Mother to Mother

As the extraordinary circumstances of Mandisa's pregnancy demonstrate, the characters in Mother to Mother have very little control over their own futures. Mandisa plans for her future in almost painstaking detail, studying diligently in the hopes of escaping Guguletu and fantasizing about marrying China. Her mother, meanwhile, goes to great lengths in her efforts to prevent her daughter from becoming pregnant, subjecting her to humiliating and invasive examinations. In the end, however, all of these actions prove useless in the face of whatever larger forces are at work: "So much store had I put on [Auntie Funiwe's] coming. Made great plans, banking on her benevolence. But, the very next morning following her arrival, not only did those grand plans unravel but my very life came to an abrupt halt. The life I had known. The life I had envisaged. Everything I had ever known had been bulldozed, extinguished, pulverized" (114).

Mandisa ultimately chalks her pregnancy up to destiny in the more traditional sense of the word—what she calls the "year's plans"—but her reference to bulldozing is significant, because it recalls the government's destruction of Blouvlei and the move to Guguletu (88). In Mother to Mother, fate most often takes the form of historical trends operating beyond the control of the characters—specifically, colonialism and apartheid. The effects of oppression limit the characters' lives to such an extent that they constitute a kind of predestination: Mandisa says at one point, for instance, that Mxolisi "had already seen his tomorrows; in the defeated stoop of his father's shoulders" (203).In this environment, people have no meaningful say even over their own actions; Magona describes the novel's central event—the murder of the American student—as a clash between racesrather than individuals with unique hopes, desires, and motivations. Magona even suggests thatthe attack fulfills Nongqawuse's prophecy, explicitly tyingthe ideas of fate and systemic racism together.

As its title implies, motherhood is a central concern in Mother to Mother. All three of the novel's major plot threads revolve around Mandisa's experiences of motherhood: in the flashbacks, we see the circumstances that led to her children’s' births; in the present, we see her frantically attempting to ascertain the safety of her children in the wake of the murder; and in her addresses to the student's mother, we see her appealing directly as a parent for compassion. Through these complementary and intersecting storylines, Magona creates a picture of motherhood that is emotionally and morally complex. As a parent, Mandisa naturally feels responsible for her children: she brought them into the world, and has had at least some influence over the kind of people they have grown into. Mandisa's "responsibility" for Mxolisi, however, is tempered by the fact that she conceived him without having (penetrative) sex. Motherhood, in other words, is as much something that happened to Mandisa as it is something she undertook. Mandisa's relationship with her children is thus a source of both happiness and suffering to her; she loves and looks after her children, but she is also in some sense their victim.

These complexities hold true on a broader and more symbolic level as well. Throughout the novel, we see Mandisa's frustration with what she perceives as the younger generation's rash destructiveness; their resistance to apartheid, according to Mandisa, often amounts to little more than disrespecting and even attacking their elders. At the same time, however, Mandisa realizes that those elders have facilitated the violence in Guguletu by passing on their own anger and resentment to their children. Magona's treatment of motherhood, in other words, parallelsher treatment of themes like fate and racial oppression; Mother to Mother's characters are caught up in a complicated web of responsibility that spans multiple generations.

The novel'sportrayal of motherhood is also closely related to its portrayal of family life and home more broadly. One of the most disastrous effects of the move to Guguletu (and of apartheid generally) is the disintegration of bonds between neighbors, friends, and relatives; Mandisa, for instance, is forced to look for work outside the home, and her ability to parent her children suffers as a result. This wide-scale social disruption parallels the repeated dislocations and estrangements that characterize Mandisa's personal life—not just the relocation to Guguletu, but also her mother's decision to send her to Gungululu, and her departure from her childhood home after marrying. Although she briefly enjoys the stability and comfort of a "hokkie of [her] own" after China has deserted her, Mxolisi's growing involvement in politics ultimately causes her family life to unravel (145). For Mandisa, as well as most of the novel's other characters, home and family are ultimately elusive goals.

Schooling and learning are recurring topics in Mother to Mother, but they are not always (or even often) the same thing. Mandisa clings to the hope that education will secure a better future first for herself, and later for her children, warning Mxolisi that if he drops out of school he "would be part of the thousands upon thousands of young people who roam the township streets aimlessly day and night" (161). The schools in Guguletu, however, are too overcrowded to function properly when they are in session, and strikes and boycotts by both the teachers and students frequently shut them down altogether. Under these circumstances, Mxolisi comes to see education as a luxury to postpone until after "liberation," rather than as a means to secure liberation in the first place (161).

If they are largely deprived of formal education, however, students are nonetheless learning outside the classroom. In fact, Mandisa suggests that some kinds of knowledge are so central to the lives of black South Africans as to be virtually innate—most notably, anger toward white South Africans. She recalls various incidents from her own childhood where she learned to think of white people as "dogs" and thieves, and laments that her own children have absorbed the same ideas in their turn (173). Magona underscores the tragic consequences of limiting people's access to education in the novel's final pages, where Mxolisi's learned resentment bumps up against education in the more traditional sense of the word: "'She's just a university student,' another of your daughter's friends screams, putting herself between her and her attackers. But 'university student' falls on deaf ears. The mob cares nothing for these words. My son and his friends and all those mobbing around your daughter's car, they know nothing of universities" (209).