Mother to Mother: Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

Skonana can see that Mandisa is distressed, and offers her some tea. Mandisa appreciates the offer but, feeling “weepy,” declines and returns inside. Mandisa begins to address the Mother again, wondering why the Girl was in Guguletu at all, why anyone would come there. Mandisa begins to tell the story of how she ended up in the township, as if “borne by a whirlwind […] of the government’s making,” an “upheaval” so intense that “three decades later, my people are still reeling from it.”

Mandisa began her life in Blouvlei. She recounts her memories the Friday she first heard rumors of relocation: young Mandisa comes home from school, and her mother, Mama, sends her on errands, as she does most afternoons. Mama sends Mandisa across the street to buy vetkoek from a nearby vendor. Mandisa is supposed to come back before Mama’s kettle boils, but dawdles in the shop eating a vetkoek, and is late. Mama comments but doesn’t punish her.

Mandisa completes the rest of her Friday chores. Mama bottles and sells ginger beer—the family business—and Mandisa helps collect the empty bottles when men come by to drink and talk after work. Mandisa overhears one man, Tat’uSikhwebu, say he’s heard the government is planning on relocating all black South Africans in Cape Town. Mandisa dismisses this as a rumor, as Tat’uSikhwebu is known to be unreliable, but later hears Tata talk to Mama about it, and sees the rumor circulate around the neighborhood.

Mandisa wonders how the government could even move the residents of Blouvlei. There are millions of people in the township, which has served as a home to its inhabitants for generations. An elder comments, “The afterbirths of our children are deep in this ground,” as are “the bleached bones of our long dead.” Mandisa is reassured by this assertion that Blouvlei will remain her home.

On a Sunday, months later, Mandisa and Khaya are playing on a hill nearby her home with their friends, when an airplane appears overhead. It spews pieces of paper, which the children and their parents first mistake for some kind of weapon. Instead, they are flyers full of typos, which translated announce, “ALL BLOUVLEI WILL BE RELOCATED […] NEXT MONTH.”

Mandisa is suddenly hit with a “bleak sadness,” realizing she’ll soon lose the only home she’s ever known. She returns home with papers and shares them with Mama and Tata. Mandisa’s parents, who have always praised her and Khaya, are too preoccupied to praise her this day, a sign of the seriousness of the situation.

A bell sounds, announcing a town meeting, and the adults leave their homes to gather and (presumably) discuss the flyers. Mandisa is happy to get extra time to play, as her parents stay at the meeting past sunset. When they eventually return, they are frustrated. The meeting was full of endless questions, and very few answers. The meetings continue for days and weeks. Representatives are sent to the government, but are rejected. Even white employers are asked to help, but nothing will change the mind of the government and its officials. The only setback is that the relocation occurs in September, instead of the promised July.

Early in the morning on September 1st, Mandisa and her family wake up to their house burning down. Police cars, bulldozers, and military vehicles surround the township, and white men are destroying homes, forcing the residents to relocate. Families try to salvage what they can from their homes, pulling the structures down themselves to save building materials.

Mama and Tata begin the march to their new home, with the materials they’ve salvaged from their old home on their backs. Arriving in Guguletu, Mandisa observes, “everybody changed.” The new houses of the settlement, “brand-new brick […] with their glass windows, concrete floors, bare walls and hungry rooms” created new material needs. Some [p]eople believed they’d been bettered, and strove hard to live up to that perception.” As the men, who typically worked, had the same wages as before, women started going to work to augment the family’s income, leaving children home alone to fend for themselves.

Back in the present, in 1993, neither Mxolisi, nor Mandisa’s husband, Dwadwa, have returned home. Once again, Mandisa wonders what is wrong with Mxolisi, and why he refuses to listen to her. Mandisa remembers how Mxolisi used to be open with her, and would share his secrets. She wonders why he stopped. Mandisa does laundry to distract herself.

Eventually Dwadwa returns with spleen for dinner. He reports that there are police vans around the train station and also along their street, although luckily the police have stayed inside their cars. Mandisa cooks up the meat Dwadwa brought home. She continues to worry about Mxolisi, who, although he loves meat, fails to appear even when she serves dinner. She feels “unsettled,” and can barely eat.

Mandisa gets ready for bed. She reflects on the violence that has been occurring in her neighborhood for years. Still, this past violence was different than today’s murder of a white woman, which was committed “for no reason at all. Killed, in fact, while doing good…”

That night, in bed, Dwadwa asks Mandisa where Mxolisi is. When she says she doesn’t know, he warns her that he will “bring you big trouble one day.” Mandisa doesn’t like that Mxolisi is always out either, but defends him to her husband, arguing, “all children are like that, these days.” Dwadwa responds that her answer is not one of “a wise mother,” and that even if Mxolisi is no longer a young boy, it is still Mandisa’s responsibility to mother him.

Mandisa reflects on how Dwadwa, although only Siziwe’s biological father, is kind to all of her children. Still, she is unable to apologize to him for lashing out. Instead, she lays awake worrying about Mxolisi.

Mandisa remembers being in school after she was relocated to Guguletu. The classes were so big, she didn’t learn the names of the other students in it. When inspectors came to check on the children’s learning, the teacher used her hands to indicate the right answer to the questions so the children would seem well learned.

Mandisa explains that schools have gotten worse since her own childhood. Mxolisi is twenty but still in the classes he should’ve completed at age eleven or twelve. With “boycotts, strikes, and indifference” Mandisa knows her “children have paid the price.”

Mandisa briefly addresses the Mother, wondering if the Girl went to school. If she did, did she not understand that Guguletu “was not safe for the likes of her”?

In bed, Mandisa reflects upon the “havoc our children” are creating in society. To her, it seems children have decided that their parents are stupid, and that it is now the children’s job to lead the revolution. They reported to adult leaders who told the children to “make the country ungovernable.” At first, Mandisa admits, parents cheered on their children as they stoned white people’s cars.

Mandisa remembers singing a song about black South Africans murdering a nun in school, but the song took pity on the nun. Now, she explains, children sing “AmaBhulu, azizinja,” or “whites are dogs,” an idiom learned from their parents who would say it as they returned from work, where they had served white people.

Mandisa’s children’s generation got increasingly out of hand. After stoning white people’s cars, they burned down their own schools, an action the adults disliked but understood. However, then children began burning unoccupied buildings, black people’s cars, and black people’s houses. At first, adults justified that perhaps the children recognized some secret guilt in their neighbors, or saw that they were collaborating with the apartheid government, calling these potential traitors “Iimpimpi.” Parents continued to praise their children, and increasingly feared them and their power. However, Mandisa recognizes the children “descended into barbarism,” losing their humanity.

For Mandisa, the final straw was when children murdered a black man from Guguletu by draping an old tire around his neck and setting it on fire, an action that came to be known as necklacing. Few leaders condemned the murder, even though, to Mandisa’s knowledge, the man was innocent. More people were publicly executed, and when questioned, the children said they were “fighting the apartheid government,” and explained, “a war was going on.”