Sindiwe Magona, South African writer finally translated into French

Audio 29:00

South African writer Sindiwe Magona in studio at RFI (2021) © Catherine Fruchon-Toussaint \ RFI

By: Catherine Fruchon-Toussaint

31 min

Born in 1943 in South Africa, having grown up in Gugulethu, a township near Cape Town, Sindiwe Magona is the author of an autobiography, poet, playwright, novelist, she writes in English and Xhosa.

After her Masters in Social Work in Columbia, New York, she worked at the UN and became involved in the fight against apartheid.

Feminist, she resists racial and sexist domination.

Sindiwe Magona currently lives in Cape Town.

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For the first time, thanks to Sarah Davies Cordova, author and translator, and to the Mémoire d'Encrier editions founded in Montreal, a book by Sindiwe Magona is translated into French and appears under the title "Mère à Mère".

Inspired by a dramatic reality: the death of Amy Biehl, a young American who came to South Africa in a humanitarian setting assassinated in August 1993 in the township of Gugulethu, here is the great apartheid novel where the author imagines the long letter that the mother of one of the young murderers could write to the mother of the victim.

On the occasion of the VO-VF festival which invited the writer to France, an exceptional meeting with a powerful and irresistible woman. 

Mother to Mother © Mémoire d'Encrier

"Sindiwe Magona could become the generic name of a certain literature: one so beautiful and so powerful that it sparks out a tiny glow then a flickering glow then a vertical and stubborn flame that lights up the world. Here, the precise outlines and the he fabric of apartheid horror in its institutional coldness and its meticulous violence on the daily lives of these women, men, children, adolescents whose full life is denied in the present, in the past, in the future. And this address subtle, vigorous, humble and tender from mother to mother, from a wounded heart to a broken heart, could have been perilous. Sindiwe Magona makes her sublime. Sarah Davies Cordova offers us a sensitive and faithful language crossing . "

-Christiane Taubira.

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