MY LATEST NOVEL, When the Village Sleeps, is perhaps different from anything that came before it. I began writing the novel with a clearer sense of purpose than usual as I was determined to speak to a problem related to our current moment in South Africa. I intended it to be a catalyst for change or, at the very least, to be at the forefront of change.

A writer, as with all living things, undergoes changes. This writer is no exception to this rule. I myself have changed, and continue to change. I am a very different person from what I was at the time of marrying, with no real thought to its ramifications – forced, really, into marriage by unplanned motherhood. That could not but be a frustrating experience; the children sure to be vulnerable throughout their childhood. Today, however, this writer is in a very different space – a position of mastery of my environment and also my life. Thus, I can begin to explain why I wrote When the Village Sleeps …

A few years back, I came across an article in my local neighbourhood newspaper, the False Bay Echo, which left me greatly disturbed. The frontpage article was prominently placed, so no one could fail to notice it. I certainly did not; I began to read the responses of a teenaged mother, who was interviewed by a social worker. It was a young mother's journey into motherhood. And there she was, pictured with baby on lap, smile on lips, looking proud as proud can be.

I wasn't long into reading it before I was struck by the central theme of the article with the young lady's responses: choice! As clear as clear can be, the young woman, a child, really, had planned each and every step of her way. Yes, at 16 she was holding a baby on her lap, her baby – and that was a choice.

I CAN'T BELIEVE I have been writing for more than three decades. However, even my feeble maths tells me that 33 years ago, To My Children's Children, announced – to those interested in such matters – the arrival of a new writer named Sindiwe Magona: this book was published by David Philip Publishers in 1990.

To reflect on what writing has meant, and continues to mean, to me is, therefore, to go back a long, a very long time. At the start of this rollercoaster journey, let me reiterate, there was a much-surprised person. I was surprised at what I had somehow managed to do – write a book. Even more surprised that a publisher had not only wanted to publish it, but had gone ahead and done just that. Then, as though that were not miracle enough to kill a person, guess what? There were people who bought the book, read the book – from page one to the very last page – and didn't try and find me and laugh at me or, worse still, throw rotten eggs at me. No, they read the book, read it like any normal book. So, the whole thing had not just been a figment of my imagination. How could that be? The whole world shared in my wild, wild dream, my fantasy. It had to be real, then. I had written a book. And the book was published by a reputable publisher.

The book went on to garner great reviews. And thirty years later, it is still in print! Sindiwe Magona – author. But what did this mean to me, then? What does it mean today? What inspired me to write that book in the first place, and what has inspired me to keep at it, keep on writing, ever since? The following poem, found in my collection, Please, Take Photographs (2009), provides some answers to these questions:

Statement

MY PEOPLE HAVE their own ways of doing things. We have always had our ways of doing things. ‘The ones scrubbed in hot water’ could not see this when they came. They came – ‘the ones with coloured eyes’ – and found my people living worthwhile lives that were satisfying to them. But the newcomers saw only indolence, ignorance and superstition. They saw nothing commendable, nothing worth preserving, least of all emulating. For them, our being alive held no lessons whatsoever. It proved nothing. They had their ways. And, in their eyes, these were far, far superior to ours. So began the destruction of my culture. So began our dying.

My people are a wise people. I do not claim God accorded them special preference in the allocation of grey matter. That would be absurd; as absurd as the claims of superiority made by ‘the ones without colour’, the ones we came to call umlungu.

But my people are patient. We have a saying: ‘These mountains were here when we were born. They will be here long after we are gone.’ Patiently, my people observed the world of which they knew they were a part – equal with the land, the rivers, the trees, the mountains and every other living thing.

My people knew how to flow with nature's rhythm, dance to its tune and harness its forces for their good. They knew about using and using up. They knew that rest is the beginning of restoration and that it brings healing.

How can one stand under the heavens one night, look up at the sky, point out one star and say: ‘That star is mine!’? My people would have thought anyone mad who suddenly pronounced themselves sole owner of such and such a mountain, valley, river or any other piece of the earth.

They had not learnt the greed that brings fences with it.

SEVERAL CONSIDERATIONS WENT into the decision to return to my home country, South Africa, from my extended stay in the United States of America. First and foremost, besides the fact that I missed home and my family, I recognised that my writing was rooted in South Africa and things South African. I felt I needed to reconnect, be ‘on the spot’, as it were, so as to be more in tune with what was happening in the country day-to-day, rather than relying on reportage. I seemed to be bombarded daily with reports of the raging fire in the country of my birth – a veritable catastrophe that was laying waste to all life, especially young life. But this was a consideration I acknowledged mostly unconsciously, as I didn't say to myself: I’m going home to join the fight against HIV and Aids. Yet the pandemic troubled me to the core of my being.

In the early days, when Aids was still but a rumour, I attended my first Aids conference in the early 1990s in New York. A South African nurse, Nonceba Lubanga, had organised this. At the time, I knew very little about the disease. That was the time we still held the mistaken notion it was something that killed gay men. The only reason I attended the conference, held over a weekend, was because Nonceba is not only a loyal friend but one of those people you don't say no to – you’d better do as she says, or else …

What I learnt from that conference left me numb. Looking back, I know I had still not grasped the magnitude of what was about to befall us. I remember the spine-chilling words: ‘By the year 2000, there will hardly be a family, in South Africa, not touched by Aids …’. Hardly a family …

I can still recall the palpable, overwhelming sense of doom with which I left the conference.

AT A CONFERENCE I once attended, a writer (white) made the startling (to me, at any rate) assertion that Cecil Rhodes brought apples to South Africa. This came after some of us (African writers) had been going on, decrying colonialism and the hardships and disruption it had brought to the African continent. I suppose she was putting us in our place or, as the saying goes, setting the record straight.

I bring this up because it is also true that colonialism brought writing to South Africa. It also brought us the English language. However, because the nature of colonialism was never one of equality between the colonisers and the colonised, the inequality affected all aspects of life and living, including writing.

The English language and writing was in most probability taught to natives with the view of serving the coloniser and his purpose, which may broadly be described as trade and spreading Christianity.

I was born into a Christian family and went to a mission school for my primary school education. Even when I was at high school, even though it was not a church school, the day started with assembly, where we had hymn-singing and prayers, usually in English. At home, I do not recall much attention being paid to the language of the child, except for the first burst of happy surprise when the baby starts making sounds that announce she is attempting human speech. Oh, yes, then there is much encouragement. However, that soon stops as the baby becomes a toddler and then a child and her speech is taken for granted. It is at school that I recall receiving praise for my use of language. However, although that praise was for both spoken and written language, not one of my teachers, right up to teacher-training college, ever hinted that there might be a writer hidden somewhere inside me. The idea of developing a skill, in which I showed clear promise, was simply never imparted to me.

I FEEL HIGHLY honoured by the Franschhoek Literary Festival and the Brink family, especially Karina Magdalena Brink, André's widow, for inviting me to participate in this year's festival.

First, let me share with you how I arrived at the title of my talk, ‘Andre Brink: Enigma, Betrayer, Villain or Hero: An Outsider's Take on this Giant of South African Letters’. This is my personal reflection on who I am next to André Brink; when, where and how our paths crossed; and what those encounters meant, as well as what they have come to mean to me.

No doubt, you – or at any rate, many of you – will agree with me that I am an outsider in this situation, an outsider looking in at the particular life of one André Phillipus Brink. I am an outsider because of who we were not so long ago when there was no way I could have been anything but an outsider in the life of this man. However, our paths did eventually cross, some 25 years ago, in 1990, to be precise, when something I would never have dreamt of happened: I became a writer. Anywhere else in the world, this would not be a noteworthy event. But given who I was – the where and the when – it was indeed remarkable.

Shortly after my first book was published in 1990, I was invited to my very first writer's conference, at the University of Cape Town. UCT was a foreign country to the likes of me. Brink could have studied there. He in fact lectured there. But it was forbidden territory to one such as I. However, this was different. I was not going there to study or lecture, but to a one-day affair – a writers’ conference.

MOTHER TO MOTHER (1998) is fiction, but there is no denying it is based on a real event, the murder of American Fulbright scholar, Amy Elizabeth Biehl, on 25 August 1993.

When that horrific event happened, I was not even in South Africa. I was in New York, USA, where I was working for the United Nations Organization, in the Department of Public Information (DPI). The tragic news spread internationally. That very same day, it reached us in New York. I didn't suddenly exclaim: Ah! There's a novel for me to write. In fact, I did not start writing Mother to Mother until 1996 – three full years after the event.

However, I was terribly saddened and felt deeply for the Biehl family, people I had no reason to believe I would ever meet. This is a typical response upon hearing sad news like this. When incidents such as these happen, how many of us do more than feel sorry for the families of the victims?

Eight months after Amy's murder, in April 1994, I was in South Africa to witness the miracle of the first democratic elections in the country. On the evening of my departure, Lindiwe Madikwa, a friend from primary-school days, drove me to the airport. That was before the ‘Drop and Go’ of today, when you could still drive your friend to the airport, go in and watch them check in, and, time permitting, have a bite in one of the cafés. Lindiwe and I did precisely that. She being a stickler for punctuality, I was a whole mile and a half early for my flight.

Over coffee we chatted about this and that, went over the miraculous happenings in the country, the ‘everybody’ elections no one had ever dreamed they would see.

MY FELLOW AFRICANS, these are bad times, indeed. Daily, sad hordes troop to cemeteries to bury our youth. Custom dictates we bury the dead. However, the acceleration of today's rate of HIV and Aids is alarming, and the age of those dying an abomination. Sadly, we are gathered here today for no different reason. I’m sure I echo what is in the heart of each one here when I say: I wish it were not so.

We have lost a young woman, the youngest of her mother's four girls and the mother of an eight-year-old little girl. Zanele was only thirty years old.

But first, let me begin by expressing my condolences to the bereaved: Dear friends, as the elders say, and have taught us to say: ‘Akuhlanga lungehliyo!’ We are all here to shed tears with you in grief, and hope our presence will soften the blow a little.

I would be remiss if I didn’t, on behalf of us all, thank this family for what it has done. They have come out publicly; declared their deceased daughter was HIV positive. We thank them for that act of rare and amazing courage; thank them for their leadership.

These days, our sad plight has made us strangers to truth. We have long forsaken truth and chosen the path of appearances and false respectability. As far as I know, this is the first such acknowledgment in Gugulethu. Despite so many of our young people dying daily in unprecedented numbers, we continue to inhabit the house of lies and denial. Yes, Lord, even as we continue to call ourselves Christians, we continue in our wicked lying ways. But this family has decided their loss shall be our gain. Let us be grateful for such bounteous mercy!

MANY OF THE world's poor are born into poverty. Some escape, many do not. Tragically, many do not only not escape poverty but actually sink deeper and deeper into the quagmire. However, most, if not all, have a fighting chance to escape poverty. Take it from me, you can escape poverty. I know, because I did.

I was born poor. That is true of most people my age group, born black in apartheid South Africa or before. Black-black1 Africans were not recognised as citizens of South Africa, their birth country. Apartheid South Africa was governed by white people, governed with the sole purpose of legally barring all those not white-skinned from meaningfully participating in the economy of the country – the darker, the further the push away from being a person who experienced a life worth living. Yes, even oppression apartheid implemented according to rank: white best; coloured next; black crushed to the ground. Black-black people didn't even have identity numbers. An ID number means you are counted as a human being, a member of a society, with a numerical value in the census. Black Africans were not counted – not as South Africans. Which is why describing the pass or dompas as an identity document, as some are wont to do, is incorrect. The pass book was a reference book in that it provided a number in reference to a black body being in a certain geographical or urban area, legally, for the purpose of residence (if that body qualified for this ‘right’), and/or the employment of a black body by such and such – this last, always and only a white body or organisation comprising a group of white bodies. Residence and employment, the first to serve the second, were the two criteria. Visits, as for a funeral or wedding, were of very short duration – never more than three weeks; vacation from work, normally a month (minus travel time, three weeks) is all one was permitted.

I Write the Yawning Void is a collection of essays by the celebrated South African writer, storyteller and activist, Sindiwe Magona. Known for her many contributions to a wide range of literary genres (autobiographies, short stories, plays, novels, poems, biographies and children's books), she has received less attention for the essays she has penned over the course of her career. Magona began to engage in expository writing with an article for the New Internationalist magazine in 1992, two years after she published her first full-length work, the autobiography To My Children's Children. She went on to publish other short prose pieces in this journal and in a variety of other venues, even as she was taking on one literary genre after another and establishing a name for herself in South African letters.

Today, Magona is well recognised as one of the country's most significant writers and a seminal figure in South African women's writing. She has received more than twenty awards since she began writing – most notably, the Xhosa Heroes Award in 1997 (which recognises those who work to uplift their communities); the Proclamation Award from New York State in 2003 (for her artistic work on the issues of HIV and Aids); the South African Molteno Gold Medal in 2007 (for her role in promoting isiXhosa); the Italian Premio Grinzane Terre D’Otrantro in 2007 (for writing that promotes dialogue between people); the Presidential Order of Ikhamanga in 2011 for outstanding achievement in literature and playwriting (the highest such award in South Africa); the Mbokodo Award for Creative Writing in 2012 (which she shared with Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer); as well as the English Academy of Southern Africa Gold Medal Award in 2016 and the André Brink Award in 2018, both of which pay tribute to her oeuvre. In addition, Magona has been awarded four honorary doctorates (from Hartwick College in the USA and also from Rhodes University, Nelson Mandela University and Fort Hare University in South Africa), and she completed a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of the Western Cape in 2022. In addition, she is among the list of ‘Living Legends’, a programme created by the South African Government's Department of Arts and Culture.

Given Magona's stature as a revered spokesperson for women and for marginalised people in general, a publication which gathers her most important essays into a single collection is both fitting and timely.

IT WOULD BE wonderful if every child had a carefree, fun-filled childhood. I know this, because I did. Day was a time for playing games, climbing trees, roaming hills and valleys, and hunting for edible roots and berries. And when sun went to her mother and our mothers called us home as the stars started popping out to twinkle and wink up in the sky, we ran home. Gleefully, we ran home to grandma – not mama. Mama called us in – called us home. But, in our hearts and minds, without any doubt, we knew she only called us to go to grandma, and that it was she to whom we were running. Grandma didn't have to invite us. We knew she was sitting there, the bright-burning fire before her, waiting for us. Yes, the fire and grandma waited for us as mama called us back home. So we ran back home and joined makhulu, making a semi-circle around the fire with its three-legged pot. Our mouths watering, the smell of whatever was cooking in that pot making us salivate, our eyes glued to the majestic figure huddled with back slightly bent, stout, strong, ready … then, as soon as we were settled, quiet, our ears pulled us to the words pouring out of makhulu's mouth:

‘Kwathi ke kaloku ngantsomi …’

At once, all thought of food flew from our minds as we wandered far away … seeing what makhulu painted in such vivid manner, her voice rising to the sky, chasing the moon, or falling so-so-so soft and faint, as a child hears the stalking beast … stealthy … slow … ever so slowly coming closer, getting ready to –

Today, I tell stories. Write stories. I doubt I would do so had I not had the childhood I’d enjoyed.