Mother to Mother

Mother to Mother's title may imply a broad theme: motherhood, and the shared experience of mothers worldwide. And to some extent the universality of motherhood does play into Sindiwe Magona's one-woman show, performed powerfully by South African actress Thembi Mtshali-Jones. But Mother to Mother's focus is far narrower than it might seem at first glance. The show is specifically about one mother on one particular day in Cape Town’s Gugulethu township. Mandisa (Magona), mother of three, is addressing the mother of Amy Biehl, an anti-apartheid activist who was murdered by a violent mob in 1993. As Mandisa's story becomes tied to Biehl's, we witness a heart-wrenching unravelling of a family against the backdrop of an already volatile refugee society.

Mtshali-Jones delivers a performance balanced between colourful theatricality and somber restraint. Mandisa's descent into the tragic truth of her family is one which requires its performer to have a keen awareness of both African history and the personal stories of the families in order to pull it off tastefully. The women involved in Mother to Mother clearly have both in spades.

It is those moments when Mandisa addresses Biehl's mother directly, caught somewhere between attrition and self-defence, when we are given glimpses of the complexity of modern African identity. It may have lent more depth to Mandisa's story to know more about her son, implicated in Biehl's murder. But perhaps it's our own tired tendency to cast that wide aperture on history – and Magona's story truly is about one (maybe two) mothers, their individual stories and their ill-fated children.