52 pages • 1 hour read
Sindiwe MagonaMother to Mother
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1998A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 3–4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary: “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. What seems to bother Mandisa the most, though, is the loss of her home in Blouvlei and the lack of community in Guguletu: "Guguletu would have you think it is a housing development, civilized, better—because of being made of concrete, complete with glass windows. But we lived in Blouvlei because we wanted to live there. Those were shacks we had built ourselves, with our own hands…built them where we wanted them, with each put together according to the wishes, whims and means of its owner" (33).
The people on the bus continue to talk about what's happening in Guguletu, and someone who saw the events firsthand speaks up, saying that a mob overturned and set fire to a car full of university students in Section 3. This is where Mandisa lives, so she begins to worry for the safety of her children—especially Mxolisi.
The bus stops near Mandisa's neighborhood, where a crowd of police and civilians has gathered. Mandisa struggles to make her way through the crowd, afraid that in the chaos Siziwe is in danger of being raped. She loses a shoe, but eventually manages to reach the gate of her house, where Siziwe is standing.
Chapter 4 Summary: “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.
Chapters 3–4 Analysis
The more personal tone Mandisa adopts in these chapters helps us better understand her as a character. Although her work as a maid requires her to maintain an outwardly deferential attitude, Mandisa is quick-witted and unsparing in sharing her opinions with her readers. She comments sardonically, for instance, on her employer's supposed inability to pronounce her name: "That is what the white woman I work for calls me: Mandy. She says she can't say my name. Says she can't say any of our native names because of the clicks. My name is Mandisa. MA-NDI-SA. Do you see any click in that?" (20). Mandisa can be equally brutal in her assessments of her children's generation, calling them "power crazed" and "tyrants" for rioting, but her fear for her own children's safety leaves little doubt that she is a devoted mother.
In addition to helping establish Mandisa's character, these chapters also provide a framework for understanding the racial violence in 1990s South Africa. The flashbacks in particular are key;because Mandisa moved to the segregated settlement of Guguletu as a child, her own history is in many ways the history of apartheid in general. This is especially clear in Chapter 3, where Mandisa frequently uses a collective "we" to describe her impressions of her new home: "Whatever it was, the relentless wind blew the sand everywhere. Day and night, it blew. We swept and swept and swept, but still the sand would not leave us alone. We shared our fragile homes with it. Every day. A reminder of how we had been swept into this howling place against our will" (30). In recounting what life is like in Guguletu, Mandisa seems to be speaking not only for herself but also for all the town's residents.
At the same time, Mandisa's references to "we" and "us" also function as a reminder of the dehumanizing effects of apartheid—a system that sees people not as individuals but as members of a racial class. One of the most oppressive aspects of Guguletu is its uniformity: Mandisa describes it as a "grey, unending mass of squatting structures. Ugly. Impersonal" (27). In uprooting Mandisa and others from their former homes, neighborhoods, schools, etc. in order to force them into Guguletu's "forest of houses," the South African government demonstrates its indifference to the personhood of its black citizens; to the government, the residents of Guguletu are not people with unique relationships, but simply an undifferentiated mass.
Ultimately, this kind of dehumanizationproves dangerous. As Mandisa notes while struggling to make her way home through a crowd, being part of a large and disconnected group of people can facilitate violence: "People forget who they are when surrounded by scores of faces they do not know, eyes that do not recognize them and would not know them in the morrow, mouths that have never said their names. There is a comforting anonymity, a freeing facelessness, when one finds oneself surrounded by strangers" (39). Significantly, when Mxolisi attacks the student, he does so as part of a crowd.
