A fictional story based on real events. A white girl was killed by a group of black youth. That white girl wasn’t a soldier or a settler. She came to help black people before the first democratic elections they were going to witness. Why was she murdered? Why did these black youth kill her? Questions we can’t answer before we read history.

Mother to Mother is a letter from the mother of a murderer to the mother of a victim. A letter through which the mother recounts the history way back before the murder was carried out. Whenever there’s colonization, racism and apartheid, we always have to examine the circumstances that led to the crime of the oppressed within the historical context. When we tell a story, we start from the early beginning. We can’t recount it somewhere in between and then, wonder why that character did this or that.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warned us of the single story. How dangerous the single story is. In her own words, she said:

Show a people as one thing, as only one thing over and over again and that’s what they become.

She also emphasized the relation between the single story and power. How single stories are told, who tells them, when they are told, how many stories are told are based on power. To dispossess people, make up their stories in your own words and start somewhere in the middle, never in a chronological order.

Single stories create stereotypes which are dangerous because they are untrue but also because they are incomplete. They robbed people of dignity. Single stories divide us, instead of uniting us.

The mother of the black boy wrapped it all when she said:

“My son was only an agent, executing the longsimmering dark desires of his race. Burning hatred for the oppressor possessed his being. It saw through his eyes; walked with his feet and wielded the knife that tore mercilessly into her flesh. The resentment of three hundred years plugged his ears; deaf to her pitiful entreaties.”

Before criminalizing the murder of this innocent girl, we have to step back and look at the several hundred years before it. The many years of racism, injustice, atrocities that Black people endured in the apartheid South Africa.

Imagine, how would you feel and react if you were a black person during the apartheid?

This applies on many other contexts. Some people look at Gaza genocide and blame it on that happened on the 7th of October. Almost none of those blamers examine the long history of oppression and colonization in Palestine that drove to the 7th.

Imagine, how would you feel and react if you were an oppressed Palestinian in the occupied Palestine?