Thembi Mtshali-Jones (Photo: Andrew Brown)
In the soul of almost every being…raved a seething madness, wild and passionate, with the causes lying deep. No cursory measures can remedy, no superficial explanation can illuminate. These jovial faces that can change into masks of bloodlust and destruction…on smallest provocation,” wrote Can Temba of township violence in Mob Passion (1953).
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission granted amnesty to the mob that killed, on 25 August 1993 in Gugulethu, Amy Biehl, an American exchange student who was registering voters for South Africa’s first democratic election. When Sindiwe Magona discovered her neighbour’s son was one of the perpetrators, she wrote her novel Mother to Mother, now recounted on the stage as a narrative monologue by director Janice Honeyman and virtuosic actress Thembi Mtshali-Jones.
It is the fictional, heartfelt testimony of the mother of the murderer trying to explain to the mother of the victim, without excusing, how her child, in Themba’s words, was “uncontrollably drawn into hideous orgies” of violence.
Lara Foot Newton’s play Reach (2007) also had echoes of that murder and dealt with it in a more dramatically realised form. The importance of Mother to Mother as a theatrical work lies primarily in its message, reconciling the nation through individual acts of contrition and uncovering the real dangers in our social-political context of racializing radicalism.
