Literature without borders

One land, one author: in South Africa with Sindiwe Magona

Audio 29:00

South African writer Sindiwe Magona in the studio at RFI (2021).

© Catherine Fruchon-Toussaint/RFI

By: Catherine Fruchon-Toussaint

2 mins

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 master's degree in social work at Columbia (New York), she worked at the UN and became involved in the fight against apartheid.

A 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

founded in Montreal, a book by Sindiwe Magona has been translated into French and is published 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 context, murdered in August 1993 in the township of Gugulethu, here is the great apartheid novel in which 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

 which invited the writer to France, an exceptional encounter with a powerful and irresistible woman. 

Mother to Mother © Mémoire d'Encrier

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

- Christiane Taubira.

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Literature without borders

Sindiwe Magona, South African writer finally translated into French