Beauty's Gift: A Novel

By Sindiwe Magona

The Five Firm Friends – Edith, Cordelia, Amanda, Doris and Beauty – are five sassy career women who confront life headon. But when Beauty suddenly becomes ill and, after six short weeks, passes away, their world is thrown into confusion. On her deathbed Beauty begs Amanda to promise her one thing – that she and the rest of the FFF will not waste their lives as she has done. All because of an unfaithful husband ... ‘Ukhule,’ she begs of Amanda. May you live a long life, and may you become old.

Beauty’s Gift is a moving tale of how four women decide to change their own fate as well as the lives of those closest to them. This is Sindiwe Magona at her very best – writing about social issues, and not keeping quiet. Speak up, she says to women in Africa. Stand up, and take control of your own lives

• Language: English
• Publisher: Picador Africa
• Release date: Aug 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781770106246

Sindiwe Magona

DR SINDIWE MAGONA is an author, storyteller, motivational speaker, poet, playwright, and actor. She has received numerous literary awards as well as awards in recognition of her work around women’s issues, the plight of children, and the fight against apartheid and racism. Dr Magona recently received the Ellen Kuzwayo Award as well as her third honorary doctorate, from Nelson Mandela University. She lives and works in Cape Town.

Book preview

Beauty's Gift

‘Beauty’s Gift offers a space for identification and understanding for women which is an enormous gift in itself. It is a difficult book to read, because it reveals truths about our society and the people closest to us which are hard to accept. But exposing and confronting them is the first step to a better future for all.’

– Karina Magdalena Szczurek, Itch, The Creative Journal

‘Beauty’s Gift is a gift to all women, for it shows how a woman’s strength and gentleness can be combined to effect changes in a world that is often violent, and even more often lonely.’

– Judy Croome, Library Thing

In memory of my loving son, Sandile Soyiso Sayedwa.

In my heart, you will always live, Rwaadibles!

Beauty’s Gift

Selected titles by Sindiwe Magona

Novels and Short Stories

Chasing the Tails of My Father’s Cattle (2015)

Mother to Mother (1998)

Push-Push and Other Stories (1996)

Living, Loving and Lying Awake at Night (1991)

Memoir

Forced to Grow (1992)

To My Children’s Children (1990)

Beauty’s Gift

Including the essay

‘Why I Wrote Beauty’s Gift’

Sindiwe Magona

PICADOR AFRICA

First published in 2008 by Kwela Books

an imprint of NB Publishers

This edition published in 2018 by Picador Africa

an imprint of Pan Macmillan South Africa

Private Bag X19, Northlands

Johannesburg

2116

www.panmacmillan.co.za

ISBN 9781770106239

e-ISBN 9781770106246

© Sindiwe Magona, 2018, 2008

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

Editing by Duncan Brown

Proofreading by Katlego Tapala

Design and typesetting by Fire and Lion

Cover design by publicide

Author photo by Victor Dlamini

Introduction

Why I Wrote Beauty’s Gift

In 2003 I retired from the United Nations Organization. A few years before that the AIDS pandemic broke out with cata­strophic effects world-wide. Today, looking back, although I did not specifically acknowledge the fact, didn’t recognise it, the pandemic featured among the reasons I chose repat­riation when that retirement finally came.

Friends, colleagues, family – everybody and his wife – questioned that choice of repatriation versus applying for the green card. Did I not like living in the United States of America then?

My usual response to such questions was, ‘Of course, I do! When I joined the UN, first came here, it would take just two weeks of being in South Africa on holiday and I’d begin missing New York.’

My apartment; the readily available hot water; the unthinking ease with which I took a shower; a public trans­portation system that works, that is dependable, clean and safe; shops open late at night; Sunday shopping; newspapers delivered to my door; ditto with restaurant food – Chinese, Indian, Korean, Italian, Thai, or American; going to the cinema; theatre; a sense of security – that going on the subway at night didn’t mean taking my life in my hands; etc. etc. etc. Yes, I did enjoy the relative freedom of living in the Big Apple, the relative safety or sense thereof.

However, as retirement drew nearer and nearer, I found that each time I was on Home Leave, when I had to pack my bags and return to New York, I’d find myself thinking: Oh, God, where am I going; and why am I going there? It seems that without my knowing, without making a conscious decision, I had already made a transition, psychologically. That doesn’t mean I was not torn. After all, I’d lived in the US for more than two decades – most of not only my working life, but my adult life as well.

Consciously, several considerations went into the decision to return to my home country, South Africa. Chief among them was the fact that I missed home and my family. Also, by the time I retired, two of my three children were back in South Africa; and another not inconsiderable reason was that I recognised that my writing was rooted in South Africa and things South African. I felt I needed to reconnect, be ‘on the spot’ as it were, so as to be more in tune with what was happening in the country day-to-day and not always get it via reportage. Also, one can’t write only and always from memory. However, another especially compelling reason for returning to South Africa was the hell I had seen – the raging fire in the country of my birth – a veritable catastrophe that was laying waste to all life – especially young life. Absolute devastation. But this was a reason I acknowledged mostly unconsciously. I didn’t say to myself, I’m going home to join the fight against HIV/AIDS; but the pandemic troubled me to the core of my being.

‘The other reason I’m going home is a little sad,’ I would sometimes say to those who asked, acknowledging while at the same time knowing, telling myself, asking – little? Now, there was an understatement. The last time I was back in the country, on Home Leave, I attended ten funerals. Ten, in two weeks. All, funerals of young people – people under the age of thirty-five years. And all those funerals, in that short space of time, in but one section of Gugulethu … All of them … It would have been bad enough were there ten in all of Gugulethu. Gugulethu alone. Gugulethu, with its close to 100 000 residents. To lose so many in so short a space of time. And all of them so young. So very, very young …

‘… AIDS … HIV-positive …’ These were words whispered; whispered and never said out loud, never announced at the funerals. People were dying of all and every disease known to humanity, except AIDS. It took time to see, know, realise that the causes of death doctors wrote on death certificates were, in reality, AIDS-related diseases. People didn’t die of AIDS. They died from pneumonia, TB, etc. but, in actual fact, had become prone to these diseases because their immune systems were compromised. And that is what HIV translated to, meant.

In the early days, when AIDS was still but a rumour and we knew no one it had touched, I attended the first (for me) AIDS conference, in New York. This was at a church in mid-Manhattan. A South African nurse had organised it. Then, I knew very little about the disease. That was the time we still held the mistaken notion it was something that killed gay men. I remember I didn’t particularly want to attend the conference, which was over a weekend. But Nonceba Lubanga is not only a loyal friend but one of those you don’t say no to – you better do as she says, or else …

I was surprised to find a sizeable number of South Africans in attendance. My surprise was doubled at seeing even a sprinkling of men – less than ten, but still …

What I learned from that conference left me numb. Looking back, I now know I still had not grasped the mag­nitude of what was about to befall us. I remember the spine-chilling words: By the year 2000, there will hardly be a family, in South Africa, not touched by AIDS… hardly a family …

I do not recall hearing words such as ‘plague’ or ‘pandemic’. But I still recall the palpable, overwhelming sense of doom with which I left the conference. I do not recall ever being that scared in my entire life. No. Not the heavy, oppressive fear that, at the same time, leaves one feeling devoid of any power to avert a dreadful disaster that is fast approaching. Doom foretold, doom inescapable. A sense of everything I had known disappearing fast, my world turned upside-down, unrecognisable, deadly.

Did I do anything? Anything that could avert the disaster? I’m not saying I could have. I’m not saying that any one person could have done that. But where’s the harm in trying?

I hear you ask, ‘What does she think she could have done?’ Believe me, I ask myself that same question. But, are we saying nothing can be done? That nothing could have been done way back then, when on the whole, the plague might have still been containable? Or is that a picture of the impossible, the unattainable? Is humanity damned through its own acts of uncaring/carelessness/unmindfulness?

All I did, in my bewilderment, is picture which one of my nieces or nephews would be affected. In my mind’s eye, I’d see them all and wonder: Will it be this one? Or that one?

Can you believe how stupid I was? How ill informed? Who had told me the disease would pick only one member, per family? That the plague should be that considerate, that mindful of our folly, that courteous. But I utterly lacked the capacity to imagine the workings of a plague.

One has to remember that the word ‘plague’, certainly in my own little mind, was a word associated with a long-distant past. With the time before antibiotics and improved standards of hygiene, a time of indiscriminate overcrowding accompanied with poor or total lack of sanitation, etc., etc. Plague belonged to the Middle Ages, the Black Death, 1918. How the hell could we be talking of a plague in the late twentieth century? We were advanced, as a species. We could give people new body parts – hearts, kidneys, eyes; remodel damaged faces. Why wouldn’t we have something, some cure, to stop this disease?

But that was the state of my thinking then. Even as I staggered under the weight of the imminent assault on our lives, I still didn’t fully grasp the magnitude of that assault, the huge wave of devastation. Perhaps it was denial. Perhaps I didn’t want to understand what all these dire predictions actually meant.

Looking back, knowing what I now know, have seen, have experienced, gone through, I’m sure I do not know the answer. Still. Even now.

And all I did, the extent of my preventive measures, was to mail home some of the handouts I’d received at the conference. I sent those back home with the instruction: ‘READ THIS AND PAY HEED!’

Reports on the scourge were everywhere. All stated: ‘We are losing more people in South Africa today than would be the case were we at war.’

War and all the devastation that goes with it … better?

That said a lot about the sorry state in which we were; not only in South Africa but throughout the whole continent of Africa in its vastness. Thinking about this, the plunder AIDS was wreaking, I wondered at our being in Africa so forever prone to the tragic side of life: plagues; disasters, man-made and natural; warfare and other acts of man’s inhumanity to man.

All our countries in Africa seemed capable of doing nothing but the gross negative. Typically, after independ­ence, all of these countries had not only not advanced in the thirty or so years they’d been independent, years post that august event, uhuru, they had actually regressed. Indeed, were any country, by some stroke of unimaginable good fortune, to find itself in the position it was in that glorious year it gained its independence, that would count as a blessing. As colleagues from other African countries often confessed, when not playing the big patriot, posturing: In our case, stagnation would have been a blessing!

After one holiday in South Africa, it took me three months after my return before I could talk about my country and not weep. And talk about South Africa was everywhere. Everyone wanted a piece of Mandela. Anyone from South Africa became a relative or kinsman. You just had to say you were from South Africa; immediately, that elicited cries of jubilation; accompanied by, ‘Mandela’s country?’ from fervent admirers of the great one. If they were not destined to ever meet Mandela, they had met someone from his country, at least! But there were those who wanted to know about AIDS and the havoc they heard it was causing in South Africa.

‘I hear promiscuity has a lot to do with it,’ said Sandra, an African-American woman, who also worked at the UN. ‘Every article I’ve read about the subject seems to point to African men’s promiscuity. I guess it’s just like what we have right here at home with our men.’

‘You’re right,’ I replied. ‘It is said Africa is the only continent where more women die of AIDS than men … And that is because for each man who is infected, there are four to five women he will infect. But …’ She didn’t let me finish.

‘Then what you have to do over there is chop off their dicks, that’s all,’ she said heatedly and added, ‘If they use them to kill women, then off they must come!’

Others wanted to know whether there was any truth to reports: ‘… that men rape little girls?’

That question reminded me of an incident, in the last days of my holiday.

I was at a meeting of the young people of my street in Gugulethu; there at their invitation. They wanted me to see what they were doing, and find out if there was any way in which I could help them in their work to fight crime. The Youth Club, as they called themselves, had also invited a nurse, a younger woman I knew quite well. Of course, the major obstacles to all the plans the Youth Club had was lack of funding. Lack of funding and lack of support. They were running the club as an informal group with no office space or personnel. Nonetheless, I was impressed with what they were trying to achieve – their insightfulness and their obvious dedication to the cause.

It was during the Coffee Hour, a time to mingle and get some refreshments (provided by the hosting family), that the other invited guest speaker asked the boys to ‘please step outside for a minute’ as she had something she ‘wanted to address to the girls in private’. I listened. With growing amazement, I listened.

‘Those of you who have already seen your moon time,’ the woman continued, ‘whether you are twelve or eleven, it doesn’t matter; as long as you have started, I want you to tell your mother to bring you to the clinic, on a Wednesday.’

She asked the girls whether they knew where the clinic at which she worked was. Many did. Anyway, she gave the address of the clinic, adding, ‘Come on a Wednesday. That day, there are no sissies or mothers; only those who are bringing girls who’re coming to the clinic for the first time.’

Naturally, all this time my mind is at work, furiously. Why is she asking girls that young to go to the Women’s Clinic, I wondered? But I didn’t wonder for long. The woman explained to

Reviews for Beauty's Gift

[whitewavedarling · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Simple, powerful, and necessary: this book is as much about family and love as it is about AIDS or our changing society. Beautiful and recommended.

[judycroome_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

As I like to support local (South African)authors, I added it to my basket. The FFF used to consist of Five Friends: Edith, Cordelia, Amanda, Doris and Beauty. But then Beauty passes away suddenly. Aids has claimed another victim. On her deathbed, she extracts a promise from Amanda. Ukuhle, she begs of Amanda. May you live a long life, and may you become old. Because Beauty’s premature death was as a result of her unfaithful husband, the remaining friends all swear an oath: they won't have unprotected sex – not even with their husbands – and they will find out their own HIV status as well as that of their husbands/partners. This oath has surprising consequences. Aids and its impact on African life is clearly a dominating theme. But this book offers so much more than that. It challenges oppression that masquerades as tradition and irresponsibility that hides behind love. While dealing with a predominantly (but not exclusively) African problem, Magona points a delightfully irreverent finger at our prolific and polygamous President. In a gentle but strong - almost motherly - way she gives a masterly indictment of the predisposition of some African males to infidelity, promiscuity and reckless negligence towards the women who love them. But she is clear-headed enough to also condemn the women who, in this time of Aids, passively accept this state of affairs (excuse the pun) because of ‘tradition’. Encouragingly, there are also characters – too few of them, the FFF’s lament – like Amanda’s brother PP, who are the best of what an African man can be. There is also the sympathetic portrayal of Selby, Doris’s fiancé, a good man who struggles with the transition from traditional sexual mores to a more modern, and responsible, attitude. In an easy-to-read style, with touches of humour and deep poignancy, Magona has produced a novel that is about the evolution of the African soul towards a new kind of freedom; one in which both sexes take responsibility for their lives in an effort to curb a new and dangerous enemy: Aids. As the remaining friends face challenges to their beliefs, and their relationships are tested and sometimes found wanting, a core message shines through: use your freedom responsibly. ‘Beauty’s Gift’ is a gift to all women, for it shows how a women’s strength and gentleness can be combined to effect changes in a world that is often violent, and even more often lonely. But the FFF’s have each other and, in their unity, lies their salvation.