Mother to Mother

Although it only appears near the end of the novel, the Xhosa cattle-killing functions as another symbol of the consequences of colonialism and apartheid. In this case, however, the focus is on the psychological effects—the destructive hatred and angerthat racism breeds. The Xhosa were so determined to rid themselves of their colonizers that they jeopardized their own survival by killing their cattle and crops: "Imagine then if the whole nation…agreed to slaughter all its cattle. Agreed to such an abomination. How deep the resentment to have spurred them to such terrible sacrifice. How deep the abomination, to trigger such a response" (178). In this way, the story of the cattle-killing anticipates the rage that results in the American student's death, as well as the general, self-sabotaging violence that characterizes life in Guguletu.

Magona uses various elements of the natural world as a means of developing key themes in the novel.Fire, for instance, is one of the main tools the young students use to express their rage, both by "necklacing" those accused of collaboration and by torching cars on Guguletu's streets; in fact, on the day of the murder, Mxolisi and his friends had already come across a handful of burning vehicles. Because of the way fire spreads, burning everything in its path, it is a particularly apt metaphor for the way years of pent-up resentment erupt in riots self-destructively targeting Guguletu itself.

Wind is a similarly impersonal and irresistible force in the novel, but it is one that Magona most commonly associates with the frequent harshness ofdestiny—as when Nongqawuse prophesied that a "whirlwind" would carry the white settlers into the sea, or when Mandisa talks about being "strewn" about Guguletu by a "gale-force wind" (210, 31). The rising and setting of the sun, meanwhile, serve as a reminder of the inevitability of certain kinds of events: Mandisa, for instance, likens the birth of her son to the "predictable" patterns of nature (127). Above all, however, Magona links the cycles of the sun to the intractable presence of suffering under colonialism and apartheid. The prophecy that inspires the cattle-killing also promises that the sun will reverse its course. This, Tatomkhulu says, is because the Xhosa's "very lives depended on the reversal of things, the natural order turned upside down"; the situation of black South Africans under both colonialism and apartheid is so desperate that the normal state of affairs is itself a crisis requiring divine intervention (179). The fact that the sun sets as usual represents the first blow to the Xhosa's hopes of change, so it is fitting that Magona brings back the same imagery in the novel's final pages, underscoring how terrible the status quo in South Africa continues to be: if only the sun had somehow not risen, Mandisa says, the student would still be alive.

In Mother to Mother, racism is not only a matter of active oppression, but also of willful blindness and negligence. The system of apartheid—and of segregated communities in particular—allows the South African government to simply pretend that Guguletu and its residents do not exist. The poverty and violence that are rife there as a result of governmental neglectfail to even register in white communities: "White people live in their own areas and mind their own business—period. We live here, fight and kill each other. That is our business. You don't see big words on every page of the newspapers because one of us kills somebody, here in the townships" (3).

In the end, however, Mother to Mother suggests that blindness is dangerous, even in its more benign forms. Mandisa, for instance, wonders if the murdered student was so caught up in her own good intentions that it "blinkered" her (2). The final pages of the novel carry this idea to literal and gruesome extremes as the girl struggles to see through the blood streaming down her face. Her killers, meanwhile, are equally "blind"—in their case, to the "pitiful powerlessness" of their actions (209). Indeed, we can read the book in its entirety as Magona's attempt to render all the wrongs and complexities of apartheid visible—a plea for people to "do their share of seeing" to prevent future atrocities (3).

Violence is widespread in Mother to Mother, and women are frequently the victims of sexual violence in particular. As Mandisa says, "The safety of girl children has become a burning issue in Guguletu and all places like Guguletu. Every day, one hears of rapes. Rapes, not a rape. Rapes. Which means that, each day, more than one woman or girl or child is accosted" (38). Women also bear the brunt of the book's interracial violence: in addition to the murder of the American student, the book describes an attack on a group of Belgian nurses sympathetic to the struggle against apartheid. Finally, Mandisa frequently describes her pregnancy with Mxolisi in terms that evoke rape; although the "violence" in this particular instance was obviously unintentional and (in the case of the birth itself) unavoidable, Mandisa experiences the pregnancy as a violation of her body.

This focus on violence against women is, in part, simply a reflection of the fact that Mother to Mother is explicitly written by and for women: as the title states, it's a novel in which one mother speaks to another. Presumably, Mandisa sees something of herself in the novel's other female victims. Gender inequality in a broader sense, though, is also a recurring topic in the book, and images of violence against women highlight the doubly powerless position of black women in South Africa: in addition to lacking control over their lives and futures, women like Mandisa often do not even have control over their own bodies. Magona's treatment of gendered violence, then, is also a reflection of her interest in fate and human agency.

Sleep is a recurring motif in Mother to Mother that often parallels the rise and fall of the sun. Mandisa's search for Mxolisi, for instance, takes place over roughly one day: we see her return home, go to bed, wake during the police raid, and then doze exhaustedly the next day. More than that, though, Magona suggests that the way a character sleeps can tell us about the kind of person he or she is. The student, for example, sleeps soundly and with an open window—a reflection of her trusting nature—while Mxolisi and his siblings linger in bed, using sleep as an escape from life in Guguletu. Most tellingly of all, Mandisa says that she "has not slept" since she learned the truth about Mxolisi's actions—a sharp contrast to her (relatively) carefree childhood, when she "[slept] the sleep of the dead" (199, 112).

Songs and chants appear throughout Mother to Mother, often in connection with the anti-apartheid movement. The toyi-toyi, for instance, is a style of dance and singing that has been associated with political protest in South Africa for decades; in Mother to Mother, Mxolisi and his friends take it up in moments of both anger and victory, as when they convince Reverend Mananga to allow them to meet in the church. As this particular example showcases, however, Magona tends to use anti-apartheid songs in deeply ironic ways: the "enemies" the boys target with their chants are typically not enemies at all, and the "victories" they achieve are at best minor and at worst self-destructive.