“Mandisa’s Lament” Mandisa addresses the mother of Amy (here, an unnamed American student) directly and explains who she is: “My son killed your daughter” (1). Since the murder, Mandisa says, people have treated her differently, as if they hold her responsible for her sons Mxolisi’s actions—though in reality, she has never had much control over what her son does.
She scoffs in particular at the idea that she would have encouraged him to kill a white woman: “People look at me as if I’m the one who woke up one shushu day and said, Boyboy, run out and see whether, somewhere out there, you can find a white girl with nothing better to do than run around Guguletu, where she does not belong” (1). Nevertheless, Mandisa admits she “was not surprised” to learn of her son’s actions, and she pleads with her fellow mother for understanding (1).
She expresses outrage and dismay over the fact that the American woman drove into Guguletu in the first place, and surmises that she must have had a naive faith in herself that blinded her to her danger: “People like your daughter have no inborn sense of fear. They so believe in their goodness, know they have hurt no one, are, indeed, helping, they never think anyone would want to hurt them” (2).
As Magona makes clear in the preface, Mother to Mother is an attempt to make the world of Amy Biehl’s attackers as visible as her own. It’stherefore appropriate that when the narrative itself begins in Chapter 2, it does so by juxtaposing the lives of the murdered student and Mxolisi. Mandisahad earlier imagined the student as “the type of person who has absolutely no sense of danger when she believes in what she is doing,” and the scenes of her waking and going about her day reinforce this impression of naivete (2).
The student’s environment is consistently light and beautiful—she wakes on a “clear autumn morning” and wraps herself in a “big, fluffy towel”—and her surroundings inform the almost childlike innocence of her own personality: Magona describes her voice as “a swan’s at break of day” and her face as “bathed in radiant smile” (5). In contrast to the idealizedimagery Magona associates with the student,her descriptions of Mxolisi are lifelike and unpolished: his morning voice is “scratchy,” and his entrance to the kitchen “giraffelike, knees semi-genuflected while neck flops head down to escape scraping the top of the doorframe” (7).
In addition to humanizing Mxolisi, theserealistic descriptionsremind us of the all-too-real facts of life in Guguletu. Rather than waking up happy and eager to start the day, for instance, Mandisa’s children linger in bed until she “holler[s]” for them to wake up (6). Her remark that she “possess[es] the ability to raise the dead” is wry—as we’ll see, Mandisa’s experiences have left her rather cynical and sarcastic—but also accurate in its association of life in Guguletu with death: unlike the student, Mxolisi and his siblings have little in the way of a future (7).
“5:15 PM – Wednesday 25 August 1993” Mandisa’s employer, Mrs. Nelson, tells her to leave early. Mandisa is surprised, because Mrs. Nelson is usually very picky about the work she does. Mrs. Nelson, however, says that there is “trouble in Guguletu,” and that she’ll drive Mandisa to the bus station (23). The station itself is busy and in turmoil. Mandisa asks what’s happened, and someone says that the students in Guguletu are rioting. This angers Mandisa: “These tyrants our children have become, power crazed, at the drop of a hat, they make these often-absurd demands on us, their parents” (24).
Mandisa eventually manages to jostle her way onto a bus, where people are gossiping about what’s happening in Guguletu. Mandisa thinks to herself that there has “always [been] trouble in Guguletu…since the government uprooted us from all over the show: all around Cape Town’s locations, suburbs, and other of its environs, and dumped us on the arid, windswept, sandy Flats” (26). She continues to think about Guguletu and how it appeared to her when she first moved there as a ten-year-old girl: poor, overcrowded, and ugly.
In fact, when Mandisa’s family first moved, there were not even enough houses, and many people had to erect temporary shacks on the borders of the town. Schools were also a problem; they filled up quickly, and people weren’t able to keep the same teachers and classmates they’d had before moving. Very little has changed in the time that Mandisa has lived in Guguletu: the education system still struggles, teen pregnancy is common, and the residents tend to die young.
“7:30 PM” Mandisa asks Siziwe where her brothers are. Seeing Siziwe has not eased her worry as she thought it would, and she acknowledges that she has a special attachment to Mxolisi. Siziwe says that Lunga is at home, but she doesn’t know where Mxolisi is. When Mandisa presses her, Siziwe says she hasn’t seen Mxolisi all day. A few minutes later, Mandisa’s neighbor Skonana knocks on the door.
Mandisa goes outside to see her, but is reluctant because Skonana is a bit of a busybody. Skonana tells her that a group of young people killed a white woman. At first, Mandisa is relieved that more people have not been hurt, but she quickly begins to worry about the repercussions. She notes that the police are “not [their] friends,” which is one reason why violence is so prevalent in Guguletu: “With impunity [the police] killed our people in the past.
Therefore, the perpetrators of evil, those who have made crime a career, live in the benign atmosphere cultivated by that corruption. As warm wet dirt breeds maggots…so have criminals thrived” (44). After gloating a bit about how she has no children of her own to cause trouble, Skonana reveals that the attack happened on their own street, NY 1. Mandisa asks how the woman was killed, fearing that she was “necklaced”—stuck inside a burning tire. Skonana says the woman’s attackers stabbed her.
Mandisa thanks Skonana for the information and begins to think through what she’s just heard. She can’t believe anyone would come to Guguletu voluntarily, and remembers when she first heard that the government might force its black citizens to resettle. While helping her mother serve ginger beer to a group of customers, Mandisa overheard one of the customers, Tat’uSikhwebu, mention the government’s plans. Mandisa herself was too young and naive to pay much attention to Tat’uSikhwebu’s claim, and although the rumor quickly spread, most others in the community were initially disbelieving.
Months later, however, “the rumor, all grown and bearded, armed with the stamp of the government, returned” (55). Mandisa is outside playing with her friends and her brother Khaya when they hear a plane flying overhead. Looking up, they see the plane dropping something, which turn out to be pieces of paper informing the residents of Blouvlei that they will need to move next month. Mandisa, upset, shows the message to her parents, and the adults in Blouvlei call a public meeting—the first of several that take place over the next few weeks.
Despite appeals to the government, however, the residents are forced to relocate in September. One day, Mandisa’s parents wake her early and urge her to help pack up the house. Mandisa looks outside and sees that Blouvlei is full of policemen and soldiers, who begin violently evicting people from their homes as Mandisa watches: “Abelungu men charged. Tin walls were torn down with the inhabitants of the shacks asleep inside some.
“4 AM Thursday 26 August 1993” Mandisa wakes up early in the morning to the sound of a car door shutting. At first, she thinks it might be Mxolisi returning home and worries that he might have been involved in a carjacking. She consoles herself with the knowledge that she still believes him to be good. Suddenly, police begin banging on the house and shining lights through its windows.
Dwadwa wakes up and begins to dress as Siziwe, frightened, comes to her parents’ room. Mandisa wonders whether the noise truly is the police or “skollies, hooligans, common criminals or comrades…disguised as police” (82). Dwadwa, however, answers the door, and the police knock him down before forcing their way into the house. Mandisa tells Siziwe to stay quiet and walks out to meet the police, but as she leaves, the police swarm into the bedroom.
In the confusion, Mandisa ends up on the floor, and Siziwe disappears from the bed. The police eventually drag Mandisa out into the kitchen, and they ask here where Mxolisi is. Mandisa says she doesn’t know, and the police again knock her to the ground. While she lies on the floor, they ransack the house and pull down the hokkie—a makeshift extension to the house where the boys sleep. Finally, they beat up Lunga and leave.
Chapter 7 marks the beginning of an extended flashback. Mandisa’s mother had hoped that she and her brother would be able to use their education to avoid lives of poverty, but, Mandisa says, “the year [1972] had its plans too” (88). She notes that it began ominously, with an argument over her best friend Nono’s decision to date Khaya, Mandisa’s older brother. Not long afterwards, Mandisa is out running errands when she runs into Stella, an old friend from Blouvlei. The two girls chat, and Mandisa notices that Stella seems to have grown up a lot since their last meeting; she’s wearing a bra, and now smokes.
Stella fills Mandisa in on what has been happening to their old acquaintances—one girl is pregnant, and a family friend, Sis’ Lulu, has died, along with one of her twin babies. Mandisa tells Nono about her encounter with Stella, and the two become friends again. In the meantime, Mandisa’s mother has become extremely paranoid that she will become pregnant; when Mandisa began menstruating, her mother forbade her from letting a boy “come anywhere near” her, and eventually began making Mandisa strip naked to inspect her for signs of penetration (94).
Mandisa, however, has begun seeing a boy named China in secret, and Nono instructs her on what she can safely do with him. Mandisa’s mother, however, takes a dislike to Nono on account of her modern clothing, and her suspicions appear to be confirmed when Nono becomes pregnant by Khaya. Mandisa’s mother forbids her daughter from seeing Nono, and sends her away to live with her own mother Makhulu in the small village of Gungululu. Months later, Mandisa has settled into life in Gungululu, Although she misses China desperately, and feels angry with and rejected by her mother, Mandisa gets along well with her grandmother Makhulu.
Mandisa and her mother return to Cape Town, where her mother keeps her “a prisoner in [her] home” for fear of anyone finding out about the pregnancy (117). This doesn’t sit well with Mandisa, who wants to tell China about the pregnancy before he hears about it in the form of her family demanding reparations. While her mother is at work, she manages to sneak a note to him. The meeting, however, doesn’t go well: China at first denies that the child is his, and then says that he intends to go away to boarding school.
Mandisa, who had previously idolized China, is devastated, and throws him out. When Mandisa is six months pregnant, her family takes her to negotiate with China’s relatives. Matters remain unsettled, however, until Mandisa is eight months pregnant, at which point a priest convinces China and his father that he and Mandisa must marry. Before they can, however, Mandisa gives birth and names her son Hlumelo—”Sprig”—as a sign of her hope that “good things might come” from him (128).
Meanwhile, Mandisa has decided she doesn’t want to marry China, since she no longer loves him and wants to remain in school. Her father initially supports this decision, but changes his mind about a month after Hlumelo’s birth because the clan at large wants Mandisa to marry. Two months after Hlumelo’s birth, Mandisa and China marry. On her first night with China’s family, Mandisa undergoes a traditional renaming ceremony in which her relatives dub her Nohehake—an “exclamation of utter surprise at some incredibly, unimaginable monstrosity, some hitherto unheard of dreadfulness” (135).
“6 AM – Thursday 26 August” Back in the present day, Mandisa and her family are trying to collect themselves after the police raid. Skonana stops by and asks what the police wanted, and Dwadwa tells her they were looking for Mxolisi. Dwadwa and Mandisa assess Lunga’s injuries and try to calm Siziwe down, but are interrupted by another neighbor: Qwati. Dwadwa dismisses her angrily, but Mandisa tells her to come back later.
She then returns to Siziwe and puts her to bed. Siziwe, though, soon calls out for her mother and begins crying. Mandisa asks Siziwe what’s wrong, and Siziwe ultimately admits that Mxolisi briefly came by the house before Mandisa returned from work. She says that she thinks he hid something in the hokkie, but when Mandisa presses for details, Siziwe clams up: “Like a shutter, something came over Siziwe’s face…over her eyes.
Now, other eyes in another face looked at me…Cagey as a fox” (169). Mandisa concludes something must have frightened Siziwe. With the children tended to, Dwadwa begins to get ready for work. Mandisa, however, says she intends to wait at home for Mxolisi, and to go looking for him if he hasn’t returned by midday. Dwadwa again warns Mandisa that Mxolisi will cause trouble for her.
Recalling her childhood again, Mandisa says that she grew up deeply aware of boththe history of white colonialism in South Africa, and of the anger her friends and family felt toward white South Africans. Her paternal grandfather was a particularly bountiful source of historical information, and Mandisa recounts an exchange where he explained how the Cape of Good Hope got its name. Vasco de Gama, Tatomkhulu says, originally named the place the “Cape of Storms”; it was not until a group of settlers led by Jan van Riebeeck decided to stay there that the cape earned its modern name.
Tatomkhulu claims, however, that, “the biggest storm is still here…in our hearts, the hearts of the people of this land” (175). On a different occasion, Tatomkhulu asks Mandisa what she knows aboutNongqawuse. Mandisa says that her teachers taught her that Nongqawuse was a “false prophet who told people to kill all their cattle and they would get new cattle on the third day,” and that people complied “because they were superstitious and ignorant” (175). Tatomkhulu objects to this interpretation of events, and recounts his own.
He first explains the significance of cattle to the Xhosa—one of the peoples that lived in South Africa before it was colonized. Cows, he says, not only provide food, but also raw materials used for shelter and clothing. Most of all, they are a form of currency that have various social functions, including serving as a bride-price, a tribute to chiefs, and an exchange for prisoners captured in war. The decision to kill the cattle and burn the fields was therefore”an abomination” that could only come from very deep anger and outrage (178).
Mandisa addresses the white American student’s mother directly, asking what she should do with her knowledge of Mxolisi’s crime. She laments the death of the girl who had “much yet to do,” but also questions why she came to South Africa in the first place(198). Now, Mandisa says she is torn between shame at her son’s actions and anger towards the people she feels pushed him towards them: the adults who had earlier praised and encouraged his anger at the white settlers.
She fears, moreover, that the same patterns will keep repeating: “There are three- and four-year-olds as well as older children, roaming the streets of Guguletu with nothing to do all day long. Those children, as true as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west—those young people are walking the same road my son walked” (199). She concludes by pleading with God for strength. The narrative jumps back to sometime”much later” than Mandisa’s meeting with Mxolisi.
Mandisa opens the door to several of her neighbors—Skonana and Qwati, as well as two women named Lindiwe and Yolisa. They tell Mandisa that they have “come to cry with [her]…to grieve with those who grieve” (200). Mandisa is confused and feels undeserving, but the experience is ultimately a healing one that lessens her feelings of isolation and dishonor. The chapter ends with Mandisa again addressing the student’s mother, acknowledging that while neither of them “have chosen the coat [they] wear,” she, unlike Mandisa, can at least can “carry [her] head sky high” (201).
Mandisa again addresses the student’s mother, explaining how bleak her son’s prospects were even before the crime: “His tomorrows were his yesterday. Nothing. Stretching long, lean, mean, and empty. A glaring void. Nothing would come of the morrow. For him. Nothing at all” (203). Mandisa then returns to imagining the afternoon of the crime. As the yellow Mazda drives down NY 1, Mxolisi and his friends are walking home.
When the car stops at a red light, someone on the street notices who the driver is, and begins to shout “ONE SETTLER! ONE BULLET! ” (205). The passengers in the car tell the student to keep driving, but the car is hemmed in by traffic. Eventually, Mxolisi and his friends hear the shouting and follow it, “each person going full speed to the epicentre, searching for the one thing that will jump out, the oddity” (206). A crowd gathers around the car and begins to rock it, “playfully, at first” (207).
Soon, however, people begin to throw stones at the car, and Mandisa imagines the girl’s fear and pain as she’s hit in the face by bits of broken glass. Now unable to see, she runs toward a nearby gas station. The crowd chases and surrounds her, despite her and her friends’ pleas. Mxolisi is in the crowd, and Mandisa imagines the effect that the chants and cheers must have had on him: “A song he had heard since he could walk. Even before he could walk.
Song of hate, of despair, of rage. Song of impotent loathing” (209). At the last moment, Mandisa pulls back from describing the murder itself to focus instead on the historical forces that have led to it; remembering the prophesy that “a great raging whirlwind would come…[to] drive abelungu to the sea,” Mandisa finally characterizes the crime as the “enactment of the deep, dark, private yearnings of a subjugated race. The consummation of inevitable senseless catastrophe” (210).