52 pages • 1 hour read
Mother to Mother
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Chapter 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 2 Summary: “Mowbray – Wednesday 25 August 1993”
Mandisa imagines the American girl going through her morning routine on the day of the murder—singing, showering, and preparing for her return home.After breakfast, she climbs back into bed to read, "scribbling notes as she goes along, the hand holding the pen wagging furiously like the tail of an over-eager puppy" (6). By 8:00, she is on her way to the university.
Mandisa then recalls her own routine across town in Guguletu. She has difficulty waking her children, and she is irritated that they don't sit down for breakfast. Mxolisi and his brother Lunga complain that their mother never makes porridge for them anymore, and Mandisa reflects bitterly on the fact that she has to work rather than "stay[ing] home doing all the things a mother's supposed to do" (8). She reminds her children of a few ground rules before leaving, but knows that her absence makes her authority a "mere formality, a charade, something nobody ever heeds" (8).
We return to the American student. She thinks again about how happy she is to be returning home, though she acknowledges that she will have a difficult time saying goodbye to the friends she's made in South Africa.
On her own commute, Mandisa worries about the fact that her children are not in school; there is a teachers' strike going on, and the Congress of South African Students has asked students to show their support. As a result, the children in Guguletu have launched a campaign against "reactionary elements" in the community, and are often out on the streets during the day (10). Mandisa imagines Mxolisi leaving the house and joining his friends: "The group opens up and swallows him. In their midst, he is lost" (11).
Back at the university, the student is struggling to say goodbye to her friends—especially three African women from the townships that she has promised to help. She offers to drive them home to Guguletu, and although they are initially uneasy, they ultimately agree.
Mxolisi and his friends struggle to find somewhere to meet, and threaten to brand the Reverend Mananga a reactionary for refusing to let them meet in the church hall. Mananga agrees to let them meet the following day, and the boys go away singing and doing a celebratory dance—the toyi-toyi. They roam the streets, coming across cars that have been set on fire and looted.
The student and her friends get in her car and drive toward Guguletu, "silently gaz[ing] at the passing scene; taking stock and measure of what it is the eye records; deliberately holding the image, letting it linger long in the mind's eye, tucking it safely away, storing it" (18).
Mxolisi's group heads toward the police station, where the boys prepare to split up to return home. In the meantime, however, the student and her friends have arrived in Guguletu. The boys hear a cry and turn around, where they see a car—the student's yellow Mazda—which has been mobbed by people: "The crowd totally eclipsing it is wild and thunderous, chanting and screaming, fists stabbing air. Fists raised towards the blue, unsmiling heavens" (19).
Chapter 2 Analysis
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 naiveté (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).
Magona keeps up this pattern of alternation throughout Chapter 2 in order to further emphasize the differences between Mxolisi and the student's lives. As they approach the place where the murder will happen, both are singing songs associated with the anti-apartheid movement, but in very different moods: the student is sharing a last experience with her South African friends before leaving the country, and Mxolisi is roaming the streets of Guguletu with his friends, excited about having frightened Mananga into compliance. The recurring theme of education, similarly, is a superficial parallel between the two narrative threads that actually underscores the very different experiences of the two characters; where the girl is a university student with many prospects before her, Mxolisi's schools are poor quality and only sporadically open as a result of political unrest. In fact, as the novel progresses, we will see that Mxolisi's real "education" consisted less of formal schooling than of learned anger toward South Africa's white settlers. Ultimately, as the novel's preface suggests, both Mxolisi and the student are products of their environment.
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