Realities of apartheid and idyllic futures: Afropessimism and Afro-optimism in Magona’s Mother to Mother

Abstract

Sindiwe Magona’s novel Mother to Mother (1993) captures the grim realities
of Apartheid through the portrayal of the murder of Fulbright white student
Amy Biehl. As she fictionalises the real-life murder, Magona – through her
narrator Mandisa – brings to light the plights and struggles of black South
Africans under the Apartheid system in its final years. This is seen through
the presentation of different forms of black mobility, the stagnant economic
and cultural mobility and the regressive physical mobility the novel discusses.
These forms of mobility, or lack thereof, represent a theme of Afropessimism,
which is the pessimistic view of blacks in a given society and how their
blackness becomes entrenched in politics of oppression. To accompany her
discussion of Afropessimism, Magona also provides the foundation and
discourse on Afro-optimism, the inverse of Afropessimism which sees the
positive reinforcement and prediction of African people’s past and future.
This is done through Magona’s discussion of the polarizing historical account
of the Xhosa cattle-killing and the very form in which the novel is written,
aiming to bridge the gap between the black, Mandisa, and the white, Amy
Biehl’s mother.