She was just 23 and the mother of three young children when her husband abandoned her, leaving her with no choice but to make ends meet by becoming a domestic worker. But SINDIWE MAGONA isn’t the kind of woman to let hardship get her down.
The 65-year-old grandmother is modest about many of her successes but her latest one has brought a glow of pride to her attractive face.
Four decades after cleaning other people’s kitchens Sindiwe is being hailed as one of the finest authors in South Africa after writing a book so honest and direct it’s been compared to Sex and the City.
But the novel, Beauty’s Gift, is about much more than a group of women who talk about relationships and one-night stands. The message is far more serious: it’s about HIV/Aids.
In the Cape Town bookstore where her book was recently launched she tells us more about it.
Sindiwe has lost six family members to Aids. As one of the characters in her book puts it, “The black man’s penis is a deadly weapon.”
Born to bright but under-educated parents she spent her early life in Cape Town “in a tin shack location with no streets and the bush for a toilet”.
She was a 19-year-old primary schoolteacher when she became pregnant and had to stop teaching. Four years, three children and one absent husband later she found herself making a living as a domestic worker before leaving to sell sheep’s heads on township pavements.
Her life took a few more turns before, at 38, she received a scholarship to study business and social science at Columbia University in New York. After earning her master’s degree there she joined the United Nations doing anti-apartheid radio programmes.
“I doubt I’d ever have written it if I hadn’t gone to New York. It’s an enabling environment.”
But she’s here to stay now. “I wanted to be part of the transformation.”
She has just finished writing the film script of Beauty’s Gift and is looking for someone to make the movie. And with such a dynamo behind the project it probably won’t take long.
