Antidote for Global Feminist Gaps As Encoded in Sindiwe Magona’s Black South African Autobiographies

Abstract

The relatively new black woman South African writer Sindiwe Magona’s autobiographies To My Children’s Children (1990) and Mother to Mother (1998) urge the agency of oppressed black South African women in a nuanced manner. That she portrays female characters from a characteristically feminist perspective framed normatively within a milieu in which women are confronted by and confront challenges in a racialized and gendered context should not misidentify her as a discursively indistinct feminist writer. This chapter argues that Magona’s category of writings epitomized mostly in her two major works hinges on female protagonists reinventing themselves in an exploitative and discriminatory atmosphere not in a way compatible with what are conventionally acknowledged as the types and evolutionary features of dominant feminist theory. I analyze Magona’s works with the objective of illustrating how they are anchored in fresh explanations of aspects of black south African cultures as mindful of and sympathetic to the social position of women. By a close look at Magona’s work and some aspects of black South African cultures constituting the fabric of her art, I engage earlier feminist interpretations reached by Magona analysts through what I demonstrate to be distorting lenses that deny self-description through (mis)representation. I make a distinction between Magona’s individual character depiction dwelling on disposition coalescing into what may be understood as individual trait unfolding within a specific cultural matrix, as opposed to a kind of characterization identifiable as metonymically symbolic of communal ethos. The study seeks to highlight how discourse in Magona’s novels contributes to a theory of feminism accommodative of social vantage points hitherto repressed in dominant feminist discourse tilted towards the more powerful centre.