Sindiwe Magona's To My Children's Children and Mother to Mother. A Customised Womanist Notion of Home within Feminist Perspectives

Abstract

In this paper I discuss the intersection of global feminism and Magona's refracted womanism in her major autobiographies To My Children's Children and Mother to Mother, utilizing the concept of home. I argue that Magona's notion of feminism has developed as she was interacting with shifting orientations of various sub-groups of feminism across the ages. This is why I analyse her two works in order to trace influences of second and third wave feminisms, in exploring the continuum of her own brand of feminism. I probe Magona's valuing of identity as a tool for liberation. I proceed to exhibit that the feminist discourse of Magona's two major works consistently identifies with a layer of 1970s third wave or new generation feminists who sought to move subjugated voices from the periphery to the centre. I use the perspectives outlined above to scrutinize Magona's two major workds in a manner showing her to craft her nuanced idea of home dialectically within the development of global feminist theory even as I show how she appropriated the theory.