427 results in Wits University Press
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- Sindiwe Magona
- Edited by Renée Schatteman, Georgia State University
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- Book:
- I Write the Yawning Void
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- Wits University Press
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- 02 March 2024
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- 01 July 2023, pp 203-205
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2 - Clawing at Stones
- Sindiwe Magona
- Edited by Renée Schatteman, Georgia State University
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- I Write the Yawning Void
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- 02 March 2024
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- 01 July 2023, pp 17-23
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Summary
This essay was published in the 2001 collection edited by Mark Robert Waldman, The Spirit of Writing: Classic and Contemporary Essays Celebrating the Writing Life. In it, Sindiwe Magona describes how she became a reader and later a writer and outlines the personal and political challenges she faced as a black South African writer when attempting to record the extreme circumstances of apartheid.
Fear of Change
I have seen the thick welted scars on people rudely plucked from hearth And home. Bound hand and bleeding foot. Kicked, punched, raped and ravaged Every which way you dare to think. Killed, in their millions and Dumped on icy wave.
And today, those unlucky enough to survive the gruesome plunder annoy the world by failing to be quite, quite human. By falling short of accepted standards of civilisation. Never mind that on these people, was performed a National Lobotomy, that has left them with No tongue of their own.
I was in my thirties before I ever held a book written by a black woman in my hand; that was Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Now I am in my fifties and have read a few more such books, not as many as could be reasonably expected, given our numbers – in 2022, Africa alone has over 700 million women. However, for reasons too many, too painful, sickeningly familiar and inseparable as resin from bark in our lives, the vast majority of African women and women of African descent have yet to tell their stories.
I am no historian. Thus, in my case the telling cannot be in that mode. History's dry exactitude kills the story: too many details simply disappear. My personal preference is music. If I could sing, I would have left songs that spoke of incredible beauty and unspeakable horror, for I have witnessed such things as make me want to shout about them from the mountaintops: the courage of women, forced to live whole lifetimes without their husbands. In my poetry, I call these women ‘gold widows’, as their men slaved hard in the gold mines of Johannesburg for gold that they and their women would never see, never wear. Meanwhile, alone in the damned villages, the women kept home, family and communities intact. They raised children, sowed and reaped fields, nursed the sick, and buried the dead – women dug graves and put corpses to rest.
3 - Finding My Way Home
- Sindiwe Magona
- Edited by Renée Schatteman, Georgia State University
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- Book:
- I Write the Yawning Void
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- Wits University Press
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- 02 March 2024
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- 01 July 2023, pp 24-30
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Summary
In this essay, which expands upon a piece with the same title that was first published in the popular South African magazine Fairlady in June 2003, Sindiwe Magona reflects upon her reasons for returning to South Africa after a 22-year stay in the United States, and describes her efforts to help rebuild the country through her writing.
ONE DAY I will write an essay, ‘All My Mothers’, because I have been blessed with an array of human beings who have been very loving towards me: my parents; my grandparents; my aunts and (most of ) my uncles; the extended family; and my teacher in Standard 2, dear Miss Vuyelwa Mabija (A Ndlovu!). This list includes a number of men because by ‘mothers’ I mean all those who made me who I am today, whether female or male, old or young.
After lunch break one day, Miss Mabija took us out of the classroom onto a little hill. It was the first lesson I’d had on writing. She brought an orange. She made us look at it, and she made us feel it, our eyes closed. She made us look at it with our eyes open, then smell it and taste it. There must have been thirty or forty of us, but we all ended up with little pieces of the peel, the rind, the fruit, the succulence, the little things in the orange that burst open inside you. Today, whenever I write, I think of that lesson, how this woman taught us to describe and write about an orange. The ease with which she went about it was nothing short of magical, for not only did she manage to get us into the orange, inside and out, she empowered us, gave us an invisible magic wand. That day I, for one, was gifted with belief in my ability to say, describe, tell anyone anything, anywhere, any time. Ndlovu zidl’ ekhaya ngokuswel’ umalusi!
When I became a young woman, my family marked the occasion with a ceremony we call intonjane. This announces to the community that the girl has now become a young woman.
12 - Why I Wrote Chasing the Tails of My Father's Cattle
- Sindiwe Magona
- Edited by Renée Schatteman, Georgia State University
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- Book:
- I Write the Yawning Void
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- Wits University Press
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- 02 March 2024
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- 01 July 2023, pp 146-159
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Summary
This previously unpublished essay explains Sindiwe Magona's turn to rural fiction in this novel, as well as the influence that the memory of her father had on the story. She reflects on the novel's protagonist, Jojo, who represents a masculine ideal often absent in her writing, and on the status of women's rights and protection in the rural environment.
NOT PROVOKED. OR WAS IT?
This book is perhaps the one exception to the observation I have made regarding my writing – it did not emerge from a position of anger or provocation. I willed it into being – wishing to see it appear.
Mother to Mother (1998) and Beauty's Gift (2008), its predecessors, were both definitely provoked. Mother to Mother was a response to an intimate tragedy: a killing in which two families were brought into close knowingness – the one of the other – by the awful incident. Because of a terrible murder, individuals who had not known one another become intricately involved in a horrific clash of feelings they had naught to do with, yanked into a soul-wrenching arena on opposing sides: victim and perpetrator. Both are shown to be sides of the same socio-political coin.
Beauty's Gift, the second novel, was provoked by the HIV and Aids pandemic, or, to be more precise, by how South Africans, as a nation, were dealing with the disaster – or rather, tragedy. It was a large-scale tragedy, for human lives were lost, some, if not most, unnecessarily. Had there been a better-informed leadership at the time, and thus a better-managed national programme, which was compassionate and worked from the heart, I sincerely believe most of those who succumbed might still be alive today.
It is commonly estimated that President Thabo Mbeki's HIV and Aids policies were responsible for more than 300 000 deaths. That staggering statistic reminded me (as if anyone could forget) of the tales of horror that had led to the publication of my book of poetry, Please, Take Photographs (2009). Words. Words. Words. Those words of poetry poured out of me, fired by the same anger as had previously provoked me into screaming words onto a page. The title of the collection is that of the poem which urges parents and caregivers to take pictures of children as a matter of urgency, since predictions for the youth of South Africa were that most would not reach the age of thirty.
13 - Why I Wrote When the Village Sleeps
- Sindiwe Magona
- Edited by Renée Schatteman, Georgia State University
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- Book:
- I Write the Yawning Void
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- Wits University Press
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- 02 March 2024
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- 01 July 2023, pp 160-172
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Summary
This previously unpublished essay identifies the catalyst for Sindiwe Magona's 2021 novel, When the Village Sleeps, and provides the context that explains the significance of the title. It also provides a powerful example of Magona's willingness to advance a potentially unpopular position on sensitive issues – in this case, the efficacy of the government's Child Support Grant – to reframe highly polarised debates, and to offer compelling solutions for seemingly intractable problems.
MY LATEST NOVEL, When the Village Sleeps, is perhaps different from anything that came before it. I began writing the novel with a clearer sense of purpose than usual as I was determined to speak to a problem related to our current moment in South Africa. I intended it to be a catalyst for change or, at the very least, to be at the forefront of change.
A writer, as with all living things, undergoes changes. This writer is no exception to this rule. I myself have changed, and continue to change. I am a very different person from what I was at the time of marrying, with no real thought to its ramifications – forced, really, into marriage by unplanned motherhood. That could not but be a frustrating experience; the children sure to be vulnerable throughout their childhood. Today, however, this writer is in a very different space – a position of mastery of my environment and also my life. Thus, I can begin to explain why I wrote When the Village Sleeps …
A few years back, I came across an article in my local neighbourhood newspaper, the False Bay Echo, which left me greatly disturbed. The frontpage article was prominently placed, so no one could fail to notice it. I certainly did not; I began to read the responses of a teenaged mother, who was interviewed by a social worker. It was a young mother's journey into motherhood. And there she was, pictured with baby on lap, smile on lips, looking proud as proud can be.
I wasn't long into reading it before I was struck by the central theme of the article with the young lady's responses: choice! As clear as clear can be, the young woman, a child, really, had planned each and every step of her way. Yes, at 16 she was holding a baby on her lap, her baby – and that was a choice.
Introduction: Writing South Africa's Yawning Void
- Sindiwe Magona
- Edited by Renée Schatteman, Georgia State University
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- Book:
- I Write the Yawning Void
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- Wits University Press
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- 02 March 2024
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- 01 July 2023, pp 1-8
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Summary
I CAN'T BELIEVE I have been writing for more than three decades. However, even my feeble maths tells me that 33 years ago, To My Children's Children, announced – to those interested in such matters – the arrival of a new writer named Sindiwe Magona: this book was published by David Philip Publishers in 1990.
To reflect on what writing has meant, and continues to mean, to me is, therefore, to go back a long, a very long time. At the start of this rollercoaster journey, let me reiterate, there was a much-surprised person. I was surprised at what I had somehow managed to do – write a book. Even more surprised that a publisher had not only wanted to publish it, but had gone ahead and done just that. Then, as though that were not miracle enough to kill a person, guess what? There were people who bought the book, read the book – from page one to the very last page – and didn't try and find me and laugh at me or, worse still, throw rotten eggs at me. No, they read the book, read it like any normal book. So, the whole thing had not just been a figment of my imagination. How could that be? The whole world shared in my wild, wild dream, my fantasy. It had to be real, then. I had written a book. And the book was published by a reputable publisher.
The book went on to garner great reviews. And thirty years later, it is still in print! Sindiwe Magona – author. But what did this mean to me, then? What does it mean today? What inspired me to write that book in the first place, and what has inspired me to keep at it, keep on writing, ever since? The following poem, found in my collection, Please, Take Photographs (2009), provides some answers to these questions:
Statement
I come to writing with no great learning
Except my life and the life of the people
Of whom I am a part. For centuries,
Others have written about us
I write to change that
Instead of moaning about it.
I write so that children who look like me
In my country,
And my people, dispersed
Throughout the world,
May see someone who looks like them
Do this thing that has for so long
Not belonged to us.
Index
- Sindiwe Magona
- Edited by Renée Schatteman, Georgia State University
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- Book:
- I Write the Yawning Void
- Published by:
- Wits University Press
- Published online:
- 02 March 2024
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- 01 July 2023, pp 209-215
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1 - The Scars of Umlungu
- Sindiwe Magona
- Edited by Renée Schatteman, Georgia State University
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- I Write the Yawning Void
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- Wits University Press
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- 02 March 2024
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- 01 July 2023, pp 11-16
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Summary
Magona's earliest published piece of published prose, this essay appeared in the New Internationalist volume 230 in April 1992. It provides a compelling example of Magona's ability to fashion unique and deeply embedded metaphors that she uses in her writing to convey large-scale experiences such as the colonial conquest of land and the accompanying destruction of the African way of life.
MY PEOPLE HAVE their own ways of doing things. We have always had our ways of doing things. ‘The ones scrubbed in hot water’ could not see this when they came. They came – ‘the ones with coloured eyes’ – and found my people living worthwhile lives that were satisfying to them. But the newcomers saw only indolence, ignorance and superstition. They saw nothing commendable, nothing worth preserving, least of all emulating. For them, our being alive held no lessons whatsoever. It proved nothing. They had their ways. And, in their eyes, these were far, far superior to ours. So began the destruction of my culture. So began our dying.
My people are a wise people. I do not claim God accorded them special preference in the allocation of grey matter. That would be absurd; as absurd as the claims of superiority made by ‘the ones without colour’, the ones we came to call umlungu.
But my people are patient. We have a saying: ‘These mountains were here when we were born. They will be here long after we are gone.’ Patiently, my people observed the world of which they knew they were a part – equal with the land, the rivers, the trees, the mountains and every other living thing.
My people knew how to flow with nature's rhythm, dance to its tune and harness its forces for their good. They knew about using and using up. They knew that rest is the beginning of restoration and that it brings healing.
How can one stand under the heavens one night, look up at the sky, point out one star and say: ‘That star is mine!’? My people would have thought anyone mad who suddenly pronounced themselves sole owner of such and such a mountain, valley, river or any other piece of the earth.
They had not learnt the greed that brings fences with it.
11 - Why I Wrote Beauty's Gift
- Sindiwe Magona
- Edited by Renée Schatteman, Georgia State University
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- Book:
- I Write the Yawning Void
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- Wits University Press
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- 02 March 2024
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- 01 July 2023, pp 130-145
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Summary
In this revised essay, which was published under the same title as the introduction to the Pan Macmillan reprint of Beauty's Gift in 2018, Sindiwe Magona describes coming to terms with the severity of the HIV and Aids crisis in South Africa, and giving herself permission to write a novel about the vulnerability of middle-class (black) married women to the virus due to the infidelity of their male partners.
SEVERAL CONSIDERATIONS WENT into the decision to return to my home country, South Africa, from my extended stay in the United States of America. First and foremost, besides the fact that I missed home and my family, I recognised that my writing was rooted in South Africa and things South African. I felt I needed to reconnect, be ‘on the spot’, as it were, so as to be more in tune with what was happening in the country day-to-day, rather than relying on reportage. I seemed to be bombarded daily with reports of the raging fire in the country of my birth – a veritable catastrophe that was laying waste to all life, especially young life. But this was a consideration I acknowledged mostly unconsciously, as I didn't say to myself: I’m going home to join the fight against HIV and Aids. Yet the pandemic troubled me to the core of my being.
In the early days, when Aids was still but a rumour, I attended my first Aids conference in the early 1990s in New York. A South African nurse, Nonceba Lubanga, had organised this. At the time, I knew very little about the disease. That was the time we still held the mistaken notion it was something that killed gay men. The only reason I attended the conference, held over a weekend, was because Nonceba is not only a loyal friend but one of those people you don't say no to – you’d better do as she says, or else …
What I learnt from that conference left me numb. Looking back, I know I had still not grasped the magnitude of what was about to befall us. I remember the spine-chilling words: ‘By the year 2000, there will hardly be a family, in South Africa, not touched by Aids …’. Hardly a family …
I can still recall the palpable, overwhelming sense of doom with which I left the conference.
Part II - Writing about Pressing Issues
- Sindiwe Magona
- Edited by Renée Schatteman, Georgia State University
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- Book:
- I Write the Yawning Void
- Published by:
- Wits University Press
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- 02 March 2024
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- 01 July 2023, pp 43-44
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Summary
Sindiwe Magona delivered ‘Address at the Funeral of a Young Woman’ – one of the essays in this section – as a speech some years ago at the funeral of a family friend who had died of Aids. It examines the causes of the spread of the virus in South Africa and the impact it had on daily life. The other three essays are newly written pieces that capture Magona's impassioned views on other issues of paramount importance in the current climate: the ever-increasing problem of poverty; the decreasing value assigned to mother tongue; and persistent manifestations of racial tensions within the country. These essays demonstrate Magona's tenacity in addressing these problems head-on and in upending the assumptions that tend to dominate the discourse surrounding these topics.
9 - Why I Wrote My Autobiographies
- Sindiwe Magona
- Edited by Renée Schatteman, Georgia State University
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- Book:
- I Write the Yawning Void
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- Wits University Press
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- 02 March 2024
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- 01 July 2023, pp 103-116
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Summary
This essay, which was published in Five Points: A Journal of Literature and Art in Winter 2018, was originally titled ‘The Impact of Colonialism & Post-colonialism on Women's Writing’. In it, Sindiwe Magona explains her first encounter with writing and how she stumbled upon autobiography, and reflects upon the significance of life writing in her own development as a writer.
AT A CONFERENCE I once attended, a writer (white) made the startling (to me, at any rate) assertion that Cecil Rhodes brought apples to South Africa. This came after some of us (African writers) had been going on, decrying colonialism and the hardships and disruption it had brought to the African continent. I suppose she was putting us in our place or, as the saying goes, setting the record straight.
I bring this up because it is also true that colonialism brought writing to South Africa. It also brought us the English language. However, because the nature of colonialism was never one of equality between the colonisers and the colonised, the inequality affected all aspects of life and living, including writing.
The English language and writing was in most probability taught to natives with the view of serving the coloniser and his purpose, which may broadly be described as trade and spreading Christianity.
I was born into a Christian family and went to a mission school for my primary school education. Even when I was at high school, even though it was not a church school, the day started with assembly, where we had hymn-singing and prayers, usually in English. At home, I do not recall much attention being paid to the language of the child, except for the first burst of happy surprise when the baby starts making sounds that announce she is attempting human speech. Oh, yes, then there is much encouragement. However, that soon stops as the baby becomes a toddler and then a child and her speech is taken for granted. It is at school that I recall receiving praise for my use of language. However, although that praise was for both spoken and written language, not one of my teachers, right up to teacher-training college, ever hinted that there might be a writer hidden somewhere inside me. The idea of developing a skill, in which I showed clear promise, was simply never imparted to me.
Frontmatter
- Sindiwe Magona
- Edited by Renée Schatteman, Georgia State University
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- Book:
- I Write the Yawning Void
- Published by:
- Wits University Press
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- 02 March 2024
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- 01 July 2023, pp i-iv
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I Write the Yawning Void
- Selected Essays of Sindiwe Magona
- Sindiwe Magona
- Edited by Renée Schatteman
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- Published by:
- Wits University Press
- Published online:
- 02 March 2024
- Print publication:
- 01 July 2023
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Sindiwe Magona is a celebrated South African writer, storyteller and motivational speaker known mainly for her autobiographies, biographies, novels, short stories, poetry and children's books. I Write the Yawning Void is a collection of essays that highlight her engagement with her writing that spans the transition from apartheid to the post-apartheid period, and that addresses themes such as HIV/Aids, language and culture, home and belonging.
Magona worked as a teacher and domestic worker, and spent two decades working for the United Nations in the United States of America. She has received many awards for her fearless writing 'truth to power'. Her written work is often informed by her lived experience of being a black woman resisting subjugation and poverty.
These essays bring to life many facets of Magona's personal history as well as her deepest convictions, her love for her country and despair at the problems that continue to plague it, and her belief in her ability to activate change. They demonstrate Magona's mastery of the essay form and serve as meaningful supplements to her fictional works, offering insightful responses to the conditions that inspired them.
Conclusion: A Tribute to Those Who Came Before Me
- Sindiwe Magona
- Edited by Renée Schatteman, Georgia State University
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- Book:
- I Write the Yawning Void
- Published by:
- Wits University Press
- Published online:
- 02 March 2024
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- 01 July 2023, pp 183-194
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Summary
This essay begins with the speech that Sindiwe Magona delivered at the Franschhoek Literary Festival in 2015 in honour of André Brink, whom she considers a literary ancestor. She follows this up with a reflection on the diverse voices that have shaped her as a writer.
I FEEL HIGHLY honoured by the Franschhoek Literary Festival and the Brink family, especially Karina Magdalena Brink, André's widow, for inviting me to participate in this year's festival.
First, let me share with you how I arrived at the title of my talk, ‘Andre Brink: Enigma, Betrayer, Villain or Hero: An Outsider's Take on this Giant of South African Letters’. This is my personal reflection on who I am next to André Brink; when, where and how our paths crossed; and what those encounters meant, as well as what they have come to mean to me.
No doubt, you – or at any rate, many of you – will agree with me that I am an outsider in this situation, an outsider looking in at the particular life of one André Phillipus Brink. I am an outsider because of who we were not so long ago when there was no way I could have been anything but an outsider in the life of this man. However, our paths did eventually cross, some 25 years ago, in 1990, to be precise, when something I would never have dreamt of happened: I became a writer. Anywhere else in the world, this would not be a noteworthy event. But given who I was – the where and the when – it was indeed remarkable.
Shortly after my first book was published in 1990, I was invited to my very first writer's conference, at the University of Cape Town. UCT was a foreign country to the likes of me. Brink could have studied there. He in fact lectured there. But it was forbidden territory to one such as I. However, this was different. I was not going there to study or lecture, but to a one-day affair – a writers’ conference.
10 - Why I Wrote Mother to Mother
- Sindiwe Magona
- Edited by Renée Schatteman, Georgia State University
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- Book:
- I Write the Yawning Void
- Published by:
- Wits University Press
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- 02 March 2024
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- 01 July 2023, pp 117-129
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Summary
This previously unpublished essay explains the genesis of this powerful novel about the turbulent period leading up to South Africa's first democratic elections in 1994. It narrates Sindiwe Magona's personal response to an event that brought South Africa much negative international attention – the 1993 killing of a 26-year-old Fulbright scholar from the United States by a group of young anti-apartheid protesters – and helps to explain why the novel continues to resonate with readers today.
MOTHER TO MOTHER (1998) is fiction, but there is no denying it is based on a real event, the murder of American Fulbright scholar, Amy Elizabeth Biehl, on 25 August 1993.
When that horrific event happened, I was not even in South Africa. I was in New York, USA, where I was working for the United Nations Organization, in the Department of Public Information (DPI). The tragic news spread internationally. That very same day, it reached us in New York. I didn't suddenly exclaim: Ah! There's a novel for me to write. In fact, I did not start writing Mother to Mother until 1996 – three full years after the event.
However, I was terribly saddened and felt deeply for the Biehl family, people I had no reason to believe I would ever meet. This is a typical response upon hearing sad news like this. When incidents such as these happen, how many of us do more than feel sorry for the families of the victims?
Eight months after Amy's murder, in April 1994, I was in South Africa to witness the miracle of the first democratic elections in the country. On the evening of my departure, Lindiwe Madikwa, a friend from primary-school days, drove me to the airport. That was before the ‘Drop and Go’ of today, when you could still drive your friend to the airport, go in and watch them check in, and, time permitting, have a bite in one of the cafés. Lindiwe and I did precisely that. She being a stickler for punctuality, I was a whole mile and a half early for my flight.
Over coffee we chatted about this and that, went over the miraculous happenings in the country, the ‘everybody’ elections no one had ever dreamed they would see.
5 - Address at the Funeral of a Young Woman
- Sindiwe Magona
- Edited by Renée Schatteman, Georgia State University
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- Book:
- I Write the Yawning Void
- Published by:
- Wits University Press
- Published online:
- 02 March 2024
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- 01 July 2023, pp 45-60
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Summary
This is a transcript of a speech that Sindiwe Magona delivered at the funeral of a family friend in December 2002, shortly before her retirement and return to South Africa. In it, she lambasts all those who are to blame in one way or another for the unprecedented spread of HIV (human immunodeficiency virus), which led to South Africa becoming the epicentre of the world's Aids crisis. Her words made such an impact that attendees beseeched her to put the speech in writing. This piece offers one of the clearest examples of the activism that Magona incorporates into her writing.
MY FELLOW AFRICANS, these are bad times, indeed. Daily, sad hordes troop to cemeteries to bury our youth. Custom dictates we bury the dead. However, the acceleration of today's rate of HIV and Aids is alarming, and the age of those dying an abomination. Sadly, we are gathered here today for no different reason. I’m sure I echo what is in the heart of each one here when I say: I wish it were not so.
We have lost a young woman, the youngest of her mother's four girls and the mother of an eight-year-old little girl. Zanele was only thirty years old.
But first, let me begin by expressing my condolences to the bereaved: Dear friends, as the elders say, and have taught us to say: ‘Akuhlanga lungehliyo!’ We are all here to shed tears with you in grief, and hope our presence will soften the blow a little.
I would be remiss if I didn’t, on behalf of us all, thank this family for what it has done. They have come out publicly; declared their deceased daughter was HIV positive. We thank them for that act of rare and amazing courage; thank them for their leadership.
These days, our sad plight has made us strangers to truth. We have long forsaken truth and chosen the path of appearances and false respectability. As far as I know, this is the first such acknowledgment in Gugulethu. Despite so many of our young people dying daily in unprecedented numbers, we continue to inhabit the house of lies and denial. Yes, Lord, even as we continue to call ourselves Christians, we continue in our wicked lying ways. But this family has decided their loss shall be our gain. Let us be grateful for such bounteous mercy!
6 - Do Not Choose Poverty
- Sindiwe Magona
- Edited by Renée Schatteman, Georgia State University
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- Book:
- I Write the Yawning Void
- Published by:
- Wits University Press
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- 02 March 2024
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- 01 July 2023, pp 61-73
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Summary
This essay spells out in detail the personal story that Sindiwe Magona references again and again in her writing: her dramatic escape from the extreme poverty she was born into as a black South African woman in 1943. She leans heavily upon this origins narrative not to castigate those in unfortunate circumstances but to inspire them to reject the assumption that the poor inherently lack the agency to improve their lives.
MANY OF THE world's poor are born into poverty. Some escape, many do not. Tragically, many do not only not escape poverty but actually sink deeper and deeper into the quagmire. However, most, if not all, have a fighting chance to escape poverty. Take it from me, you can escape poverty. I know, because I did.
I was born poor. That is true of most people my age group, born black in apartheid South Africa or before. Black-black1 Africans were not recognised as citizens of South Africa, their birth country. Apartheid South Africa was governed by white people, governed with the sole purpose of legally barring all those not white-skinned from meaningfully participating in the economy of the country – the darker, the further the push away from being a person who experienced a life worth living. Yes, even oppression apartheid implemented according to rank: white best; coloured next; black crushed to the ground. Black-black people didn't even have identity numbers. An ID number means you are counted as a human being, a member of a society, with a numerical value in the census. Black Africans were not counted – not as South Africans. Which is why describing the pass or dompas as an identity document, as some are wont to do, is incorrect. The pass book was a reference book in that it provided a number in reference to a black body being in a certain geographical or urban area, legally, for the purpose of residence (if that body qualified for this ‘right’), and/or the employment of a black body by such and such – this last, always and only a white body or organisation comprising a group of white bodies. Residence and employment, the first to serve the second, were the two criteria. Visits, as for a funeral or wedding, were of very short duration – never more than three weeks; vacation from work, normally a month (minus travel time, three weeks) is all one was permitted.
Foreword
- Sindiwe Magona
- Edited by Renée Schatteman, Georgia State University
-
- Book:
- I Write the Yawning Void
- Published by:
- Wits University Press
- Published online:
- 02 March 2024
- Print publication:
- 01 July 2023, pp xi-xxiv
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Summary
I Write the Yawning Void is a collection of essays by the celebrated South African writer, storyteller and activist, Sindiwe Magona. Known for her many contributions to a wide range of literary genres (autobiographies, short stories, plays, novels, poems, biographies and children's books), she has received less attention for the essays she has penned over the course of her career. Magona began to engage in expository writing with an article for the New Internationalist magazine in 1992, two years after she published her first full-length work, the autobiography To My Children's Children. She went on to publish other short prose pieces in this journal and in a variety of other venues, even as she was taking on one literary genre after another and establishing a name for herself in South African letters.
Today, Magona is well recognised as one of the country's most significant writers and a seminal figure in South African women's writing. She has received more than twenty awards since she began writing – most notably, the Xhosa Heroes Award in 1997 (which recognises those who work to uplift their communities); the Proclamation Award from New York State in 2003 (for her artistic work on the issues of HIV and Aids); the South African Molteno Gold Medal in 2007 (for her role in promoting isiXhosa); the Italian Premio Grinzane Terre D’Otrantro in 2007 (for writing that promotes dialogue between people); the Presidential Order of Ikhamanga in 2011 for outstanding achievement in literature and playwriting (the highest such award in South Africa); the Mbokodo Award for Creative Writing in 2012 (which she shared with Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer); as well as the English Academy of Southern Africa Gold Medal Award in 2016 and the André Brink Award in 2018, both of which pay tribute to her oeuvre. In addition, Magona has been awarded four honorary doctorates (from Hartwick College in the USA and also from Rhodes University, Nelson Mandela University and Fort Hare University in South Africa), and she completed a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of the Western Cape in 2022. In addition, she is among the list of ‘Living Legends’, a programme created by the South African Government's Department of Arts and Culture.
Given Magona's stature as a revered spokesperson for women and for marginalised people in general, a publication which gathers her most important essays into a single collection is both fitting and timely.
14 - Why I Write Children's Stories
- Sindiwe Magona
- Edited by Renée Schatteman, Georgia State University
-
- Book:
- I Write the Yawning Void
- Published by:
- Wits University Press
- Published online:
- 02 March 2024
- Print publication:
- 01 July 2023, pp 173-182
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Summary
In this previously unpublished essay, Sindiwe Magona explains her motivations for writing children's literature (becoming one of the most prolific of such writers in Africa) and her understanding of the uniqueness of the genre. Her decision to write stories for young readers, the essay suggests, is linked to her deep conviction that South Africa's youth need to be protected and nurtured if they are to become responsible citizens of the country.
IT WOULD BE wonderful if every child had a carefree, fun-filled childhood. I know this, because I did. Day was a time for playing games, climbing trees, roaming hills and valleys, and hunting for edible roots and berries. And when sun went to her mother and our mothers called us home as the stars started popping out to twinkle and wink up in the sky, we ran home. Gleefully, we ran home to grandma – not mama. Mama called us in – called us home. But, in our hearts and minds, without any doubt, we knew she only called us to go to grandma, and that it was she to whom we were running. Grandma didn't have to invite us. We knew she was sitting there, the bright-burning fire before her, waiting for us. Yes, the fire and grandma waited for us as mama called us back home. So we ran back home and joined makhulu, making a semi-circle around the fire with its three-legged pot. Our mouths watering, the smell of whatever was cooking in that pot making us salivate, our eyes glued to the majestic figure huddled with back slightly bent, stout, strong, ready … then, as soon as we were settled, quiet, our ears pulled us to the words pouring out of makhulu's mouth:
‘Kwathi ke kaloku ngantsomi …’
At once, all thought of food flew from our minds as we wandered far away … seeing what makhulu painted in such vivid manner, her voice rising to the sky, chasing the moon, or falling so-so-so soft and faint, as a child hears the stalking beast … stealthy … slow … ever so slowly coming closer, getting ready to –
Today, I tell stories. Write stories. I doubt I would do so had I not had the childhood I’d enjoyed.
Part III - Writing about My Writing
- Sindiwe Magona
- Edited by Renée Schatteman, Georgia State University
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- Book:
- I Write the Yawning Void
- Published by:
- Wits University Press
- Published online:
- 02 March 2024
- Print publication:
- 01 July 2023, pp 101-102
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Summary
This section features essays in which Sindiwe Magona reflects upon the most significant and best-known works in her oeuvre. Two of the pieces were previously published while four represent new writing. In their discussion of the origins, the process, and, in some cases, the reception of each text, they serve as enlightening supplements to her literary works. But they are so rich with unique and engaging reflections on a wide variety of social issues that each stands independent of its corresponding work. When these ‘Why I Wrote’ essays are considered together, they provide a window into Magona's thoughts over the years and across her different creative productions, and also into Magona's expanding sense of herself as a writer.