Mother to Mother

  AMABHULU, AZIZINJA!

  AMABHULU, AZIZINJA!

  BOERS, THEY ARE DOGS!

  BOERS, THEY ARE DOGS!

  Oh, that her goodness had not blinded her to the animosity of some of those for whom she bore such compassion! That her naiveté had not tricked her into believing in blanket, uniform guiltlessness of those whom she came to help.

  That irrevocable moment! The crowd cheers my son on. One settler! One bullet! We had been cheering him on since the day he was born. Before he was born. Long before.

  Nongqawuse saw it in that long, long-ago dream: A great raging whirlwind would come. It would drive abelungu to the sea. Nongqawuse had but voiced the unconscious collective wish of the nation: rid ourselves of the scourge.

  She was not robbed. She was not raped. There was no quarrel. Only the eruption of a slow, simmering, seething rage. Bitterness burst and spilled her tender blood on the green autumn grass of a far-away land. Irredeemable blood. Irretrievable loss.

  One boy. Lost. Hopelessly lost.

  One girl, far away from home.

  The enactment of the deep, dark, private yearnings of a subjugated race. The consummation of inevitable senseless catastrophe.

  I do not pretend to know why your daughter died . . . died in the manner in which she did. Died when the time and place and hands were all in perfect congruence; cruel confluence of time, place and agent.

  For that is what he had become at the time when he killed your daughter. My son was only an agent, executing the long-simmering dark desires of his race. Burning hatred for the oppressor possessed his being. It saw through his eyes; walked with his feet and wielded the knife that tore mercilessly into her flesh. The resentment of three hundred years plugged his ears; deaf to her pitiful entreaties.

  My son, the blind but sharpened arrow of the wrath of his race.

  Your daughter, the sacrifice of hers. Blindly chosen. Flung towards her sad fate by fortune’s cruellest slings.

  But for the chance of a day, the difference of one sun’s rise, she would be alive today. My son, perhaps not a murderer. Perhaps, not yet.

  Beacon Press

  Boston, Massachusetts

  www.beacon.org

  Beacon Press books

  are published under the auspices of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.

  © 1998 by Sindiwe Magona

  First published in 1998 in South Africa by David Philip Publisher (Pty) Ltd, 208 Werdmuller Centre, Claremont, 7708, South Africa First Beacon Press edition published in 1999

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America

  15 14 13 14 13 12 11

  This book is printed on acid-free paper that meets the uncoated paper ANSI/NISO specifications for permanence as revised in 1992.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Magona, Sindiwe.

  Mother to mother / Sindiwe Magona.

  p. cm.

  e-ISBN 978-0-8070-0997-0

  ISBN 978-0-8070-0949-9 (pbk.)

  I. Title.

  PR9369.3.M335M67 1999

  823-dc21 99-26023