Mother to Mother

by

Sindiwe Magona

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Mandisa’s hometown, a town located several miles inland from Cape Town.

Blouvlei Quotes in Mother to Mother

The Mother to Mother quotes below are all either spoken by Blouvlei or refer to Blouvlei. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
The Legacy of Colonialism and Apartheid Theme Icon
).
Chapter 3 Quotes

Mama did not want to hear any moaning about my not having friends at school.

“Count your blessings,” she said. “Do you know how many children would just love to change places with you?”

Change places with me? Change places with me? I’d have done anything to change places with them.

Mama’s lack of sympathy only added to my misery. I hated school and envied those children she pitied. What had they done to be that lucky? To me, the prospect of loafing the rest of the year away was quite appealing. What I didn’t know then, of course, was that some of those children would never go back to school again. Others who, like Khaya and me, were lucky enough to gain admission to a school, soon found the newness too much and played truant. From this group too, there were those who would gradually drift away from school ... and eventually leave for good.

To this day, there are not enough schools or teachers in Guguletu to accommodate all the children. You heard me talk about Operation Barcelona, just now. There never has been enough of anything in our schools. Therefore, many of the children, even today, do not go to school. There are not enough mothers during the day to force the children to go to school and stay there for the whole day. The mothers are at work. Or they are drunk. Defeated by life. Dead. We die young, these days. In the times of our grandmothers and their grandmothers before them, African people lived to see their great-great-grandchildren. Today, one is lucky to see a grandchild. Unless, of course, it is a grandchild whose arrival is an abomination — the children our children are getting before we even suspect they have come of child-bearing age.

Related Characters: Mandisa (speaker), Mama (speaker), Khaya
Page Number: 31
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

The sea of tin shacks lying lazily in the flats, surrounded by gentle white hills, sandy hills dotted with scrub, gave us (all of us, parents and children alike) such a fantastic sense of security we could not conceive of its ever ceasing to exist. Thus, convinced of the inviolability offered by our tremendous numbers, the size of our settlement, the belief that our dwelling places, our homes, and our burial places were sacred, we laughed at the absurdity of the rumour.

“The afterbirths of our children are deep in this ground. So are the foreskins of our boys and the bleached bones of our long dead,” Grandfather Mxube, the location elder, told Mama one day, when they were discussing, once again, this very same question of forced removals. Blouvlei was going nowhere, he said. “Going nowhere,” he reiterated, right fist beating hard against palm of the other hand.

Related Characters: Mandisa (speaker), Mama
Page Number: 54
Explanation and Analysis:
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Mother to Mother PDF

Blouvlei Term Timeline in Mother to Mother

The timeline below shows where the term Blouvlei appears in Mother to Mother. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 3: 5.15 p.m. – Wednesday 25 August 1993
The Legacy of Colonialism and Apartheid Theme Icon
...remembers being dumped in Guguletu with her family as a child. She was raised in Blouvlei, but then, like tens of thousands of others, she was relocated from her former home... (full context)
The Legacy of Colonialism and Apartheid Theme Icon
Family, Tradition, and Obligation Theme Icon
School was also an issue in Guguletu. Blouvlei had one school and Guguletu had a dozen, but children and parents who assumed they... (full context)
The Legacy of Colonialism and Apartheid Theme Icon
Family, Tradition, and Obligation Theme Icon
Mandisa still misses Blouvlei, which, although made up of shacks, was “no pretense,” unlike Guguletu, which pretends to be... (full context)
Chapter 5
The Legacy of Colonialism and Apartheid Theme Icon
Family, Tradition, and Obligation Theme Icon
Mandisa began her life in Blouvlei. She recounts her memories the Friday she first heard rumors of relocation: young Mandisa comes... (full context)
The Legacy of Colonialism and Apartheid Theme Icon
Family, Tradition, and Obligation Theme Icon
Mandisa wonders how the government could even move the residents of Blouvlei. There are millions of people in the township, which has served as a home to... (full context)
The Legacy of Colonialism and Apartheid Theme Icon
...some kind of weapon. Instead, they are flyers full of typos, which translated announce, “ALL BLOUVLEI WILL BE RELOCATED […] NEXT MONTH.” (full context)
Chapter 7
Family, Tradition, and Obligation Theme Icon
...smokes cigarettes. Stella shares gossip with Mandisa, telling her that a girl they knew from Blouvlei is pregnant, and another has been married off to an old man. Mandisa decides to... (full context)