, it critiques the overarching and ingrained patriarchal ideologies that are hindering the treatment and prevention of this disease. The article seeks to examine Magona’s text as uncovering the lack of appropriate knowledge about HIV/AIDS, and the silencing of South African women in the articulation or dissemination of this disease-related knowledge. The article argues that Magona’s text emphasizes the delinking of taboos and highlights the necessity of the South African community’s engagement at micro and macro levels regarding HIV/AIDS. This engagement reflects an epistemic responsibility that is crucial to reducing the dreadful impact of this illness from both cultural and structural perspectives.

The humanity of whiteness in Sindiwe Magona’s Mother to Mother

In this article, I will use a textual analysis of Sindiwe Magona’s Mother to Mother (1998) as a framework through which to critique and expand upon the concerns reflected in current studies of whiteness. As I will observe, the field of Whiteness Studies offers an insightful lens through which to examine the constructions of whiteness, particularly with regards to how it capitalizes on Black identities and subjectivities. Yet, it does not address the different formations of white identity that may emerge when seeking out points of empathy and connection between Black and white individuals and communities. Through a specific focus on Magona’s portrayal of the figures of the white “madam”, the white liberal activist, and the white grieving mother in Mother to Mother, I will examine how the novel demonstrates the ways in which engaging with the humanity of whiteness can potentially illuminate these different formations of white identity.

Analysing the Plight of HIV-positive Women in South African Society as Represented in Sindiwe Magona’s Beauty’s Gift

Statistics show that South Africa has one of the highest rates of HIV/Aids in the world, with a prevalence of 18.9% of adults afflicted, and women much more vulnerable to the infection than men. Although anti-retrovirals are widely available, social injustices such as poverty and the low status of women contribute to this gendered disparity. In the novel Beauty’s Gift (2008), the author Sindiwe Magona relates a narrative in which four women lose their best friend to Aids, prompting them to take decisive action as women who play a significant role within the domain of the family. The Aids activist Jackie Achmat has called this novel “one of the most important books about HIV/AIDS in our country.” This article examines the fictional representation of the plight of HIV-positive women in South Africa through an analysis of the characterisation and the author’s representations of socio-cultural injustice suffered by these women. The paper further explores the advocacy and agency of these women characters during the time of sickness. With respect to stigma and discrimination, in the context of HIV and Aids, I argue that despair and hopelessness thrive in situations where women are plagued by sickness. I further argue that shame and secrecy are social conditions that perpetuate the spread of HIV, leading to a common response of silence. Lastly, the representations of bereavement and grief are analysed in this article. My examination of the agency of women characters in the chosen novel is underpinned by the theory of African feminism, which engages with, critiques, and develops Western feminism, influenced by African women’s resistance to Western hegemony and its legacy within African culture. Charged with the duties of transforming societies through both intellectual and pragmatic approaches, African feminists illuminate ways women manage and challenge multiple oppressions. Using this theoretical lens that reveals ways in which Magona elicits identification and empathy on the part of readers, which can assist in stimulating positive change as depicted in Beauty’s Gift, thus re-imagining and reconfiguring the Rainbow Nation.

Analysing the Plight of HIV-positive Women in South African Society as Represented in Sindiwe Magona’s Beauty’s Gift

This article proceeds from the understanding that literature is the mirror of society, reflecting problematic features, failures to provide social justice, and attempts to live with dignity and hope. Statistics show that South Africa has one of the highest rates of HIV/Aids in the world, with a prevalence of 18.9% of adults afflicted, and women much more vulnerable to the infection than men. Although anti-retrovirals are widely available, social injustices such as poverty and the low status of women contribute to this gendered disparity. In the novel Beauty’s Gift (2008), author Sindiwe Magona relates a narrative in which four women lose their best friend to Aids, prompting them to take decisive action as women who play a significant role within the domain of the family. The Aids activist Zackie Achmat has called this novel “one of the most important books about HIV/AIDS in our country.” This article examines the fictional representation of the plight of HIV-positive women in South Africa through an analysis of the characterisation and the author’s representations of socio-cultural injustice suffered by these women. The paper further explores the advocacy and agency of these women characters during the time of sickness. With respect to stigma and discrimination, in the context of HIV and Aids, I argue that despair and hopelessness thrive in situations where women are plagued by sickness. I further argue that shame and secrecy are social conditions that perpetuate the spread of HIV, leading to a common response of silence. Lastly, the representations of bereavement and grief are analysed in this article. My examination of the agency of women characters in the chosen novel is underpinned by the theory of African feminism, which engages with, critiques and develops Western feminism, influenced by African women’s resistance to Western hegemony and its legacy within African culture. Charged with the duties of transforming societies through both intellectual and pragmatic approaches, African feminists illuminate ways women manage and challenge multiple oppressions. Using this theoretical lens enables me to reveal ways in which Magona elicits identification and empathy on the part of readers, which can assist in stimulating positive change as depicted in Beauty’s Gift, thus re-imagining and reconfiguring the Rainbow Nation.

When the Village Sleeps by Sindiwe Magona

Reviewed by: When the Village Sleeps by Sindiwe Magona Sarah Davies Cordova Sindiwe Magona When the Village Sleeps Johannesburg. Picador Africa. 2021. 310 pages. THE VILLAGE THAT sleeps is South Africa in the afterlives of apartheid, thought-provokingly awoken by Sindiwe Magona’s unflinching indictment of graft and government-created dependency, and by her (re)capture of ubuntu (humanity) and of the sustenance and well-being that the elders’ traditions hold. In step with her award-winning feminist and eco-ethical novelistic writing in Mother to Mother (1998), Beauty’s Gift (2008), and Chasing the Tails of My Father’s Cattle (2015), When the Village Sleeps historicizes the quarter-century of inequities, injustices, and consequential social ills that led up to the calamitous 2020 state response to the Covid-19 pandemic for the precariously dependent. As one of South Africa’s honored amaXhosa living legends, Magona’s clear-sightedness and well-tuned ear expose the wounds of colonialism and apartheid that continue to scar the land and abet the collateral damage of self-perpetuating poverty. Offering in their stead the rich rewards born of a shared understanding and transmission of the practices and maxims embedded in the ancestral homeland’s cultural heritage, she situates black South African women at the nation’s hearths where generations of mothers and daughters strive to sow a life of respect for self and other, for one and all. Multilingual, weaving isiXhosa in with English in what Mamphela Ramphele terms Magona’s “unique isiXhosinglish,” textured and plurivocal, When the Village Sleeps unfolds dexterously with intersecting dialogue and insight-filled interior monologues, citing and intertextually borrowing from such timeless South African literary figures as A. C. Jordan and S. E. K. Mqhayi. Memories and teachings in songs, legends, and folktales merge with poems in the lyrical voice of the “Old” of the unfleshed world and through Mandlakazi— the child of strength—their chosen flesh-born who speak in dreams, nightmares, and trances of what has passed and what is to come with harbingers of ever-increasing urgency and premonitory doom-saying. A veritable pharmakon, fastening social and political commentary to didactic analogies and revelatory storytelling, the novel offers remedies to mend and restore body and soul, ones drawn from nature’s medicinal plants and well-tended husbandry that safekeep the environment and support human life, as well as reinterpreted ancestral proverbs that underscore the oneness of all humanity and rites of passage serving as new bridges to contemporary life. When the Village Sleeps sets in motion the proverb “It takes a village to raise a child,” moving from the township to the city and to the village and back and advancing a national narrative highlighting the plight of adolescent children, orphaned or left alone to care for themselves and their siblings while their mothers are away eking out a living with low-paying jobs and child grants. Encompassing four generations of women, the novel first focuses on the grandchild, Busisiwe—honey-graced— on the eve of her thirteenth birthday as she negotiates the bus ride and the pretenses and masks she must wear to pass back and forth from her home life to the world of privilege she encounters at her Capetonian primary school, whose fees Mrs. Bird, her grandmother’s former white employer, pays. Staying at her aunt Lily’s house, she is the caregiver to her half-brothers in the absence of a father and a dependable mother, and her academic success is seen by her family as their way out of poverty. Her flawed decision to beget a child, to harm the fetus with alcohol and drugs in the womb to access a higher-paying child grant, and to build with the sixteen-year-old orphaned Brian “a family where . . . no one will ever be hungry or beg for things they want—a loving family” is an adolescent’s tragic response to the pressures of fitting in and wanting to be loved. Only when Busisiwe visits her beloved maternal grandmother, Khulu, in her village in the Eastern Cape does she discover another way of life, one grounded in the rewards of participatory communal life, the dignity of self-sufficiency, and her ancestors’ observance...

REPRESENTATION OF FEMALE MENTAL ILL HEALTH IN THE AFRICAN NOVEL

This study examines the depiction of female mental ill health in selected African novels. We intend to explore some causes and manifestations of, as well as responses to women’s emotional disorders. Through the prism of psychoanalytical feminism, our paper identifies those socio-cultural and environmental factors that are drivers of female mental ailments as represented in Mariama Ba’s So Long a Letter and Scarlet Song, Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail, Nawal El Saadawi’s Women at Point Zero, and Sindiwe Magona’s Beauty’s Gift. A close reading of these selected African novels reveals that the predominantly patriarchal nature of many African cultures enable and promote gender relationships that act as stressors to women’s psychological welfare. That this paper focuses on an often ignored or glossed over, but very important, aspect of African women’s existential reality is one of its strengths. It concludes that there is a need to give priority attention to the festering epidemic of female mental illness in African societies in order to attain more holistic outcomes for individual, gender and social well-being.KEYWORDS: Female Mental Health, African Novel, Medical Humanities, Psychoanalytic Feminism.

Inside the Creaking Baobab in Sindiwe Magona’s When the Village Sleeps (2021)

Bookended by the life of Busisiwe Mhkonto, When the Village Sleeps can be read as an “unfinished symphony”. The musicological analogy is bolstered by the harmonisation of the polyphonic voice register, coupled with the “unachieved” or the “yet to be achieved” implied in Sindiwe Magona’s wake-up call towards education for life. This article is predicated on Milan Kundera’s three categories of the art of the novel—the art of radical divestment, the art of novelistic counterpoint, and the art of the specifically novelistic essay—which, in turn, determine the progression of my argument. This is no dystopian novel— Magona looks beyond the precarity that she depicts in this metatext for uplifting instances that epitomise the central tropes of ubuntu and self-sufficiency. Ultimately, this is a story about youth advocacy that culminates in a programme to teach self-help through a broad-based notion of education for living in South Africa. Magona’s proposed reparation seeks to define a new cultural nationhood through an awakened imaginary.

Story of a Mother: a Biopolitical Reading of Sindiwe Magona’s Mother to Mother

ABSTRACT Sindiwe Magona’s Mother to Mother, a fictional rendition of Amy Biehl’s murder, has been analyzed as a text that challenges the TRC’s reconciliatory philosophy, generates an empathetic dialogue across the color line, and reclaims the subdued maternal identity and voice. However, Mandisa’s narrative throws light on the condition of motherhood in apartheid South Africa. Examining Mandisa’s position as a girl, woman, and mother through a Foucauldian biopolitical lens, this paper argues that Mandisa’s story reveals the biopolitical construction of motherhood at a crucial historical juncture of South Africa. This analysis reveals that the novel is not a mere maternal testimony; rather, the narrative elucidates the creation of the docile bodies of black women under structural oppression and discursive regulation.

Sindiwe Magona’s Beauty’s Gift: Sexual Security in the Era of HIV/AIDS

This article examines Sindiwe Magona’s 2008 novel, Beauty’s Gift (Cape Town: Kwela), noting its significance as the first full-length work by a South African woman on the topic of HIV/AIDS. The article contends that the novel borrows elements from popular modes of African fiction, primarily through its valorisation of female friendship, to speak to the urgency of the country’s health crisis and to question how love and marriage can be negotiated when women have become vulnerable to disease and death because of their unfaithful husbands. Charting the trajectory of the novel, this analysis recounts how one woman’s illness and death inspire her friends to challenge both the cultural endorsement of a masculinity that rejects any expectations of fidelity and the stigma which encourages South Africans to remain stuck in a quagmire of denial and indifference. While Magona envisions a transformation from passivity to determined action, she also nuances her indictment of men by noting the destabilisation of the African family caused by the exploitation of the black male body under apartheid. In addition, she suggests the role that certain traditional practices can play in offering examples of the type of community cohesion that is needed to stem the tide of HIV infections. The article concludes by acknowledging Magona’s willingness to adapt her aesthetics in this work to become an advocate for critically needed change as well as a spokesperson for uncomfortable truths related to the misdirection and inadequacy of the governmental response to the HIV/AIDS crisis.

Complicating Apartheid Resistance Histories by Means of South African Autobiographies

This article addresses twelve South African autobiographical texts, focusing on (paired) authors’ portrayed experiences of apartheid in order to give recognition to the enduring relevance of their life writing and resistance work. Life writing materials by Es’kia Mphahlele and Chris van Wyk; Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe and Bessie Head; Ray Alexander Simons and Emma Mashinini; Ronnie Govender and Sindiwe Magona; Mxolisi “Bra Ace” Mgxashe and Harold Strachan; Zarina Maharaj and Pregs Govender cumulatively demonstrate how battling apartheid damage required complex endurance strategies and diverse contributions to the collective struggle for sociopolitical change.

Belonging, Memory and Subaltern Voices: Reflecting on Sindiwe Magona’s To my Children’s Children

ABSTRACT For many black people, the act of writing and expressing one’s thoughts was an exercise of resistance and defiance, one that often meant risking losing one’s freedom or one’s life. Sindiwe Magona’s works challenge the commonly held assumption that writing is a male preserve, and illustrate how, for a black woman, writing is a form of rioting, of speaking back, of reclaiming one's voice and of breathing. I focus on Magona's book, To my Children's Children (1990) to highlight the ways in which she engages notions of memory, voice and belonging. I further point to ways in which Magona shows how writing one's story is a form of protest, and of connecting the past, the present and an unknown future. For Magona, the public cannot be separated from the private. Through her life story, we are confronted with what it meant to live under the oppressive apartheid system in South Africa.

‘As Long as I Can Do, I Will Do for Children’: Sindiwe Magona's Children's Literature

Sindiwe Magona is a celebrated South African writer for children. Her books have appeared in both English and Xhosa and are widely prescribed and used in schools. This short essay on Magona and her works is followed by an interview conducted with her in 2019.

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)

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.

An African’s faith: Discourse and disclosure in selected works by Sindiwe Magona

The recent attention to decolonisation in academia and other facets of the sociopolitical landscape has encouraged many to re-examine their tenets of faith and their methods of incorporating personal expressions of spirituality into their decision-making processes. The significance of faith practices for South Africans as they manoeuvre the challenges of navigating the post-apartheid context has been acknowledged across a number of disciplines, including law, education and healthcare. Yet for decades, South African writers have seamlessly included religious thought and practice into their works, evidencing the subtle influence of faith and tradition in their prose. For many, their religious faith has been vital to their identity development and cultural expression, and synonymous with their liberation. This article examines these metaphoric realities in the cohesive interplay of African traditions and western Christianity in the oeuvre of recognised black South African writer Sindiwe Magona.

Ecofeminist invitations in the works of Sindiwe Magona

The global challenges of environmental devastation and gender-based injustice require a multifocal approach in appropriating effective solutions. While acknowledging the effectual endeavours initiated through the social and natural sciences to counteract these areas of degradation, this paper offers another field of potential mediation: ecofeminist literary criticism. Through its interrogation of selected works by the black South African writer, Sindiwe Magona, it seeks to reveal the value of literature as a tool to counteract destructive political and patriarchal rhetorical paradigms, which have served to oppress nature and women and, through ecofeminist discourse, mitigate lasting global change.

Sindiwe Magona’s To My Children’s Children and Mother to Mother. A Customised Womanist Notion of Home within Feminist Perspectives

Funding from Unisa research office enabled me to complete and present this paper at an international scientific conference prior to publication.

Overcoming the ‘daily bludgeoning by apartheid’: black South African women writers, agency, and space

This article examines creative agency in the lives of four black South African women writers during South African apartheid: Miriam Tlali, Lauretta Ngcobo, Gladys Thomas, and Sindiwe Magona. Drawing theoretically on Mamphela Ramphele’s conceptualizations of space, it analyzes life review interviews with these writers, who were among the first black women to publish novels and poetry in apartheid South Africa, about the ways in which they came to understand themselves as writers and creative subjects within a political system that severely curtailed their political and creative expression. It considers agency a key tool for understanding how these authors transcended their received identities as laborers and reproducers of labor for the apartheid nation, to become authors of their own lives and works. In elucidating how writing increased personal agency for these writers, the article posits the concept of creative re-visioning – a subject’s ability to re-envision what is possible for her to achieve beyond received expectations for her life. It theorizes such creative re-visioning as a strategy of resistance during apartheid and an additional dimension to feminist conceptualizations of human agency.

Post-apartheid transnationalism in black South African literature: a reality or a fallacy?

The quest of this paper is to probe whether globalising post-nationalism impacts on post- apartheid black South African English literature in a manner that suggests a blurring of distinctive African identities. This is done against the background that black South African literature right from its written beginnings in the early 19th century has coalesced into a taxonomically distinct entity forming a non-negligible component of South African literature written in English. I first analyse two post-apartheid novels written by the black writers Niq Mhlongo (Dog Eat Dog, 2004) and Sindiwe Magona (Beauty’s Gift, 2008). Secondly, I consider three post-apartheid novels by the black writers Phaswane Mpe (Welcome to Our Hillbrow, 2001), Kgebetli Moele (Room 207, 2009) and Kopano Matlwa (Coconut, 2007). I approach an examination of the five post-apartheid novels by separating them into two categories, as a way of indicating that black South African literature of this era remains as stylistically varied as that of earlier periods, albeit broadly within a mould continuing to characterise it as black. In order to justify an underlying common allegiance to localised identity cutting across the two categories in which I place these five post-apartheid novels, evidence of such a pervasively black feature is explained inter-categorically, even as intra-categorical affinities are demonstrated. I trace these two levels of typology within the conceptual framework of two main groups of theorists. The first group consists of commentators such as Carrol Clarkson in her assertion that the identity of black Africans in the post-apartheid era as portrayed in the fiction of writers such as Phaswane Mpe is such that “educated and urbanised individuals should no longer identify” with and share beliefs having to do with African identity and “a common and accountable response to that which the community represents.” The attitude of these critics has led to Leon de Kock seeing both black and white post-apartheid literature warranting interpretation with a “sense of a post-national configuration—indeed, now a transnational constellation.” I demonstrate in this paper that post-apartheid fiction written by blacks not only defies theorists’ subordination of imaginative writers’ centrality in social discourse, but goes further specifically to chafe against normative characterisation as transnational. The second main category constituting the theoretical matrix within which I examine the discourses of the five selected novels includes theorists such as Rob Gaylard, in his observation that Es’kia Mphahlele “can be seen as the founder of a tradition of black writing that runs through writers like Miriam Tlali, Mtutuzeli Matshoba, Njabulo Ndebele and Zakes Mda to Phaswane Mpe,” with the thread splicing them together being a grounding of these authors’ writings in the philosophy or worldview of Afrikan Humanism.

Mqhayi's chapter and verse: Kees van die Kalahari becoming u-Adonisi wasentlango

Xhosa’s best and most well-known imbongi and poet, S. E. K. Mqhayi, once translated an Afrikaans book Kees van die Kalahari into Xhosa—a story about the trials and tribulations of a leader baboon and his tribe. The Xhosa translation had been prescribed for generations of pupils and became one of the language’s most well-known texts. As part of a larger project which will compare the two texts in their totality, this essay is a preliminary exercise to determine the history of the translated text and more specifically to explore what Mqhayi’s possible translation strategies could have been which rendered the book so ‘home- grown’. According to Sindiwe Magona, ‘It was prescribed to me in high school and I taught it, but neither I, nor my colleagues, realised that it was a translation. And even now, there is no feeling that behind this text there is another one, it feels so authentic!’ There are in fact two other texts: the original English text which spawned the well-known Afrikaans book Kees van die Kalahari, written/translated by the brothers S. B. and G. C. Hobson. The Afrikaans text won the coveted Afrikaans Hertzog Prize for prose and was reprinted 33 times.