Mother-in-verse: Sindiwe Magona

Some of you have heard this story before – of the first time I met Sindiwe Magona. It was back in the days when the Mail & Guardian was still the Weekly Mail (known by many as the Meekly Wail), and it hosted a Book Week at the Baxter Theatre – a week of events mostly featuring men, most of them white. Back then, women in the literary world still belonged in the “trot-them-out-for-show” ghetto, and black women barely featured at all.

I was a green graduate student when I got the call from Rhoda Kadalie, then still setting up the Women’s Studies Dept at UWC. She was in charge of a panel featuring Ellen Kuzwayo and Sindiwe Magona, and needed a co-interviewer. Was I interested? I nearly chewed my lips off telling her just how interested I was – for me, busy with a PhD on the PreRaphaelites, this was a signal honour. My colleagues tended to assume I had no interest in contemporary local writing, which was far from true. Rhoda was clear about why she wanted me: she believed I’d ask interesting questions from a feminist perspective (the f-word was still a pretty dirty one).

I got my first ever freebie books from the publisher (David Philip) – Kuzwayo’s Call Me Woman (which she signed, and which someone borrowed – if you are reading this, and you have it, please return it – no questions asked) and Magona’s To My Children’s Children.

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