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Sindiwe MagonaA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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. One day, Makhulu receives a letter that she asks Mandisa to read to her. The letter is from Funiwe—Makhulu's daughter and Mandisa's aunt—who says that she's pregnant and will be visiting Makhulu to have the baby. The whole family is excited: Makhulu because Funiwe has been married for years without having children, and Mandisa because Funiwe works as a teacher in London. Mandisa hopes that Funiwe might allow her to come attend school in England, and begins to build elaborate plans for the future, writing to China to tell him to apply to boarding schools as well.
At the end of the school term, Mandisa is elated to learn that she has ranked second in her class of thirty-three, and to receive a letter from China. When Funiwe arrives, however, she quickly discerns that something about Mandisa is different, and asks Makhulu whether it's possible Mandisa is pregnant. The two women confront her, and although she admits to having a boyfriend and having missed her periods for the past several months, she denies ever having had sex. Makhulu and Funiwe take Mandisa to the village midwife, who confirms that Mandisa is still a virgin: "She looked and saw that what I said, that I had done no shameful thing, was true. But she saw something else…something I did not know—did not understand…The old woman said, 'Utakelwe! She has been jumped into!" (112).
Mandisa's mother is sent for, and bitterly laments what Mandisa's pregnancy will mean for the family's reputation. Mandisa, meanwhile, feels a "wide, wide smile in [her] heart" when she first feels the baby kicking, but is "numb" overall—disbelieving and angry over the turn her life has taken (113).
The circumstances of Mandisa's pregnancy are clearly unusual, but they are also thematically significant on several levels. First, and perhaps most obviously, the pregnancy is a harsh reminder of the fragility of human plans—a major theme of Magona's novel. Broadly speaking, Mother to Mother depicts its characters as victims of circumstance rather than as individuals with the ability to make free choices about their lives. These "circumstances" often take the form of systemic racism—apartheid and the after-effects of colonialism—but they sometimes appear as something more like destiny. Both Mandisa and her parents had hoped that education would provide the means for her to escape poverty, and before learning of her pregnancy, Mandisa is hard at work planning for her future. In the end, however, Mandisa suggests that all her planning was futile in the face of fate: "Yes, we had our plans. But the year had its plans too; unknown to us, of course" (88).
Largely because it was so unexpected, Mandisa's pregnancy is also described throughout the novel as a form of violation; in the very first chapter, for instance, Mandisa says that Mxolisi "with total lack of consideration if not downright malice, seeded himself inside [her] womb" (1). In this way, Magona aligns Mandisa's pregnancy with the other forms of violence that rebound on the residents of Guguletu—and, in particular, on the women. Rape is especially common, and metaphorically similar to Mandisa's own situation, which takes the form of an unwanted invasion of her body. The fact that it is Mandisa's son who "violates" her in this way further underscores the fact that violence in Mother to Motheroften takes place across and between generations; Mandisa's conception foreshadows his later role as one of the students terrorizing the adults of Guguletu in the name of fighting apartheid.
Finally, Mandisa's "virgin" pregnancy has inevitable echoes of the Biblical story of the Virgin Mary and Jesus, particularly because Mandisa gives birth to a child she will later describe as the fulfillment of a prophesy—in this case, Nongqawuse's "great raging whirlwind…[that] would drive abelungu to the sea" (210). The parallel is clearly a bitter and ironic one, however, since the actions Mxolisi takes to "save" his people only cause greater suffering.