As one of South Africa’s honored amaXhosa living legends, Magona’s clear-sightedness and well-tuned ear expose the wounds of colonialism and apartheid that continue to scar the land and abet the collateral damage of self-perpetuating poverty.

In step with her award-winning feminist and eco-ethical novelistic writing in Mother to Mother (1998), Beauty’s Gift (2008), and Chasing the Tails of My Father’s Cattle (2015), When the Village Sleeps historicizes the quarter-century of inequities, injustices, and consequential social ills that led up to the calamitous 2020 state response to the Covid-19 pandemic for the precariously dependent. THE VILLAGE THAT sleeps is South Africa in the afterlives of apartheid, thought-provokingly awoken by Sindiwe Magona’s unflinching indictment of graft and government-created dependency, and by her (re)capture of ubuntu (humanity) and of the sustenance and well-being that the elders’ traditions hold. If you do not receive e-mail in your 'inbox', check your 'bulk mail' or 'junk mail' folders.Johannesburg. To make sure that you can receive messages from us, please add the '' domain to your e-mail 'safe list'. Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences ISSN 2039-9340(Print) ISSN 2039-2117(Online)Ĭopyright © MCSER-Mediterranean Center of Social and Educational Research This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. In her own words about this novel, Magona asserts that “black masculinity is being corroded and we must address it by naming the crisis, by examining what a black man is to a black woman” (Magona, 2009). The Five Firm Friends(FFF) - Edith, Cordelia, Amanda, Doris and Beauty - in being career women, display an uncanny ability to construct heterogeneous and evasive identities that defy simplistic essentialism and, in the process, emerge with a novel set of “feminist dividends” that occlude the patriarchal, traditional, and normative hegemonic distribution of privilege and power in South Africa. It enlists Butler’s (1990) performative theory in order to unpack Magona’s (2008) depiction of hegemonic, subordinate, complicit and marginalised masculinities in Beauty’s gift. This article interrogates Sindiwe Magona’s poignant testament to the ravages of AIDS in South Africa.

Beauty's Gift by Sindiwe Magona