Читать книгу Mother to Mother von Sindiwe Magona. Königs Erläuterungen Spezial. - Patrick Neill Charles - Страница 6

2.2	Zeitgeschichtlicher Hintergrund

ZUSAMMENFASSUNG

 Mother to Mother is set in the Western Cape province of South Africa and covers a period from the early 1970s up until 1993.

 The book describes the era and aftermath of apartheid in South Africa and is the real world backdrop to the murder of Amy Biehl in August 1993.

Mother to Mother is set in the Western Cape province of South Africa and covers a period from the early 1970s up until 1993. The story is largely situated in a black township near Cape Town called Guguletu. Other locations include the squatters’ settlement of Blouvlei, where Mandisa grew up, and her ancestral village Gungululu, where her grandmother still lives. All the African characters in the novel belong to the Xhosa people, and we see many examples of tribal customs and traditions.

The book describes the era and aftermath of apartheid in South Africa, a period of extreme racial oppression, state neglect, police brutality and political turmoil and violence. This is the real world backdrop to the murder of Amy Biehl in August 1993 (see p. 32); the novel is a fictionalised account of the killing.

Geography

Guguletu

The majority of the book – and the entirety of its present-day time frame, in 1993 – is set in the township of Guguletu, which is 15 kilometres outside Cape Town, in the Western Cape province of South Africa. Today Guguletu has a population of over 98,000, and more than 98% are black Africans. The primary language spoken in the township is Xhosa.

Guguletu (which comes from the Xhosa phrase for “our pride”, igugu lethu) was founded in the 1960s as a home for the black people of the Cape Town district of Langa. During apartheid, blacks in the region were not allowed to live in Cape Town and were forced to live in one district, which became desperately overcrowded. Residents were relocated to Guguletu and other newly-founded townships, where overcrowding, lack of education, jobs and adequate infrastructure (electricity, running water, waste removal, etc.) greatly increased social tensions. Guguletu is infamous for its high levels of crime, including world-famous murders like that of Amy Biehl, and it remains a troubled and problem-ridden community even in the 21st century, with an estimated murder every two and a half days between 2005 and 2010[2].

Blouvlei

Blouvlei is the squatters’ settlement where Mandisa remembers growing up, before her family was forcibly relocated to Guguletu. Blouvlei was founded by squatters – people who occupy land or buildings without permission and without paying rent. It was one of three major squatters’ settlements, the others being Windermere and Epping Forest, which were founded by people coming south to find work in Cape Town during and after the Second World War. They were estimated to be home to roughly 20,000 people each. Cape Town was a “closed city” (blacks were not allowed to live there) and there was very little employment or hope for jobs. Poverty was widespread amongst the black population.[3]

Successive governments made efforts to redirect some of the migrants to a “reception depot” in Langa, which itself became terribly overcrowded. After the war, some settlers were allowed by the local council to buy the land they had occupied, but the national government took control of everything related to housing across the country and began to relocate black Africans as a part of the efforts to enforce segregation.

There were groups of civil rights activists in Blouvlei who worked to resist the forced relocations as part of their struggles against the apartheid system. As Mandisa explains in the novel, however, these efforts were futile, because the government used police and the military to literally destroy the settlements, forcing the inhabitants cross-country to the newly-founded segregated townships like Guguletu.

Gungululu

Mandisa is sent away from Guguletu to live with her grandmother in the ancestral village where her mother was born. This is a very different world from the one she has known so far in her fourteen years: It is a traditional tribal village where old customs are still in effect and there are none of the amenities of even the township slums. Mandisa is lovesick for China and does not adapt easily to the village.

Gungululu is the name of a district as well as of the village, and is situated in the Eastern Cape region – Mandisa describes it as comprising “some twenty or so villages” (p. 101). This is also where the author Sindiwe Magona was born (see Chapter 2.1). At the time covered in the novel, the village and the region were a part of the Transkei, which existed as a state (although unrecognised by the South African government) from 1976 to 1994.

The village is presented in an ambiguous way in the novel (pp. 88–114). Mandisa’s reaction is predictably and even understandably negative – she is a teenager from a bustling township, torn away from her boyfriend and stuck in a backwards village in the middle of nowhere. She complains that the village is “remote”, but worse, she is “separated from China” (p. 108). But there is a simplicity and a calm in the village which she appreciates, and she admits that the place isn’t bad and that the school is good (p. 108). As is the case with the traditions and customs that have so much influence over her life, Mandisa is frustrated and restrained by rural life, yet appreciates its rooted, solid essence.

Apartheid in South Africa

Apartheid (meaning literally “separateness”) was a system of racial segregation in South Africa. It existed as a state-ordered policy determining South African society from 1948 until 1991.[4]

Segregation is the act or policy of separating people of different races, religions or genders, and treating them differently. Many cultures across the world and throughout history, from 8th century China to 13th century Europe and the USA in the 20th century, have practiced segregation in order to separate people of different races in daily life. Even following the end of apartheid in South Africa, segregation by race, religion and gender still exists in various countries all around the world.

The apartheid system was based on a very simple ideology – white supremacy. The fundamental idea was that white-skinned people are in every way superior to darker-skinned people, and that blacks must be repressed and segregated in order to benefit the white ruling class. This repression and segregation was the form that apartheid took and the guiding principle for how society was structured. The white rulers were predominantly Afrikaners, who were descended from the Dutch colonists of the 17th and 18th centuries. They maintained a firm grip on politics, the economy and land ownership and had, since the 17th century, enforced increasingly strict and regulated racial divisions and separations. The development of apartheid – from isolated, casual racist oppression within regions and communities to outright national policy – was gradual, taking over two centuries, and it then lasted in its most strict and brutal form for a little less than fifty years.

A very brief history of apartheid

Pre-20th century racial oppression and discrimination was more freewheeling and casual: there was a slave era, the increasing theft of land and resources from native peoples by European (mostly Dutch) settlers, and with the coming of the British there was a rise in industrialisation and a great expansion of mining projects (South Africa is home to some of the most profitable diamond mines on the planet, with roughly 49% of all diamonds still being mined in Central and South Africa). Black people were pushed off their land when the white settlers wanted to use it themselves; they were forbidden from living in certain places and doing certain work; they were not allowed to vote or enter white churches; and criminal acts against blacks were barely noticed and rarely dealt with seriously by white authorities. The Dutch settlers had already introduced a hierarchy of race, with whites at the top, Indians and Asians somewhere in the middle, and blacks at the very bottom.

By the mid-20th century, however, the central government began to institute stricter and more precise legislation to enforce the system of white supremacy.

 The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act in 1949 is considered to be the first step in the institutionalisation of white supremacy as state policy. This law, and the Immorality Act of the following year, made it a crime to marry or have sexual relationships across racial lines.

 Another 1950 law, the Population Registration Act, defined the four legal racial groups: black, white, coloured and Indian. Your race defined where you could live, what job you could have, and who you were allowed to interact with. Identification papers included these racial designations, and citizens were not able to cross the boundaries of their assigned region without these papers.

 In 1953 the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act defined racially-specific public services, such as hospitals, universities and public parks, which were not allowed to be used by members of other races.

 Also passed in 1953, the Bantu Education Act segregated national education, effectively cutting black South Africans off from the better-financed and organised educational infrastructure, which was from this point on only available to whites.

 In the 1950s the government also created the “pass laws”, which stopped black South Africans from being able to travel freely in the country. The pass laws in particular limited blacks’ ability to enter urban areas; black South Africans were now required to provide authorisation from a white employer to be able to enter specific towns and cities (when China vanishes, Mandisa first believes he may have been arrested for just this crime: “Maybe he had been arrested for a pass offence”, p. 144).

These laws led to the forced relocations of the 1960s–1980s, during which millions of non-white Africans were removed from their homes and made to live in so-called “tribal homelands” – although these areas often had no historical validity or relevance for the tribes. These regions were also largely unsuitable for larger populations, with very poor agricultural potential and little or no infrastructure. Some of these so-called bantustans became independent republics. The goal of the white supremacist governments was to strip black Africans of their South African citizenship as they moved into the bantustans, thus removing all remaining rights from the blacks and freeing the white rulers of all remaining responsibility for the blacks.

Petty and grand apartheid – Very broadly speaking, apartheid in South Africa came in two forms. Petty apartheid is the segregation of public facilities (hospitals, public toilets, churches, public transport etc.) and social events, meaning that blacks and whites are not allowed – by law – to share these facilities or to mix with one another in “social events”. Grand apartheid is concerned with housing and employment. So the relocations which play such a huge role in Mandisa’s youth are an example of grand apartheid: the government telling her and her family where they are allowed to live (see p. 28, where Mandisa describes the shock of being relocated to Guguletu). Black labour was necessary to uphold South Africa’s industries – particularly mining – because the blacks could be exploited with poor wages, little or no labour law protections, and inadequate security for dangerous jobs. This government control of work is also a case of grand apartheid.

The apartheid system was hugely controversial and widely denounced all around the world. As well as activism and resistance within South Africa, there were global movements aimed at stopping and removing the institution of white supremacy as state policy. Many countries joined in arms and trade embargoes against South Africa. In 1973 the United Nations officially defined the apartheid system as a crime against humanity, which would allow criminal prosecution of individuals responsible for upholding and enforcing the system. Not all member states signed the declaration: by 2008, nearly 90 states had still not signed.

Sport under apartheid – The world of sports is not relevant to Mother to Mother, but a brief look at the subject highlights the injustice and absurdity of white supremacist policies on a social as well as international level. Because the apartheid system forbids multiracial sports teams, it was almost impossible for teams from other countries to play any kind of sports in South Africa. No teams were permitted to compete if they contained members of different races.

The International Table Tennis Federation cut all ties to the South African table tennis organisations in protest. South Africa was banned from the 1964 Olympics, and again in 1968.

The Australian Cricketing Association refused to compete in South Africa or against South African teams as long as they selected their teams on a purely racial basis. In the Chess Olympiad of 1970, the Albanian team forfeited rather than face a team of chess players from an apartheid state. South Africa was suspended from FIFA (the international governing body for football) in 1963. The South African tennis team was banned from the 1970 Davis Cup tournament, and when they were allowed to participate in 1974 they won because the Indian team refused to travel to South Africa to compete in the final.

Following the end of apartheid in 1991, the various boycotts against South African athletes and teams also quickly ended.

By the 1980s increasing number of Western companies and organisations were withdrawing from South Africa in response to louder and louder calls for boycotts and embargoes, taking their money with them, and this, combined with structural flaws in the South African economy, was having a devastating effect on the country. These economic pressures combined with increasingly potent and at times violent resistance within the country, as militant and activist groups grew bolder and angrier. Under increased pressure from within and from the rest of the world, the South African government began to release anti-apartheid political prisoners, which further electrified and revitalised anti-apartheid activism within the country as these political prisoners – or, in the phrase made famous by Amnesty International, “prisoners of conscience” – were welcomed back as heroes and martyrs by the anti-apartheid movement.

Attempts made by the central government to reform apartheid – such as giving “coloureds” and “Indians” voting rights in 1983 – were widely seen as inadequate responses to the problem. The government under P. W. Botha (1916–2006, leader of South Africa from 1978 to 1989) claimed it was about to make reforms to the apartheid laws which never came true.

By the end of the 1980s the South African economy was in terrible shape, and when Botha suffered a stroke and resigned as leader, F. W. de Klerk became the leader of the state, and moved quickly to begin dismantling the discriminatory legislation underpinning apartheid. The changes he initiated included lifting the bans on anti-apartheid groups and organisations like Nelson Mandela’s ANC (African National Congress). De Klerk also ordered the release from prison of Mandela after 27 years, restored the freedom of the press and suspended the death penalty. De Klerk was the country’s president in 1993, when the contemporary events surrounding the murder of the white girl are described in the novel.

The end of apartheid was finalised in a series of negotiations in the years 1990 and 1991, ending in the general elections of 1994 (a year following the events described in Mother to Mother), the first time in the country’s history that all South Africans were allowed to vote. The process was violent, with both “black on black” violence erupting all over the country as well as white supremacist attacks on anti-apartheid activists and even assassinations of anti-apartheid leaders. The negotiations were repeatedly interrupted by protests from groups and organisations representing the far-right white racist minority. The violence continued right up until the day of the general election, with car bombs exploding and people being killed. On April 27, 1994, the apartheid state officially ceased to exist, and South Africa raised its new flag and sang the new official national anthem, “God Bless Africa”.

The novel is very much about the apartheid era – about the forces (racism and colonialism) which made it possible, the terrible consequences it had for society as a whole, and for tribes, families and individuals. Sindiwe Magona is a generation older than her main character, Mandisa, and Mandisa’s experiences are based on Magona’s own life, specifically the places she was forced to live and the pressures on her as a black woman and a young mother. Magona was born in 1943 and witnessed the apartheid era in its entirety; as an adult she campaigned ceaselessly from the UN in New York for an end to apartheid.

The Xhosa

Mandisa and her family (and the other African characters we see in the novel) are all Xhosa. There are 8 million Xhosa people living in South Africa (roughly 18% of the population, according to the 2011 census). They are an ethnic sub-group of the Bantu peoples, which is the umbrella term for the hundreds of ethnic groups in Africa who speak variants of the Bantu languages. The language spoken by the Xhosa is called isiXhosa, and it is the second most commonly spoken language in South Africa (after Zulu).

During apartheid, the Xhosa were denied South African citizenship, and were instead allowed to live in self-governed so-called “homelands”, called Transkei and Ciskei.

The cattle killing movement: “The hatred has but multiplied.”

The cattle killing movement of 1854–1858 was a near-catastrophic act of self-destruction committed by the Xhosa, based on a prophecy by a young girl. Cattle introduced by the white settlers had spread new diseases to the native cattle, many of which died. The loss of cattle – which were for the Xhosa an important status symbol as well as being a source of food and leather (see pp. 176–177) – was a serious problem. The girl, Nongqawuse, told her father that she had encountered spirits out in the fields, and that they had told her that the Xhosa should kill all of their cattle. The spirits of all the dead Xhosa would then return to drive out the white settlers, and bring back all the cattle with them (p. 180).

Her prophecy made its way to the chief of the Xhosa, who ordered the tribe to kill all their cattle and destroy all their grain supplies. Some Xhosa allegedly believed the prophecy to be genuine, and some simply followed orders. Whatever their reasons may have been, the results were disastrous. Famine struck, the Xhosa had no food, the prophesied return of the ancestors never happened and the dead cattle never reappeared. Instead, the white European settlers were forbidden by their governor Sir George Grey from helping the starving, helpless Xhosa unless the tribespeople signed labour contracts with the white landowners. The Xhosa were then bound to work in the mines, labouring for the white colonists.

This is told to Mandisa by her grandfather Tatomkhulu (see Chapter 10, pp. 175–183). A true story and an important episode in Xhosa history, the story has additional significance to the novel. Mandisa has been taught that the Xhosa followed the prophecy because they were “superstitious and ignorant” (p. 175). But her grandfather teaches her that it was an act of desperation, fed by their hatred of the white settlers who had stolen absolutely everything from the native peoples of the country they had colonised – a colossal, catastrophic act of self-harm. Mandisa comes to believe that the story reveals something honourable rather than merely being a display of disastrous ignorance. Her grandfather positions it in a sequence of protests and uprisings against the white settlers through the colonial history of South Africa, pointing out efforts by the black inhabitants of the country to reclaim their land which had been stolen from them, and to resist the “button without a hole” – meaning coins, because money was unknown to pre-colonial South Africa – because of the damaging effect money would have on a purely agrarian culture.

The symbolism of this history of honourable but doomed protests and violent, apocalyptic uprisings against the hated white oppressors is of great relevance to the tragic story of the killing of the white girl in Guguletu – the story at the heart of Mother to Mother. The same hatred of colonists who had stolen everything can be seen in both the cattle killing movement of 1857 and the “one settler, one bullet!” war cry of the furious anti-apartheid protests of the 1980s and 1990s, and the mob who killed Amy Biehl.

Rites of passage and traditions: Marriage, parenthood and gender

We see different examples of traditional customs and rites of passage in the novel, and learn about the traditions which organise marriage, the business of parenthood and the roles and interaction of men and women. These traditions are seen with a degree of ambivalence: While Mandisa is frustrated by the unfairness of the limits imposed on her as a woman and a young mother, and is equally annoyed by the dominance allowed to males within the culture, she also sees how a lack of traditions and respect for customs and cultural roles can damage and break a society.

We will look at the role played by traditional initiation rites and customs in the chapter on themes in the novel (see p. 100). These include:

 Marriage arrangements and ceremonies

 Circumcision and coming of age rites for young men

 Naming customs

 The patriarchal structure of tribal society

 Tribal legends and myths

 Faith healers (Sangomas)

Education and politics

“Boycotts, strikes and indifference have plagued the schools in the last two decades. Our children have paid the price.”

(Mandisa, p. 72)

Poster from 1985 protesting and demanding reform of the education system.[5]

The combination of inadequate education, social neglect and bad politics (at once irresponsible, oppressive politics proved to be explosive in the immediate aftermath of the apartheid regime. The protests and explosions of violence which Sindiwe Magona talks about in Mother to Mother were shocking to many – to locals and neighbours as well as outsiders and foreign observers.

The apartheid system influenced education as well as every other aspect of life in South Africa. From the early 1980s, black schools were legally required to conduct the majority of their lessons in English and Afrikaans, with the native languages only allowed to be used for subjects like art and music. The government’s goal was to make sure that all black people in South Africa knew how to communicate with white people in “white” languages. There were widespread and at times violent protests against this, as many students didn’t want to speak Afrikaans. There were strikes and boycotts of schools throughout the townships.

Multilingual colonial societies have an interesting side-effect when it comes to languages. Organising a society along racial lines – as in apartheid South Africa, with whites on the top and blacks on the bottom – and enforcing the language(s) of the minority ruling class means that the lower classes are forced by circumstance and by law to learn the colonisers’ languages. But they also grow up speaking their own tribal language. In the case of the black characters in Mother to Mother, that language is Xhosa.

The result of this structure, with black native languages forbidden from being taught in schools but being the main form of communication at home, is that the blacks grow up speaking at least three languages – a tribal mother tongue, English and Afrikaans – whereas the white ruling classes will usually be limited to speaking only the official “white” languages.

The fluid ease with which Mandisa and her family switch between these languages and the interesting way in which the languages interact with and influence each other are looked at in this study guide in the chapter on Style and Language (p. 114).

The quality of teaching was also an issue. Over 90% of all the teachers in white schools were properly trained and certified teachers[6] whereas only about 15% of the teachers in black schools were trained teachers. The pass rate for exams and graduating among black students was less than half what it was for white students.

The issue of education is very important in Mother to Mother – Mandisa talks about it on pages 71–72, for example – but more as a matter of context and environment. It is another one of those outside influences contributing to the violence and unrest of the society and more specifically to Mxolisi’s development and behaviour as a young man. The generally low quality and restrictive nature of segregated education in the apartheid state had the effect of increasing ignorance, unemployment and despair throughout the black population. With no real education – we can see how Mandisa is constantly frustrated in her efforts to educate herself – people have no chance to get well-paying jobs or to improve their position within society. The lack of perspectives creates more despair and frustration, on the one hand: and on the other hand, it provokes radical and at times violent resistance and protest.

The student protests

The school boycott was sparked by the deteriorating quality of education in black schools, the school age limit of twenty, and the policy that denied students representation by a democratically elected Student Representative Council.[7]

The student protests of the “Young Lions” in 1993 which Mandisa talks about were part of a long tradition of protest and resistance, but in this year they were particularly energized by the frustratingly slow pace of change and improvement in society and politics following the release of Mandela, among other developments. Mandela had called the Young Lions “the government-in-waiting”[8] because so many of their leaders were gifted, intelligent and energetic individuals who spoke passionately and articulately about the need for change in South Africa and an end to the oppression of the blacks. But many of these young people had come out of a nation-wide movement which had boycotted schools, protesting the state-led efforts to keep the black population in a state of passivity and ignorance.

While many of these young people wanted to become lawyers or politicians and active, professional members of society, most of them had little or no official education. Mandisa first mentions the student protests and education boycotts on page 10, describing how a student organisation (COSAS) told students to boycott schools out of solidarity with striking teachers. For Mandisa, this playing at politics and social unrest is unreal, a dangerous and stupid game which is stopping the young people from understanding life – as she sees it, by wasting their youth and not going to school, they all but guaranteeing that their lives as adults will be no better than her generation’s: “if they’re not careful, they’ll end up in the kitchens and gardens of white homes … just like us, their mothers and fathers” (p. 10).