by Claire Chambers
Continuing my previous 3QD post about Pamela Sneed’s Funeral Diva, and an earlier piece contextualizing literary representations of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, today I want to discuss the work of Sindiwe Magona. She is one of South Africa’s most renowned Black women writers, and her autobiography To My Children’s Children (1990) is required reading about apartheid in the 1950s and 1960s. Magona went on to publish Beauty’s Gift in 2008, a novel dealing with the devastation of AIDS in South Africa during the early twenty-first century. The protagonist is called Beauty and she lives up to that name, being beautiful inside and out. But she exists off-stage, so to speak, since the novel narrates in a non-linear manner some events from August to December 2002.
These are recounted from the perspectives of Beauty’s four closest friends, Amanda, Edith, Cordelia, and Doris, all women in their early to mid-thirties. The novel opens on Beauty’s funeral, described in free indirect discourse through her oldest friend Amanda’s focalization. We find out quickly that Amanda hates Beauty’s surviving husband, Hamilton, as ‘a silent message of loathing’ is exchanged by the two. The reason for this hatred, readers discover, is that the suave ‘man of substance’ Hamilton had conducted multiple love affairs. As a consequence he had infected his wife with HIV, which in her case leads to rapid physical deterioration and death from AIDS soon afterwards. In her ‘Introduction’ to the ten-year anniversary edition of the novel, Magona writes of ‘the raging fire in the country of my birth – a veritable catastrophe that was laying waste to all life – especially young life. Absolute devastation’. She also explores the initial assumption that this was a plague affecting gay men, and her horror on realizing that hardly a home in South Africa would be unaffected by the disease. Accordingly, even as they mourn her, Beauty’s friends start looking at their own marriages, discovering husbands’ infidelities, and worrying about tests and HIV status.
Early on, Magona presents readers of Beauty’s Gift with a startling image: the beautiful and ‘beloved’ Beauty laid to rest in an opulent casket, which is then fixed in the earth with cement to prevent theft. Her friends’ memories of Beauty’s charisma and kindness are concretized by the weight of her death from AIDS. From the outset, funerals emerge not merely as a plot point but a structuring device for understanding the social and political implications of the AIDS crisis in South Africa. After opening her novel with Beauty’s funeral, Magona continues with vignettes about various stages of illness, death, and grief. These include a wake, the mourning period, Beauty’s posthumous ceremony of drinking water and the spade-washing rite, followed by other people’s funerals. Through this framework, Magona creates a narrative of gendered suffering and resilience. She uses ritual, mourning, and friendship to critique the systemic neglect and betrayal of South African women. The novel tells the story of the Five Firm Friends or ‘FFF’, each grappling with the impact of Beauty’s death in different ways. Beauty remains an aporia for much of the text, although we encounter her in occasional analepses, such as when she faces her friends for the first time after the illness has ravaged her looks. Now deceased, the figure haunts the lives of her family, friends, and the community. Beauty’s funeral is a weeping sore that opens up even deeper wounds. In the flashbacks detailing Beauty’s physical deterioration due to AIDS, Magona deploys grotesque imagery whereby her body is both a symbol of her personal suffering and a broader metaphor for the AIDS epidemic. Beauty’s ‘gaunt wasteland of [a] face’, contrasted with her once lustrous hair, evokes the frightening transformation that the disease visits upon its victims, stripping them of health, vibrancy, and, ultimately, dignity. Magona thus uses Beauty’s body to speak to a larger issue: the crisis of care and responsibility toward those impacted by AIDS in a society fraught with racial and gender inequities.
So many funerals are being held, including consecutive ones for members of the same family, that the graveyards are overwhelmed, struggling to accommodate any more burials. Undertaker businesses are South Africa’s only growth industry in a stagnant economy. Yet, despite the pandemic’s extensive reach, HIV still carries the freight of stigma. Incest and homosexuality are joked about by one group of crude youngsters, but Cordelia challenges them sarcastically: ‘Because heterosexual people don’t die of Aids?’. Magona puts colourful language in characters’ mouths. Cordelia speaks of ‘Africans dying like flies’ from the HIV virus, and she goes on to speculate that ‘they were all walking corpses’. The disease’s racialized impact is brought out when the FFF talk about how even though ‘Aids is not a black disease’, it has killed more Black people in South Africa than the other ethnicities put together. This is ‘a genocide of the poor’ that had it occurred during apartheid South Africa would have been roundly ‘condemned’. The best guardrails against HIV are shown to be tests and condoms. If this embarrasses many of the novel’s menfolk, then the elder Mrs Mazwi is not ashamed to pronounce: ‘There is no stigma to illness’. Relatedly, not only does Beauty have a gift for the FFF, about which I shall have more to say later on, but she also has a request. She asks Amanda to tackle taboos head on by ‘tell[ing] the others’ it was AIDS that caused her death. Beauty’s Gift shows that combatting HIV requires confronting prejudice and prioritizing widespread education and prevention.
At Beauty’s funeral, Amanda seethes with anger directed towards Hamilton. Despite his reputable appearance, his cheating led to his wife’s infection. Hamilton’s personal betrayal is thus metonymic for a larger betrayal of South African women, who often bear the brunt of their husbands’ indiscretions without any awareness or protection. Magona presents men as the primary transgressors, while women are depicted as steadfast but ultimately hurt. This at times leans into judgment, perhaps reflecting gender roles in South Africa since, as the late British feminist Tamsin Wilton observed, there is a global ‘invisibility of the heterosexual male “norm” in AIDS discourse [… whereby] it is precisely men’s behaviour which puts women at risk’. As the narrative unfolds, we learn that Beauty, like most if not all of her friends, had little agency in her relationship. Hamilton’s decisions impacted her life and, ultimately, caused her death. The widower’s conspicuously grand display at the funeral seems to showcase what Magona – in one of many phrases that remain untranslated from the isiZulu – calls ‘umngcwabo womhlaba’, or a burial of the world. Yet this bears tragic irony because, rather than last rites replete with worldly love, the phrasing actually points to the world’s complicity in and burial of Beauty’s suffering. This hollow embrace bespeaks the communal silence and failure that enabled Hamilton’s behaviour. Magona emphasizes that AIDS is not merely a personal crisis but a structural one, exacerbated by social norms that prioritize so-called tradition and male power while silencing female suffering. Thus, Beauty’s funeral operates as a microcosm of the institutional failures that have allowed the epidemic to decimate communities with limited intervention, particularly in marginalized populations.
The structuring device of funerals in Beauty’s Gift allows Magona to bind together multiple threads concerning personal grief, systemic inequality, and the need for collective responsibility. As Amanda and her group mourn a friend and investigate their own relationships, their shared anxiety highlights the relational vulnerability of women. In South African society, as Cordelia bitterly notes, ‘men who refuse to use condoms kill women’. This sentiment reflects the dangerous intersection of patriarchy and AIDS, where male privilege becomes a ‘deadly weapon’ that endangers the lives of women. The metaphor of men as ‘armed enem[ies]’ stresses the power dynamics at play, positioning women as casualties of a system that values male desire over female autonomy.
Magona’s narrative structure draws attention to the routine, almost numbing prevalence of funerals in South Africa during the AIDS crisis. The idea that not only are parents burying their children but also the same family has to arrange consecutive rites for its members highlights the frequency of the funerals and the emotional toll they take on communities. Funerals punctuate the lives of those left behind, compelling them to address not only personal loss but the socio-political realities of their nation. ‘Last rites were a tricky affair’, frets one character, but as a device the funeral works seamlessly. It allows for the inclusion of rousing rhetoric from eulogies and panegyrics without undue authorial didacticism. Mrs Mazwi, a retired teacher and something of a mouthpiece for Magona’s own views, warns from the graveside that ‘there will not be one family left untouched’, foreshadowing the devastation that AIDS would bring across South Africa. Her words underline the collective impact of the disease and the sense of powerlessness that communities feel facing a pandemic largely ignored by institutions. This neglect was especially fostered during Thabo Mbeke’s government which, being in power from 1999 to 2008, encompasses both the novel’s events and its date of publication. Mrs Mazwi asks a rhetorical question of the mourners assembled to pay their last respects to the teacher and rugby player Lungile Sonti: ‘Where is the government, with our children dying?’ (86). Through Mrs Mazwi’s oration, Magona highlights the systemic neglect felt in the deprived township of Gugulethu near Cape Town during the crisis.
In the pages of Beauty’s Gift, funerals are more than just a ritual of mourning – they become a site of political and social commentary. The image of the shovel, which ‘eats the ground with such ferocious frequency’, encapsulates the relentless pace of death in South Africa during the AIDS crisis. Small wonder that the spade-washing ceremony is popularly held after a burial as a sign of the removal of death’s lingering presence. The novel’s structure, as it moves non-sequentially through phases of illness, death, funeral, and mourning, mirrors the recurrent and cyclical nature of grief. Magona’s narrative suggests that these funerals, while necessary for commemorating deaths, are also a call to action, a demand for systemic reform in a society that has failed its most vulnerable members.
Through Beauty’s death, Magona brings attention to the ways in which AIDS has destabilized social structures in South Africa. Magona uses Foucauldian language – appropriately given that Michel Foucault had earlier died of AIDS – in describing an inversion of ‘the order of things’. Parents are forced to bury their children in a crisis that upends normative family roles and signifies a collapse of stability because of the pandemic. Indeed, AIDS is depicted as ‘the disease of the children’ and young people are addressed directly by Mrs Mazwi when she says: ‘My children, […] this is your funeral. This is your disease’. Magona drives home the profound generational disruption caused by HIV, illustrating the virus’s impact on youth and families. The fleeting presence of Njongonkulu Ndungane (1941–) in the text reinforces this point, as the Archbishop condemns a culture of ‘inordinately costly ceremonies’. Financial resources are poured into elaborate mourning rituals rather than going to preventive or supportive measures for those living with HIV/AIDS. To provide some mitigation against the expenses of all these ceremonies, monthly payments to a burial society act as an insurance. Yet Ndungane’s critique highlights a tension between ancestral customs and the essential nature of practical interventions, suggesting that the cultural emphasis on funerals may inadvertently hinder collective efforts to address the virus at its root.
The friends’ mourning process also opens up ideas around beauty and mortality, juxtaposing the idealized image of Beauty with her physical deterioration due to AIDS. This tension is evident in Amanda’s reflections on Beauty’s body, which Magona describes in unflinching detail. Her friends think that Hamilton’s abuse has caused her ‘raw-steak lips’ and ‘shrunken gums’, and in a way they are correct. The contrast between Beauty’s appearance in life and her skeletal form in death speak viscerally to the disease’s impact, prompting readers to reckon with the physical and emotional devastation wrought by AIDS. The ‘grotesque face that appears in place of Beauty’s’ and her ‘enormous head on a tiny skeleton’ call to mind the figure of Kurtz. Describing this character’s death in Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad writes that ‘the thin arm extended commandingly, the lower jaw moving, the eyes of that apparition shining darkly far in its bony head that nodded with grotesque jerks’. Kurtz’s physical decay symbolizes moral corruption, whereas Beauty’s diminishment reveals the social and ethical decay in the way the South African authorities responded to AIDS.
Magona intersperses isiXhosa and isiZulu phrases throughout the novel, infusing Beauty’s Gift with cultural specificity while also underscoring the linguistic divisions that further isolate marginalized voices. The isiXhosa phrase ‘Ziyaphel’ iititshala’, which translates to ‘The teachers are disappearing!’, stands as a metaphor for the generational loss inflicted by HIV, as the virus decimates communities, leaving gaps that cannot be easily filled. The absence of translation for many phrases spotlights the particularity of the AIDS crisis in this part of South Africa, resisting the homogenizing tendencies and ‘single story’ of Western narratives about the epidemic. By refusing to translate many of the isiXhosa and isiZulu words that pepper the narrative, in addition to refusing italicization of non-English words, Magona pushes non-isiXhosa-speaking readers to examine their own outsider status.
Women’s solidarity emerges as a counterforce to the forces of betrayal and death that permeate the novel. Amanda and Beauty call each other ‘sithandwa’, meaning ‘You are loved’. The use of the term of endearment reflects an emotional bond that transcends romantic relationships. Beauty and Amanda were friends before meeting the others, and their closeness is almost that of lovers, replete with tiffs as well as affection. Magona positions female friendship as a form of ‘chosen family’ that is especially important in the time of AIDS. The FFF construct a support network that stands in stark contrast to the betrayal and silence of the men in their lives. For instance, after the funeral the four surviving women decide to spend the rest of the day ‘honouring her and consoling one another as best as they knew how. No men (they could take care of themselves)’. The novel thus invites readers to interpret the relationship between its female characters as a form of sisterhood, a concept that carries complex and debated meanings within feminist thought. Unlike second-wave representations that sometimes romanticize women’s unity based on shared experiences of oppression, intersectional feminists like bell hooks and Nira Yuval-Davis have critiqued the simplistic notion of a universal sisterhood. In her essay on female solidarity, hooks stresses that unity should stem from political commitment rather than assumed similarities. Yuval-Davis adumbrates a ‘feminist transversal politics’ grounded in shared emancipatory goals rather than victimhood. This perspective meshes with Beauty’s Gift’s portrayal of solidarity, as four women are brought together via a shared ideal of liberation given to them by their fifth, absent friend Beauty. Magona recognizes that responses to crises, such as disease, act as a catalyst for this solidarity. Moreover, the novel underscores that the fragile sisterhood is frequently threatened, particularly by male influence, with sexual relationships often depicted as a source of disruption. The multicultural fabric needed for a lasting solidarity is implied in the phrase ‘ukusezwa amanzi’ for a water drinking ritual that emphasizes the interconnectedness of all living beings and the collective strength of the community. This ceremony, in which participants drink water from a shared vessel, symbolizes both purification and resilience, functioning as a reminder that the fight against AIDS is not an individual struggle but a communal one.
The novel’s concluding scenes, where the FFF leave their inadequate male partners behind to go on a group holiday, indicate Beauty’s lasting impact. Her ‘gift’ to her friends is ‘Ukhule’, a word expressing hope her friends will ‘grow old’. This wish, simple yet profound, encapsulates a desire for a future in which women are free from the fears of public humiliation, coercive control, sexual violence, and disease. When they formulate their rule ‘No test, no sex’, Cordelia’s husband beats her badly and then abandons her. Doris’s fiancé is so relieved by a negative HIV result for a test he undergoes reluctantly that it becomes clear he has been unfaithful. Amanda’s husband has been discovered to have had secret children with two different women, and after Amanda leaves him he suffers a fatal road accident while drunk. In the novel’s most disturbing scene described in Chapter 30, Edith’s husband rapes her. By inspiring the four to remain steadfast despite these stark circumstances, Beauty’s legacy is not merely one of loss but of resilience. This is a reminder that the fight against AIDS requires not only medical intervention but a transformation of social structures that perpetuate gendered violence and inequality.
Magona spins out the symbolism of funerals so as to interrogate the intersections of gender, systemic inequality, and the AIDS crisis. The shared commitment of the FFF also signals a crucial shift away from the traditional passivity often expected of women within patriarchal structures. Rather than accepting their roles as silent victims or resigned mourners, Amanda, Edith, Cordelia, and Doris challenge these archetypes. Keeping Beauty’s tragedy in mind, they reject the cultural expectations that would bind them to submissive, vulnerable positions within their marriages. Instead, they seek out active agency, demanding autonomy over their bodies and choices. Magona illustrates this defiance through the repeated word, which ends the novel and articulates a fierce vow to live as Beauty would have wanted: ‘“Ukhule!” [Amanda] said to each in turn, “Ukhule”’. This pronouncement that ‘you are growing’ or ‘you have grown’ stages a form of feminist revolt. It shows that within the loss of one life, others may find the courage to forge new paths for themselves. Women’s bonds of kinship and friendship are vital resources of survival, resistance, and wellbeing within oppressive systems. The vacation which the women initiate in Beauty’s memory features as narrative closure and gestures to a future of hope and healing. Magona suggests that while the funeral marks an ending, it also denotes a beginning. Opening with a death and ending with a female-only road trip, Beauty’s Gift reframes the act of mourning, showing it not as a passive acceptance of fate but as an active, communal stance against systemic injustice.
In sum, Magona’s Beauty’s Gift uses funerals as a complex symbol through which the intersections of gender, systemic inequality, and the AIDS epidemic are explored. Beauty’s death, alongside the funerals that ripple through the community, functions as a searing indictment of the patriarchal and governmental failures that exacerbate the AIDS crisis in South Africa. But within this condemnation lies a message of sisterhood. Magona reminds readers that even as communities are fractured by loss, they are also bound together by shared grief, collective strength, and the relentless pursuit of justice and dignity. Beauty’s memory endures, not just as a symbol of suffering, but as a ‘gift’ of awareness and empowerment for those left behind. Through their mourning, her friends find a path forward, emboldened to seek a life of safety, autonomy, and solidarity. In a world marred by funerals and loss, Magona’s women emerge as bearers of a new kind of strength. It is one that honours the dead by fighting fiercely for the living.