On Writing from a Postcolonial Perspective

Abstract

Sindiwe Magona started writing in pursuit of agency as opposed to victimhood. With no training in writing, she felt nonetheless she could paint a much better, more realistic picture than what she found in stories of her people written by white people, to say nothing of how history books represented black Africans or “Bantu” as the terminology of the day went. Another fact that pushed her to dare to write was the almost total absence of records left to her generation by the preceding one. She wanted to close that lacuna. Her first book, To My Children’s Children, was published in 1990 when she was almost fifty years old. Magona wrote the autobiography as a record of life lived in a specific period, by specific people, using hers as an example. The book references other lives, not only that of her family. The cultural milieu and the overarching theme, given the times, however, is of the oppressive system of apartheid—legalized racism. Memory represents not only what is remembered but the inescapable past as represented by the still felt, still visible, still “performing” insights, ideas, ideology, actions, and reactions of South Africans almost a quarter of a century since the end of apartheid came with the first democratic elections of April 27, 1994. Each of her books—four novels, two collections of short stories, two autobiographies, two published plays, three biographies, a book of poetry, as well as her articles, essays, and talks—gives evidence of Magona’s witness of what happens, how it happens, and its observed or acknowledged consequences. She takes the journey further, exploring the inner meanings of the observed. The inner lives of victims and perpetrators, of oppressed and oppressor, and all the other binaries of which she is aware concern her. She set out to write, to leave a record for all posterity, not only black posterity, for it is her firm belief, hope, and prayer that, ere long, humanity will find itself, regain its former oneness or sense of belonging, and understand there are no races but one, the human race.