Living, Loving and Lying Awake at Night Book

"My great hope for African women is that one day they will come into their own. That is why I chose to write" Sindiwe Magona
Sindiwe Magona started her writing career in her late 40s. In an interview she says that in the late 1980s she realised there were very few black women writers in South Africa (she counted 5 at the time) and she recalls being angry that other people were writing about what she and her people were going through. She decided that she must bear witness. You can find the interview in the Feminist Africa journal issue 13 (2009).
This is a powerful collection of short stories which illustrate the experience of black women under the apartheid regime. They are written with strength and humour, but they have a very sharp edge and depict hope and tragedy in equal measure. Some are bleak and heart-breaking. There is a great (but controlled) ferocity in the anger at the injustice being described.
The first group of stories are about a group of maids who work in domestic service in the homes of white South Africans. It reminded me a little of The Help, but much more powerful. Each of the group of maids speaks and imparts some of the particular habits of their own "Medem". This is clearly written from experience, as Magona worked in domestic service when she was young.
The rest of the stories are more diverse, but are all centred on Cape Town. Magone writes her characters really well, making it easier to highlight the systematic brutality of apartheid without having to put the political arguments into their mouths. This is well illustrated by the last story about the abolition of the pass laws (which occurred a little before the fall of the regime), when a family who are celebrating are pulled up by the mother of the family who tells a story which illustrates that the pass laws are merely a symptom; the roots of the injustice still exist. Magone is also very good at portraying children. She also tackles the issue of the abuse of women and how deep-rooted it is; a point she emphasizes in the interview I mentioned earlier.
"The abuse of women is linked to our broken-ness, our de-basedness. I don't know why we thought that just because we could vote in 1994, the de-basedness would vanish. The psychological wounding of racism and of the accompanying sexism will take a long time to heal. But we have to begin that journey."
When you read a great deal it takes something special to take your breath away and to shock (not in a negative way), but a couple of these stories ae truly harrowing. This is a great collection of stories that deserve to be read and to be better known.