Background information

Sindiwe Magona and her background

Sindiwe Magona is a South African writer who grew up in Gugulethu, a township of Cape Town. In this way, Magona is extremely familiar with the main location of her novel Mother to Mother and the community of Gugulethu. 

Like Mandisa in Mother to Mother, Magona also worked as a domestic worker, while she completed her secondary education by correspondence as a single parent and mother of three. Overall, Magona’s life experience of growing up in poverty, being a wife, mother, and community leader in a township, and living as a black woman during the apartheid regime in South Africa greatly informed her writing, which is also visible in Mother to Mother. Her inspiration for the novel came after she discovered that Amy Biehl’s murder took place right outside Magona’s home in Gugulethu, and that one of the boys responsible for the killing was her neighbor’s son. 

Magona graduated from the University of South Africa, earned a Master’s degree in Organizational Social Work from Columbia University, and worked for the United Nations for more than 20 years. During her career, she was awarded numerous prizes for writing that addresses social concerns, for promoting Xhosa culture and language, for her contribution to South African Literature, and in recognition of her work for addressing women and children’s issues, and the fight against apartheid and racism. In 2011 she was given the Order of iKhamanga; a Presidential Award and the highest such award in South Africa.

Magona has published a total of five novels, two autobiographies: To My Children's Children (1990) and Forced to Grow (1992); and several collections of short stories, poetry, and children’s books. She also created the first children’s series to be written in the Xhosa language. Her most famous novel, Mother to Mother was praised for its contribution to ...