Antidote for Global Feminist Gaps as Encoded in Sindiwe Magona's Black South African Autobiographies

ANTIDOTE FOR GLOBAL FEMINIST GAPSAS ENCODED IN SINDIWE MAGONA’S BLACK

SOUTH AFRICAN AUTOBIOGRAPHIES

Lesibana Rafapa

University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa

ABSTRACT

The relatively new black woman South African writerSindiwe Magona’s autobiographies To My Children’s Children (1990)and Mother to Mother (1998) urge the agency of oppressed blackSouth African women in a nuanced manner. That she portraysfemale characters from a characteristically feministperspective framed normatively within a milieu in whichwomen are confronted by and confront challenges in aracialized and gendered context should not misidentify heras a discursively indistinct feminist writer. This chapterargues that Magona’s category of writings epitomized mostlyin her two major works hinges on female protagonistsreinventing themselves in an exploitative and discriminatoryatmosphere not in a way compatible with what areconventionally acknowledged as the types and evolutionaryfeatures of dominant feminist theory. I analyze Magona’sworks with the objective of illustrating how they areanchored in fresh explanations of aspects of black southAfrican cultures as mindful of and sympathetic to the socialposition of women. By a close look at Magona’s work and someaspects of black South African cultures constituting thefabric of her art, I engage earlier feminist interpretationsreached by Magona analysts through what I demonstrate to bedistorting lenses that deny self-description through(mis)representation. I make a distinction between Magona’sindividual character depiction dwelling on dispositioncoalescing into what may be understood as individual traitunfolding within a specific cultural matrix, as opposed to a

Corresponding author: Lesibana Rafapa. University of South Africa,Pretoria, South Africa. E-mail: rafaplj@ unisa.ac.za.

Antidote for Global Feminist Gaps …

kind of characterization identifiable as metonymicallysymbolic of communal ethos. The study seeks to highlight howdiscourse in Magona’s novels contributes to a theory offeminism accommodative of social vantage points hithertorepressed in dominant feminist discourse tilted towards themore powerful centre.

MAGONA’S DEVELOPMENT OF AWOMANIST REFRACTED VOICE WITHIN

GLOBAL POLYVOCALITY

In this chapter I consider how in her autobiographies To MyChildren’s Children (1990) and Mother to Mother (1998) the black SouthAfrican woman writer Sindiwe Magona displays a profoundcritique of dominant feminist theory as well as apply it tothe discourse of her narratives in a distinctive mannerdeserving of critical attention. While Magona’s relativeunder-appreciation as a writer of fiction can be ascribed tothe fact that as recently as 1999 she could be described as “arecent practitioner of the novel form … not that widely knownoutside South Africa” (Boehmer 1999:159, 160), the niche shehas now carved for herself warrants more dedicated criticalattention.

Due to the autobiographical element of her fiction (seeDaymond 2002:331; Masemola 2010:117), I integrate my scrutinyof Magona’s novels or autobiographies within what I assert asher real life discursive progression within the feministconceptual framework the distinctive inflection of which I ampursuing in this study. A character like Joyce in Magona’s1991 short story collection Living, Loving and Lying Awake at Nightincarnates some aspect of Magona’s theoretical immersion inthe former’s fictionalized view that “a feminist perspectivein South Africa is inhibited by racism” (Magona 1991:59). Evena critic such as Loflin (1990:112) does shed light on thiskind of characterization, albeit from a historicallyperiodising vantage point paying scant attention to what maybe described as the short narratives’ dialectical theoreticalmatrix of feminism. Magona’s life journey testifies that she

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has been exposed to and influenced by feminist theory ininteresting ways this chapter seeks to outline. Intellectuallyequipped with academic and professional qualificationsincluding degrees from Colombia University, with an experienceof working for the United Nations in New York and living therefor twenty three years, it cannot make sense that she has notgrappled with feminist ideas forming part of the globalintellectual context at least from the time “issues like raceand class … were an integral part of the feminism of the 1960sand 1970s” (Mann and Huffman 2005:60). One feature of Magona’s‘moulding’ by feminist theory is her appropriation of the1980s postcolonial theoretical feature of “global feminism.”According to Mann and Huffman (2005:66), this tenet offeminism highlights “relations between local and globalprocesses affect[ing] women in different social locationsacross the globe.” I intend to include this criterion in myscrutiny of the discourse of Magona’s selected novels. Inaddition to testing the discourse of Magona’s narrativesagainst major feminist postcolonial theoretical orientations,I shall probe evidence from them of feminist post-modernistand post-structuralist views of identity as “simply aconstruct of language, discourse, and cultural practices”(Mann and Huffman 2005:63). In this way I should show howMagona’s influence by feminist theory bears some correlationwith its evolving tenets across the ages. As further testimonyof Magona’s comprehensiveness in subsuming feminism in orderto consolidate her own trope of womanist social commentary, Iexplore also how the discourse of Magona’s fiction points to aspace in her feminist evolution identifiable with 1970s “thirdwave” feminists in their refinement of second wave tendenciesto “factionalize” women unified internally by a “sisterhood”that yet ended up treating “oppressions as separate anddistinct” and hierarchisizing oppressions by treating “oneform as more fundamental than another” (Mann and Huffman 2005:59).

In keeping with the global evolution of feminist theory ,there is evidence in Magona’s fiction of what may be seen asher commonality with a section of the 1970s “third wave” ornew generation feminists is their moving of “subjugated voices

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from the margins to the centre, thus decentering dominantdiscourse” (Mann and Huffman 2005:65). Magona’s criticalidentification with the intersectional position of the secondwave counter-faction of feminist women of colour who viewed“identity politics as the key to liberation” (Mann and Huffman2005:58), in reaction to what may be described as dominantwhite women’s pushing of black women from the centre of thendominant feminist theory strongly taking root in America, isfurther evidence of her familiarity with the different streamsof feminism as the theory developed across geographical space.Intersectional thinking, according to Mann and Huffman(2005:58), arose “in the United States … from within thesecond wave … [sharing] a focus on difference … that embracedidentity politics as the key to liberation”, while one factionco-existing with it “saw freedom in resistance to identity.”Intersectional views negated those of the second wave ofAmerican feminists for “alleged essentialism, white solipsism,and failure to adequately address the simultaneous andmultiple oppressions” of women across race and class (Mann andHuffman 2005:58). Such a strand of third wave feminists waslater “exemplified by postmodernist and post-structuralistfeminists who critically questioned the notion of coherentidentities and viewed freedom as resistance to categorizationor identity,” as Mann and Huffman (2005:58) explain. I arguethat Magona’s novels display a typically feminist defiance ofbinary exclusivism, in both common and unique ways settingapart both her literary project and brand of feminism.

As I analyse the three novels by mapping the evolution ofglobal feminism onto Magona’s progressive immersion in thetheory, I illustrate how close she is to some womanist,intersectional and polyvocal problematisation of what wouldotherwise be a regurgitated affirmation of dominant discoursewithin feminism. As Mann and Huffman (2005:65) explain,polyvocality embraces the view that “No one view is inherentlysuperior to another and any claim to having a clear view ofthe truth is simply a masternarrative – a partial perspectivethat assumes dominance and privilege.” I argue that apolyvocal stance frames Magona’s discourse in the two novels,identifiable with the manner in which, according to Mann and

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Huffman (2005:63-64,) the common epistemological groundjoining intersectionality with postmodernism and post-structuralism is the way in which exponents of thecrisscrossing streams “call for … more localized mini-narratives to give voice to the multiple realities that arisefrom diverse social locations.” The womanism I will use datacollected from Magona’s novels to trace, is one Alice Walkersees lived by a “communal mother … who is committed to theintegrity, survival and wholeness of entire peoples due to hersense of self and her love for her culture” (Mehta 2000:397).

AGENCY URGED FOR BLACK SOUTH AFRICANS WITHIN ACOMPLACENT APARTHEID NATION: TO MY CHILDREN’S

CHILDREN AND MAGONA’S WOMANIST DISCOURSE

Magona’s autobiography To my Children’s Children (1990) opens withan implied interpretation by the South African woman writerherself of her work as an attempt at performing a writtenpreservation of the black South Africans’ socio-politicalhistory, which normally would have been transmitted verballyfor the reason that theirs “is an oral tradition” (1). Shetells not only her own life story as she describes what it waslike “living in the 1940s onwards … in the times of yourgreat, grandmother, me” (1). Simultaneously she hints at theentire narrative carrying out an explication of the history ofa people, by making it clear that the autobiography detailshow “Heavy, indeed, was the yoke that black people bore” dueto apartheid conditions created by a patriarchal and racistwhite rule in which “the white man … had set himself up astheir god” (1). Her anti-racist stand is reinforced when thesymbol of patriarchy is expanded to include blackness, as inher authorial statement concerning her authoritarian fatherwhose sense of “being powerful” would never leave her (2).That Magona’s conception of feminism includes the view that“macroeconomic policies have gendered effects” (Berik et al.2009:3) is borne out when right at the opening of theautobiography she conjures an atmosphere of economic

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domination in phrases like “pounds, shillings, and pennies”and “rands and cents” (1). One more crucial element ofMagona’s discourse in this long narrative is her projection ofa religious pluralist ideal, by referring to white peopleimposing themselves as the” god” of black South Africans underapartheid.

Among the defining features of the cosmology of the blackSouth Africans living in the village of Gungululu with theprotagonist, are spiritualities symbolized by the phrases“Ootikoloshe, the little people, and izithunzela, the zombies” (10),“believed thunder was God speaking” (11), “spill beer on theground before drinking that the ancestors may partake thereof”(12) and “suffered through at church” (15). By acknowledgingthe presence of western Christian churches among the blackvillagers, Magona feministically lets go of what wouldotherwise be an ethnocentric view of spirituality. Afterearlier referring to whites imagining themselves as the “god”of oppressed black South Africans, her childhood memory oflighting invokes a hybrid conception of the natural phenomenonas “God”, speaking – this time a deity spelt with capital “G”.However, the narrator’s confession that during her childhoodshe found Sunday church services in the black village ofGungululu “unispiring” (15) is Magona’s foregrounding andprioritization of the indigenous religion of her peoplepractised with abandon (12). A religious culture in whichpeople believe in witchcraft related creatures like zombiesand revere their ancestors as Magona’s fellow villagers do, donot see their indigenous consciousness and lifestyles in ahierarchical relationship with Christianity. By such astylistic manipulation, Magona enriches her domestication ofglobal feminism in a complex and questioning manner typical ofthe feminist project, especially in its advanced historicalevolutionary stage of feminist postcoloniality.

The cultural aesthetic of oral storytelling intensifies theindigenous cultural complex of which indigenous spiritualityis a constituent. Apart from a strategic encapsulation of thewritten mode of narration within what the opening paragraphsof the autobiography inculcate as an originally verbalnarration of the contents, Magona makes clear that the

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traditional folktales and riddles form the texture of howchildren in Gungululu were brought up (13). The observationthat “In her autobiography, Sindiwe Magona draws on two setsof narrative conventions – those of Xhosa orature and those ofwestern writing – and the resultant text is dialogic” (Daymond2002:331) should accurately be seen as true not only of Motherto Mother (1998) which the writer specifically focuses on.Magona’s debut autobiography To My Children’s Children (1990) provesto be the fountainhead of a stylistic feature refractingMagona’s brand of feminism, later pervading her other works asI illustrate in the next sections of this chapter.

One pertinent aspect of feminist postcoloniality is itsorientation towards the kind of religious pluralism encoded inthe discourse of To My Children’s Children. That is why Trexler(2007:46) states that “a feminist theology of religiouspluralism” is committed to eradicating “hierarchy wherever itis found”, thus aiding “religious pluralism in underminingclaims of Christian superiority.” It is important to note thatas a member of oppressed blacks in the setting of thenarrative, Magona creates an atmosphere of a myriad concurringreligions, first as a way of defying an imposed hierarchicalprecedence of religions extraneous to the lifestyles of theindigenous blacks. Secondly, Magona acknowledges the existenceof these other religions, believing that they are equal to thereligion of her own community of fellow blacks and should beacknowledged as such. Yet in a manner identifying her withglobal feminists believing in intersectional group identityand the equality of the various blocks held together byvarying identities, the narration of Magona’s autobiographydoes not posit homogenized intersectionality at the cost ofthe kind of cultural identity holding together the black SouthAfricans. Historically, such a recognition of the simultaneousand non-hierarchical nature of oppressions” (Mann and Huffman2005:60) is not unprecedented, yet Magona’s addition of SouthAfrican blackness and black womanness to the polyvocality ofglobal feminisms is unparalleled in giving voice to what Mannand Huffman (2005:65) describe as “multiple realities thatarise from diverse social locations.”

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Economic exploitation tied to her being a black woman isexposed when Magona moves from one domestic work to another,after losing a teaching job in which she and other black womenare exploited in a manner worse that how black men areexploited and doomed to inhuman working conditions. Whileworking for the Garlands as a domestic, she works “from sevenin the morning to eight-thirty at night, Monday to Friday; andseven to two-thirty in the afternoon on Saturday; and Sunday,eight to ten-thirty” (124).

Even migrant whites display racist solidarity with whiteapartheid rulers (137). As an expression of awareness of thehierarchical centering of white oligarchic exploitation of thesubaltern globally, Magona bitterly protests that it is thismigrant group of whites that she finds “hardest to swallow”(137).

Magona’s weaving of her personal with national historiesfrom the perspective of exploited black South African malesand females during apartheid, characterizes her regard for thesocio-political history of her people with the seriousness theAfrican theorist Es’kia Mphahlele articulates as the “burdenof our history we cannot afford to ignore” (Mphahlele2002:83). From a black South African cultural point of view,Mphahlele (2004:27) sees the writer as someone consciouslywanting “to give an account of himself as a product ofhistorical process.” Magona should rightly be understood as awriter using autobiography to affirm the cultural perspectivesof fellow black South Africans needing to have the agency tocounteract white ruling class hegemony. This includes refined,nuanced cultural affinities such as those expressed byMphahlele (2004:27) on the place of history and the writerwithin black South African culture threatened by apartheidoppression. It is for this reason that Loflin (1997:220)stresses Magona’s dissolution of self in her feministdiscourse, with the remark that “Magona describes theoppressive conditions of black domestic workers underapartheid.” In a typically simultaneous feminist conformingand negating of global feminists concepts like womanism,Magona thus displays a complex delineation of the womanistAlice Walker (Mehta 2000:397) has described as a “communal

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mother … who is committed to the integrity, survival andwholeness of entire peoples due to her sense of self and herlove for her culture.”

Such a uniquely reconstructed womanism adds to the otherconcepts within a global feminist framework that Magona hasappropriated in order to lend a ring of original peculiarityto the agency she represents in To My Children’s Children (1990) IfMagona believes in feminist post-modernist and post-structuralist views of identity as “simply a construct oflanguage, discourse, and cultural practices” (Mann and Huffman2005:63), the cultural practices encoded into To My Children’sChildren (1990) by means of her discourse using language as Idemonstrate above are specifically black South African underapartheid conditions.

In the same way the stylistic and discursive aspects of ToMy Children’s Children germinate seeds that continue to grow inMagona’s later work Mother to Mother (1998), her position alsomanifests itself in her short story collection Living, Loving andLying Awake at Night (1991), and in Forced to Grow (1992), her sequelto To My Children’s Children (1990). This is seen when Magonadescribes her domestic worker character Joyce in the shortstory collection as realizing that “a feminist perspective inSouth Africa is inhibited by racism” (Magona 1991:59). This istestimony to Magona’s feminist project illustrated above tohave started developing in To My Children’s Children (1990), when shedeclares her view that place for her “means less ageographical locality and more a group of people with whom Iam connected and to whom I belong” (Magona 1990:1-2).

Magona here concurrently associates with and dissociatesherself from a layer of feminists characterized astranscontinental postcolonials known for downplaying thesignificance of identity attachment to a specific locale. Itis such a Magonaesque feminist bent that has led to Boehmer(1999:169) observing that in Magona’s Mother to Mother (1998),“contrary to transcontinental post-colonials, home isexperienced as being at once grounded, even if temporarily,and up in the air, in the sense of provisional” (Boehmer1999:169). Before I move on to a discussion of Magona’s Motherto Mother (1998), it is worthwhile to show continued removal of

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racist discrimination in Magona’s urge for anti-patriarchalagency starting to show in To My Children’s Children (1990). Amongthe many autobiographical segments Magona chooses to put undera magnifying glass in Forced to Grow (1992) more than she does inTo My Children’s Children (1990), is her transition from workingunder exploitative conditions as a teacher under the apartheidBantu Education Department, to “nearly doubling [her] monthlyearnings from forty-seven to seventy-two rand” working for yetanother department of apartheid government called BantuAdministration (Magona 1992:82).

Upon learning of Magona’s resignation from the school heheads, the male principal named Tabane reacts in a manner thatpaternalistically implies an objectification denying the factthat Magona herself has worked her way up the economic ladder,by remarking “now that I have scrubbed you, they all want you”(Magona 1991:82).

Yet another black, a township ‘landlord’ named Ngambu,sympathizes with the patriarchal school principal by throwingMagona out of her rented room which, unlike the rest of theblack township, “was large … had inside running water, hot aswell as cold … had electricity” (Magona 1992:82). Magona(1992:82) purposely juxtaposes her plight with the fact thatas a woman she “absolutely had no hope of being allowed torent or buy a council house.”

Inclusion of the restrictive impact of apartheidgovernment’s macro-economic policies on the protagonist ofForced to Grow (1992) serves to clarify the comprehensiveness ofMagona’s feminism in the way she handles autobiography.

It is a recognized tenet of global feminism to foster “aclear understanding of how gender relations can affectprogress toward [the formulation of] efficacious policies topromote societal development and raise living standards”(Berik et al. 2009:13).

The township in which Magona rents a room in order to beclose to her teaching job at Moshesh Higher Primary Schooldoes not have sufficient space and amenities for adequatehuman occupation (Magona 1992: 82). This situation is aproduct of conscious macro-economic policy formulation by thewhite apartheid ruling class. While post-apartheid South

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Africa’s macro-economic policy may enjoy a limited role ofnational government due to restriction by post-national macro-economic dynamics characterizing today’s globalized economy,the apartheid government mostly afforded national monopoly ofeconomic policy at the cost of international macro-economics.Besides, world economics between 1948 when the national partyassumed rule in South Africa and 1994 when a new democraticSouth Africa dawned have not always been as post-structuralistor postmodernist and relatively deracialized as today. In aninterrogation of Magona’s feminist discourse displayed by herautobiographies, it is thus pertinent to pose the globalfeminist question Berik et al. (2009:13) concern themselveswith, regarding “how gender and the macroeconomy interact.”

The immortalization of Magona’s socio-economic holding downby both members of her black community and the macro-economicsof the white apartheid state should be understoodsimultaneously as her shift to a deliberate painting of thewhites running apartheid South Africa, symbolized the word“council” (Magona 1992:82), with the same patriarchal brush asthe black school principal and ‘landlord’. Magona laterexplains that by council she is referring to the Cape TownCity Council functioning under the Bantu AdministrationDepartment that is “charged specifically with the regulationof Africans,” where as an employee she “learn[s] a lot about[her] special hell as an African” (Magona 1992:83). Apart fromachieving the kind of deracialized agentive display of bothinternal and external exploitation by lumping black and whitepatriarchy together evident in her earlier work To My Children’sChildren (1990), Magona (1992:83) invokes her feminist religiouspluralist orientation by means of the word “hell.”

According to Trexler (2007:50, 52, 58) such a position isakin to a global feminist model for religious pluralism thatis described as postpatriarchal, incorporating “a variety ofresources and perspectives into theology” and leading to astance that “all persons are created within the body of Godand, as such, cannot be subjugated because of non-Christianbeliefs.” In the same breath, Africanist theorists likeMphahlele have indicated that within African spirituality,western Christian notions of hell as some place one may be

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doomed to in the hereafter are replaced by notions of‘paradisial’ well-being and possible lived hell in the hereand now (Mphahlele 2002:154).

In this way, by describing the life of black women underapartheid as hell Magona is simultaneously global and African,congruous to her pinning down of global feminism to beinflected in terms of her specifically South African notion ofhome. Such a feminist simultaneity renders Magona amenableeven to global notions of what writers like Mann and Huffman(2005:81) conceive as a “decentering of the West” emanatingfrom postmodernist feminism. The socio-political agency Magonaurges through her discourse starting with her autobiography ToMy Children’s Children is achieved through a global womanism, post-structuralism or postmodernism and feminist postcolonialitythat she inflects individually to account for her specificblack South African home impinged upon by an apartheidnational macro-economics.

AGENCY URGED FOR BLACK SOUTH AFRICANS WITHIN THEAPARTHEID NATION ON THE BRINK OF A COLLAPSE: MOTHER

TO MOTHER AND MAGONA’S KIND OF INFLECTED FEMINISM

Published four years into the new South Africa’s democracyinaugurated in 1994, Magona’s autobiography Mother to Mother(1998) aptly critiques an apartheid state turbulently shakenout of complacency by an intensifying struggle for theliberation of oppressed blacks, led by the blacks themselves.The narrative is set within the height of the liberationstruggle when the ANC and other black liberation movements inexile and their supporters within the borders of a moribundapartheid state had joined hands through underground networks.Magona exemplifies such networks with the incidents leading upto Mxolisi’s mother Mandisa meeting her son who is hiding awayfrom apartheid police, through an intricate route arranged byfreedom fighter comrades (Magona 1998:196-210). I will showthat Magona continues gainfully to experiment with herfeminism, sustaining the devices appearing in her earlierworks.

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Magona opens the narrative in such a way that she creates anaura of orality, bridging the distance between herself and themurdered girl’s mother by means of a direct, I-narrator voice.Magona modulates the narrator Mandisa’s voice, transforming itfrom what would be a somewhat detached written kind ofcommunication by means of an epistolary medium. The shockingsalutation of the missive from the murderer son’s motherMandisa to the mother of the slain white young American womanAmy Biehl is “My son killed your daughter” (1). Within theeffective tautness of the monologue, a richly dialogicdiscourse unfolds, stretching the subject matter from thespecific to the contextual, and from the self to the black andwhite nations of Mxolisi’s and Amy Biehl’s mothers. The manyquestions Mother to Mother (1998) opens with, chart theparameters of such a varied multidimensionality of focus,preparing the reader for the answers the narration implicitlyundertakes to provide. Such a style reinforces Magona’sfeminist perspective. Brisolara (2003:30) highlights theprimacy of questioning within feminist theory, by pointing outthat “Questioning leads to dialogue, which leads (though notnecessarily) to organization or action toward changes.” At onetime Magona’s questioning assumes the form of question, at theother a statement expressing a challenge to some(mis)perception. Phrases like “people look at me”, “where shedoes not belong”, “if she’s American”, “Where did she thinkshe was going?” and “no white people in this place?”, all urgean agency that will change the status quo (Magona 1998:7, 8).What may simplistically be seen as a shirking of parentalresponsibility in the words “people look at me as if I’m theone” (7) and heartlessness in the accusation of the slain girlas a “white girl with nothing better to do than hang around inGuguletu, where she does not belong” (7), are technical shiftsof focus from blaming the killer boy Mxolisi and his motherfor the incident, to indicting apartheid rulers for creatingand maintaining social conditions that render abnormality anormality. This comes out more literally in the narrator’sremark, “these monsters our children have become” (8). Withsuch a shift effected, it is now understandable why the motherof the black boy is “not surprised” that her son has killed

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the addressee’s daughter. Boehmer is aware of the significanceof Magona’s complex use of voice with one effect I show above,in her observation that “the narrator in Mother to Motherexpresses deep bitterness at the nationalist rhetoric whichhas produced … the irrational violence that has engulfed herson” (Boehmer 1999:161).

Of course, as I demonstrate, the bitterness is directed evenbeyond the national, commensurate with the complexity ofMagona’s application of feminist ideas.

Magona is quick to confine such a state in the upbringing ofchildren to the black areas of “Guguletu, or … Langa, orNyanga or Khayelitsha”, prefacing the phrase with a “Here”that associates the writer with the blacks and their locale,as opposed to opulent white areas of South Africa occupiedonly by whites in the heyday of the Group Areas and otherdiscriminatory and oppressive apartheid legislation. It issuch an aspect that Boehmer captures in her remark that forMagona “home is still an important concept, a core site ofselfhood” (Boehmer 1999: 168). Magona reveals thegeographically disjointed oneness of hers and her people’shome, with the suggestion that the white girl could actuallyhave been killed by any other black South African child “inanother far-away township in the vastness of this country”(8). There is a telling tension in the expressions “if she’sAmerican, all the better” (7), “where did she think she wasgoing?” (8), “she probably saw that coming from theauthorities, who might either hamper and hinder her” (9), “didshe not go to school?” (8), “You don’t see big words … becauseone of us kills somebody, here in the townships” (9) and “thestory was all over the place” (9).

Among the many ‘silent’ statements Magona is giving afeminist voice to by these expressions, is that some fellowblack South Africans have been so hardened by apartheidsuffering that they cannot distinguish between what theydislike about the Reagan American administration of the timeand the likeable mission of the white girl who has fallenvictim to spiraling violence in black townships. At the sametime, the white girl’s miscalculated visit to Guguletu isblamed on American blindness to the positioned nature of

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macro-economics and other fronts for global expansionism,where the girl personifies the American state with her failureto “go to school” properly on the reality of the apartheidSouth African situation. That the white girl banked onapartheid police to protect her from danger on the night shewas is an acute assertion that at this point of South Africanblack people’s appropriation of power, state machinery waspowerless, with the power then in the hands of the ordinaryblack people in their numbers. Magona brings out herlampooning of the senseless economic policies of the apartheidstate in her questioning why the government ironically “paysfor [Mxolisi’s] food, his clothes, the roof over his head”(10) only now that he is imprisoned for ‘killing’ the naivelyinnocent American visiting university student Amy Biehl. HereMagona’s global feminism is revealed, in her characterizationechoing the postmodernist and post-structuralist feministviewpoint shifting power for bringing about change to themasses, in her undermining of “structural views of oppression”and “treatment of power as more ephemeral and ubiquitous”(Brisolara 2003:64). Magona projects the powerless blackmasses as the now powerful in bringing about change. In thesame vein, Magona externalizes her feminist sensibility ofcensuring an arrogant hegemony of the centre, this timerepresented by both apartheid South Africa and the UnitedStates of America of the time, in the way west controlled ormanipulated media selectively report on the victims ofviolence along colour lines. It is one of the many feministviews that “What is spoken and who is silenced shapes theperception of reality” (Brisolara 2003:31). In recognition ofthis aspect of Magona’s feminism, McHaney (2008:176) remarksthat Magona “seeks understanding by imagining thecircumstances of the killers in lieu of hearing the story viathe typical media attention given to the victim.” One morethread continuing in Mother to Mother (1998) is Magona’sencapsulation of local black South African lifestyles andconsciousness within an atmosphere of indigenous spiritualityand artistic form.

Upon receiving news of Magona’s pregnancy out of wedlock,one of the worries uppermost in her mother’s mind is “What

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will the church people say?” (123). Implicitly Magona ties heroverall discrimination on the basis of gender to her mother’ssubjugated ingestion of the Christian ideas of sin. Magonasatirizes the non-cultural notion of sin more explicitly atthe start of the narrative, when she pleads for her murdererson in the words “Forgive him this terrible, terrible sin”(10). Calling the act a sin and not a mistake is in keepingwith Magona’s subtle ascription of blame for his son’s beastlyactions at least to apartheid conditions under which blackslive. Christianity, especially it Calvinist version, is oneprominently known part of the fabric of apartheid SouthAfrica. By invoking the foreign idea of sin, Magona impliesthat only white apartheid South Africa and the complicitAmerican state of the time are blind to the fact that what hashappened is not a fault of her son’s.

While what Daymond (2002:331) says concerning Magona’sfusion of a South African indigenous narrative style oforature with a conventionally western one is true, this shouldbe stretched to include the fact that the indigenous takesprecedence over the western. This justifies why Tatamkhulueven recasts the cattle killing Xhosa incident from portrayingthe black people of South Africa and their culture as lesssensible and nuanced than the written history of the whites(185-195). As a retort to the child Magona’s distortedinterpretation of the story of Nongqawuse, Tatamkhuluheightens the blame from individual teachers to the apartheidstate employing them and the Bantu Education system, in thewords, “These liars, your teachers … But, what can one expect?After all they are paid by the same boer government … the samepeople who stole our land” (188). When Tatamkhulu regales theyoung Magona with a genuine version of the cattle killinghistorical event, he ends up reciting “in the voice of animbongi of the people” (188). Contrary to the blaming of genderrelated devaluing on what is often called cultural patriarchyof males within black communities in the west’s othering blackSouth Africans, here we have a male elder displaying aprofound valuing of the female by undertaking intimately toteach her the true story of her people. The raising ofTatamkhulu’s role to the traditional cultural one of a

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prophetic elder called imbongi imbues the character ofTatamkhulu with an epic dimension. In addition, this hoiststhe black indigenous story above that of the white oppressors.

Magona achieves the same thematic effect with hercharacterization of Magona’s father not as a caricature alwaysmanipulated to live true to the western role of a traditionalblack South African male stereotyped by the west aspaternalistic. While Magona’s mother does not relent in herostricization of Magona for falling pregnant with Mxolisi,Magona delineates the character of Magona’s father asaccommodative of what has happened (Magona 1998:138-139). Forthis reason, the views of writers such as Loflin (1997: 213)that Magona’s suffering after she has fallen pregnant wasmotivated by the patriarchal state of black South Africancultures not accepting that their daughters have matured intoadulthood, seem to me to contradict Magona’s more nuanceddiscourse in this autobiography.

CONCLUSION

While Magona does apply global feminist ideas in thediscourse of her autobiographies, she does so alongsidedistilling her own kind of feminism uniquely foregroundingblack South Africans as a positioned focus of what wouldotherwise be an ineffectual, overgeneralizing global feminism.

Not only is Magona “aware of the role of the apartheid Statein the breakdown of communities, demanding interventions atcommunity level” (Masemola 2010:116). She considers thecommunity of black South African men and women first as theprimary section of global society required to show agency andchange the plight of her people, before she can resonateintersectionally with the other oppressed of the world. Inthis way Magona can be said to embrace the feminist economicsinsight recognizing that “Increased global economicintegration … has caused income and wealth inequality toexpand,” thus working against development by generating“intergroup inequality in gender, race/ethnicity, and class

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terms (Berik et al. 2009:1). This position comfortablycharacterizes Magona as a world feminist, according to theglobal feminist aspect expressed by Trexler (2007: 47), of notonly asserting “that women should be treated equally”, butbroadening to maintain that “all people worldwide ought to betreated as equals.” It is thus noteworthy that Magona pushesforward the development of feminist theory on a world scaleeven as she provides an antidote to some hegemonicmisperceptions concerning black South Africans as culturalgroups. Some peoples belonging to the periphery will never betreated as equals within the feminist project for as long astheir cultural identities are distortedly represented byfeminists from the centre. One such distortion is what Magonarectifies in her discourse, that black South African cultures,though patriarchal like most western societies, are notinherently sexist because of this. Hence her characterizationof male characters as culturally empowering and sociallybenevolent, while some woman characters come across as genderdiscrimination incarnate, meted out to same gender characters.Magona even apportions epic assertion of the black SouthAfrican cultural voice within a global feminist framework tothe male character Tatamkhulu (Mother to Mother 1998). It isTatamkhulu who performs the agentive task of what (Loflin1997: 220) sees as “preserving the knowledge of apartheid’soppression for future generations.” This is why Tatamkhulu re-tells the cattle killing Xhosa historical event with a blackvoice, linking the historical freedom struggle to theliberation struggle within which Mother to Mother (1998) is set.

One way Magona attains her unique enrichment of globalfeminism by bending it dialectically to account for thedistinctive plight of black South Africans under apartheid, isby stressing stylistically that apartheid in South Africa hasqueerly conflated gender, class and race discrimination. ThisMagona achieves in an complex way of using the dynamics oflocal oppression of women and blacks to dovetail within globalfeminism’s stand that “sex and gender relations cannot beseparated from race, class, sexual orientation or preference,and physical ability” (Brisolara 2003:27), and that feminismhas “proven ability to understand diversity, complexity, and

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power, to give voice to what has long been silenced”(Brisolara 2003:33). Magona’s autobiographies deny a culturalsilencing, including apartheid’s denial of what black SouthAfricans among the oppressed of the world would gain fromfeminism’s inclination towards a postpatriarchal religiouspluralism. It is through Magona’s refracted model of globalfeminist postcoloniality that the cosmology of black SouthAfricans, including their own understanding of associatingwith the body of God through ancestral veneration, can beenlisted in the gains of feminist-driven social emancipation.

While on a world scale children, the disabled and the poormay be the ones feminist approaches seek to rescue fromdiscrimination and oppression, on the South African sceneapartheid artificially constructed society such that poor anddisabled coincided with black.

This is why the protagonists of Magona’s autobiographies arepainted as a confluence of economic, gender and apartheidoppression, as we see with the characters Sindiwe (To MyChildren’s Children 1990), Joyce (Living, Loving and Lying Awake at Night1991), Magona herself as narrator (Forced to Grow 1992) andMagona’s alter ego Mandisa (Mother to Mother 1998). Such a vantagepoint has led to MacHaney (2008:167, 180) correctly describingMagona simultaneously as offering “transnational intertextualreadings” and a “polyphonic dialogism of [her] story ofapartheid from the black South African point of view.” Thelaunching pad of Magona’s dialogism and adding of a voice toglobal feminism on behalf of herself and her people, is herblack South African home impinged upon by apartheidrestrictions. With such a voice, she engages in dialogue withapartheid rule, global feminism and global macro-economicpolitics (as with the United States of America or broadwestern hegemony in Mother to Mother 1998) – in true feministpolyphonic fashion.

Among the many achievements towards urging agency againstthe apartheid status quo, “Magona describes the oppressiveconditions of black domestic workers under apartheid” (Loflin1997: 220). As my scrutiny of Magona’s biographies hasdemonstrated, what sweeps through all of them is a typicallyfeminist attitude towards the past, the present and the

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future, especially in the way it is associated with what arehistorically known as third wave feminists (Mann and Huffman2005:75). Right from To My Children’s Children (1990) through toMother to Mother (1998), the overriding moral is, as Loflin(1997:220) comments about the discourse of the short storiesin the collection Living, Loving and Lying Awake at Night (1991), that“the systematic exploitation of black women’s labour … iscoming to an end.” However, Magona’s feminist pessimism withthe present and optimism with the future is much more profoundthan just urging agency for black South African womanemancipation.

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Berik, Günseli, van der Meulen Rodgers, Yana and StephanieSeguino. 2009. Feminist Economics 15(3): 1-33.

Boehmer, Elleke. 1999. Without the West: 1990s SouthernAfrican and Indian Woman Writers – A Conversation. AfricanStudies 58(2): 157-170.

Brisolara, Sharon. 2003. Invited Reaction: Feminist Inquiry,Frameworks, Feminisms and Other “F” Words. Human ResourceDevelopment Quarterly 14(1): 27-34.

Daymond, Margaret J. 2002. Complementary Oral and WrittenNarrative Conventions: Sindiwe Magona’s autobiography andShort Story Sequence, “Women at Work.” Journal of Southern AfricanStudies 28(2): 331-346.

Loflin, Christine. 1990. ‘White women can learn not to call usgirls.’ Journal of Modern Literature XX (1): 109-114.

Loflin, Christine. 1997. Periodization in South AfricanLiterature. CLIO 26(2): 205-227.

Magona, Sindiwe. 1990. To My Children’s Children (Cape Town: DavidPhillip).

Magona, Sindiwe. 1991. Living, Loving and Lying Awake at Night (CapeTown: David Phillip).

Magona, Sindiwe. 1992. Forced to Grow (Cape Town: David Phillip).Magona, Sindiwe. 1998. Mother to Mother (Cape Town: David

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Magona, Sindiwe. 2008. Beauty’s Gift (Cape Town: Kwela Books).Mann, Susan Arther and Huffman, Douglas J. 2005. The

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Masemola, Kgomotso. 2010. The Individuated CollectiveUtterance: Lack. Law and Desire in Autobiographies of EllenKuzwayo and Sindiwe Magona. Journal of Literary Studies 26 (1):111-134.

McHaney, Pearl Amelia. 2008. History and Intertextuality. ATransnational Reading of Eddora Wetty’s Losing Battles andSindiwe Magona’s Mother to Mother. Southern African Literary Journal XL(2): 166-181.

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Mphahlele, Es’kia. 2002. The Burden of History and theUniversity ‘s Role in the Recreating of its Community andits Environment. Ogude, J., Raditlhalo, S., Ramakuela, N.,Ramogale, M., and Peter N. Thuynsma (Ed.) Es’kia (Cape Town:Kwela Books), 78-83.

Mphahlele, Es’kia. 2002. The Fabric of African Culture andReligious Beliefs. Ogude, J., Raditlhalo, S., Ramakuela, N.,Ramogale, M., and Peter N. Thuynsma (Ed.). Es’kia (Cape Town:Kwela Books), 142-156.

Mphahlele, Es’kia. 2004. Afrikan Literature, Social Experiencein Process Ogude, J., Raditlhalo, S., Ramakuela, N.,Ramogale, M., and Peter N. Thuynsma (Ed.). Es’kia Continued(Johannesburg: Stainbank and Associates).

Trexler, Melanie E. 2007. The World as the Body of God: AFeminist Approach to Religious Pluralism. Dialogue and Alliance21(1): 45-68.

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Antidote for Global Feminist Gaps as Encoded in Sindiwe Magona's Black South African Autobiographies

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Transcript of Antidote for Global Feminist Gaps as Encoded in Sindiwe Magona's Black South African Autobiographies