Inside the creaking baobab in Sindiwe Magona’s When the Village Sleeps (2021)

Abstract

Bookended by the life of Busisiwe Mhkonto, When the Village Sleeps can be read as an “unfinished symphony”. The musicological analogy is bolstered by the harmonisation of the polyphonic voice register, coupled with the “unachieved” or the “yet to be achieved” implied in Sindiwe Magona’s wake-up call towards education for life. This article is predicated on Milan Kundera’s three categories of the art of the novel—the art of radical divestment, the art of novelistic counterpoint, and the art of the specifically novelistic essay—which, in turn, determine the progression of my argument. This is no dystopian novel— Magona looks beyond the precarity that she depicts in this metatext for uplifting instances that epitomise the central tropes of ubuntu and self-sufficiency. Ultimately, this is a story about youth advocacy that culminates in a programme to teach self-help through a broad-based notion of education for living in South Africa. Magona’s proposed reparation seeks to define a new cultural nationhood through an awakened imaginary.