Mother to Mother

In writing Mother to Mother, Sindiwe Magona drew inspiration from a real event: the murder of a white American named Amy Biehl by young black men in 1990s South Africa. The crime caused shockwaves around the world, not least because Biehl herself had come to South Africa to combat apartheid—the system of segregation and discrimination that relegated black South Africans, as well as other people of color, to second-class citizenship.

On the face of it, then, Biehl's murder was an incomprehensible and counterproductive attack on someone trying to make amends for the injustices of colonialism and apartheid. Mother to Mother, however, sets out to render the murder comprehensible (if not excusable). By tracing the life and upbringing of a young man named Mxolisi—a kind of amalgam of Biehl's real-life killers—Magona works to show her readers the pernicious effects of colonialism and apartheid, which cause their victims to become "lost creatures of malice and destruction" (v).

Mother to Mother, however, is narrated not by Mxolisi himself but by his mother, Mandisa. In the opening pages of the novel, Mandisa speaks directly to Biehl's mother, pleading for compassion on her son's behalf; if Biehl's mother understood Mxolisi's past, Mandisa says, she would understand why he acted so violently.