Poignant and powerful, Mother to Mother, a tour-de-force solo performance comes to the Market Theatre from tomorrow until June 9 for the first time. This intimate portrayal of a mother struggling to come to terms with the actions of her son is written by celebrated author Dr Sindiwe Magona, and is a deeply moving story of forgiveness and reconciliation. The author is an extraordinary archive of writings pre-democracy and after, writes ROBYN COHEN.
EIGHT months before the 1994 elections, American Fulbright Scholar Amy Biehl was murdered in Gugulethu. Dr Sindiwe Magona was deeply moved and wrote Mother to Mother – a fictional memoir, a “heartfelt letter from one mother to another”.
Magona adapted the novel for the stage and after a few years of tour- ing nationally and internationally, directed by Janice Honeyman and starring Thembi Mtshali-Jones, it comes to the Barney Simon Theatre at the Market from tomorrow until June 9.
Magona was living in New York, working for the UN, when she heard about Biehl’s murder.
She felt anguish, she says, but it was a generalised kind of anguish. That changed, months later, when Magona was in Cape Town while the elections were on the go.
At the airport, just before she boarded her plane back to the US, she was chatting to her friend Lindiwe and Biehl’s murder came up. “Do you know that one of the men is Nonthuthuzelo’s son?” said Lindiwe.
Nonthuthuzelo had been a neighbour of Magona’s in Gugulethu when they were teenagers.
Magona was stunned.
“How is Nonthuthuzelo coping?” she asked. “That moment was an awakening for me. It gave me a new sense of awareness of her anguish – the anguish that mother, that parents of killers must go through. The mothers of killers don’t go on picnics you know. They too, suffer.”
At the time, Magona did not see the incident as material for a novel: “I was filled with sorrow. I thought – golly – that could have easily been me. I have a son.
“I come from the same kind of background. We both grew up dirt poor. We were both single parents… I thought, ‘Poor woman – she never stood a chance’. She is what I describe as a perfect product of apartheid. Her anguish and sorrow stayed with me for two years.”
Then Magona attended a writers’ workshop in New York and a narrative began to take shape: “Empathising with the killer’s family does not detract from the empathy you feel for the victim.
“It is another aspect. It is widen- ing the scope of the tragedy. It is opening your heart to the hurt on both sides.”
Four young men were implicated and sentenced for Biehl’s killing.
They later applied for, and received, amnesty from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Based in New York, Magona was unable to conduct interviews with the families which is why she made the book a novel, focusing on one young man and his mother.
The Amy Biehl story becomes a frame through which Magona conjures up a potent portrait of our nation – and how apartheid has left a brutal legacy in the destruction of families.
Mother to Mother was published in 1998 by David Philip.
Prior to that, Magona had published four books – two superb autobiographical volumes and two collections of short stories.
The books were written in New York, where Magona worked for the UN, making anti-apartheid radio programmes.
At 60, after 20 years in New York, she returned to South Africa in December 2003 when she retired.
“One never really feels at home in other peoples’ countries,” muses Magona. She bought a house at Marina da Gama – near to her childhood home of Blouvlei. It is no longer there.
Born in 1945, Magona was four or five when her family moved from Gungululu, a village in the Transkei, to Blouvlei, near Retreat.
Here, they were poor but happy in a close-knit community.
When Magona was 17, Blouvlei was razed; the community was forcibly moved.
Families were split up, wrenched apart. Magona’s family found themselves in bleak Gugulethu.
Children grew up unsupervised as their mothers worked in domestic service in the suburbs, often looking after other people’s children.
After three years of high school, Magona trained as a primary school teacher. She worked as a teacher for a while, then she fell pregnant.
Unable to get a teaching job, she took a job as a domestic worker.
By 23 she had been deserted by her husband and left with three children.
Despite apartheid legislation – pass laws, the Group Areas Act – and single parenthood and poverty, she never gave up.
Eventually, she re-entered the teaching profession and obtained her matric. She received degrees from Unisa and Columbia University in the US, and an honorary doctorate from Hartwick College in New York.
Throughout her evocative and powerful writing is the refrain: in varying degrees, we are all complicit in the tragedies that have occurred and continue to happen in our society.
Apartheid has left us with a mammoth bill. We are all paying.
No one escapes her unwavering gaze and her ultimate hope for understanding and healing. She is an extraordinary writer who has documented the past as it intersects with the present and vice versa.
A must-read.