south africa

When the village sleeps

by sindiwe magona

WHEN THE VILLAGE SLEEPS, is told through the lives and spirits of four generations of amaTolo women. The book reveals how each subsequent generation suffers a little more loss of connection to the land, their community, their identity, their ancestors, and ultimately, to one another. Magona seamlessly weaves in the voices of the ancestors—The Old—as they observe their descendants, and worry about what decades of collective trauma, poverty, and brokenness has taken from them.

“Disinclination to belief, the sad lot of our leavelings.

The very fact of one’s own life fails to fill them with a sense of wonder—the miracle of it all.

Day in, day out, minute by minute, awake or asleep, the blood runs

And they thank not Qamata*, the All-powerful.

Alas, the fleshlings have abandoned reason

Hearts dark as night rule their every waking moment

In deep sleep of night, they embrace dreams of greed

Rapacious, lascivious living is the order of the day

Ubuntu has become stranger.”

*The Xhosa god of creation.

The book opens with Busisiwe, an almost 13-year-old girl, living in the township of Kwanele, who tells us from the very beginning, “With all her heart, she hated her life.” Busi is desperate to escape the drudgery and difficulties of a life with an absent father, an alcoholic mother, two younger siblings, and “the every-present crisis of money.” She is young, educated, and modern, and desires a bigger and better life. A life like the children from her model-C school in the white suburbs of Cape Town have, with their new sneakers, swimming pools, and holidays in Mauritius.

Busi’s mother, Phyllis, drinks and spends days and nights away from home, leaving her two small sons in Busi’s care. The family live in a small backyard addition to a home owned by Phyllis’s sister, Lily, and her husband Luvo, who have two sons.

Khulu, is the matriarch of the family. Phyllis and Lily’s mother, and Busi’s grandmother. An elderly former domestic worker, Khulu has retired to her home village of Sidwadweni, “not far from Mthatha and near Tsolo in the Eastern Cape.” Khulu is still connected to the old ways, she listens for advice from her ancestors and takes great pride in being entirely self-sufficient, planting a garden, keeping animals, and taking her role in her community very seriously. Phyllis on the other hand, feels wronged by the world. She doesn’t work, relying instead on monthly ‘loans’ from Khulu’s state pension, and the state grant she receives for each ‘fatherless’ child she is raising as a single parent. Influenced by her mother’s sense that the world owes her something, 12-year-old Busi decides that the fastest way to wealth and independence is to fall pregnant and begin claiming the state grant for young mothers. Further to this misguided plotting, Busi decides that she will drink during her pregnancy,—”for a disabled child, the grant must be huge: a thousand: at least!”

Before even Busi knows whether her plan has borne fruit, a new voice quietly enters the story. The spirit of the potential fetus, an old soul connected to the ancestors, who resists becoming Busi’s child, “I also know I will fights to the best of what power is mine not to be born to a thirteen-year-old child not yet done being a child,” but is resigned to the inevitable, “she will become my mother in the end, though, that I also know, I will be accepted, if reluctantly, if with much regret, it has to be,” and to the clear earthly purpose that life will require of her.

The outcome of Busi’s plan brings the old ways and the new crashing into one another. Each of the women in the family must recognize the role and responsibility they have played in creating the life they now live. The crisis also offers them each the opportunity to either accept or improve their circumstances.

WHEN THE VILLAGE SLEEPS is described in a blurb by Mamphele Ramphele as “a wake-up call to the sleeping village that is our country.” Magona employs the voices of the ancestors to make increasingly urgent calls to return to our roots. To see just how rich and valuable the miracle of being alive is. That life itself has our back and will provide everything we need, if we could only remember to rely on one another, to listen more carefully to the world around us, and appreciate what we have.

The book is an easy, accessibly read, where Magona takes on enormous universal intentions and filters them through the mundane and challenging everyday lives of Khulu’s family. I found Part Three a bit explicit, as if Magona felt an urgency to pass on her essential wisdom before too late. But her message is clear: Resurrect our humanity, find our connection to spirit and source, rediscover our uBuntu.

“Our leavelings had strayed so far from the path of ubuntu

Only umntu from the other side, the spirit side

Had the least hope of righting them; guiding them back to

The meaning of ubuntu

I am because

You are.

Umntu ngumntu ngabantu

A human is human thought the humanity of others.

That is the marrow of ubuntu. Nanko ke umongo wobuntu.”