Bessie Head explored the effects of racial and social oppression and used the theme of exile in her novels and short stories. She was of mixed race, and she experienced discrimination both in her birthplace of South Africa and in her adopted land of Botswana. Her novels, unlike many other works of protest literature, cast a distinctly female perspective on social injustice and the psychological costs of alienation. Head, however, refused to be called a feminist, insisting instead that she abhorred all oppression—racial, sexual, and political.
Works in Biographical and Historical Context
An African Childhood Bessie Amelia Emery was born on July 6, 1937, in a mental hospital in Pietermar-itzburg, South Africa. Her white mother, Bessie Amilia Emery, had been committed there because the father of her child was a black stable hand, whose name is now unknown. Their relationship was forbidden under South Africa’s Immorality Act of 1927, which barred sexual relations between people of different races. This was one of many such rules found under the government-sponsored system of rule later known as apartheid, which is Afrikaans for ‘‘separateness.’’ Apartheid also designated certain buildings, areas, and services for use only by certain races and led to the segregation of living areas within South Africa, with black citizens of different cultural groups separated from each other as well as separated from whites.
Bessie was handed over to ‘‘Coloured,’’ or mixed-race, foster parents, who cared for her until she was thirteen. Because her natural mother had provided money for Bessie’s education, she was placed in a mission orphanage, where she earned a high school diploma and was trained to be a teacher. She taught elementary school and then wrote for the African magazine Drum.
Marriage and Divorce In September 1961, she married Harold Head, a journalist with whom she later had a son, Howard. Around this time she also entered the world of literature, publishing a poem and several autobiographical pieces in the New African, a left-wing journal that followed most of its contributors into exile later in the decade.
The Head family lived in a slum in Cape Town because apartheid laws dictated that people of different races had to live in specific districts. While living there, Head worked on a novel, The Cardinals (published posthumously in 1993). Her marriage broke up after a few years, and she accepted a teaching job in the British Bechuanaland Protectorate (later Botswana), because, in her words, she could no longer tolerate apartheid in South Africa. Head left South Africa with her infant son in March 1964. Because of her political affiliations and friendships with left-wing activists, however, she was denied a passport and instead was given a canceled exit visa, depriving her of South African citizenship.
Life in Exile When the teaching job did not materialize, Head was declared a political refugee in the Bech-uanaland Protectorate and was required to report to the police daily. She had no income other than a small allowance provided by the World Council of Churches and without a passport she was unable to seek employment opportunities elsewhere. Head did much of her writing in a small home without electricity and sold homemade guava jam for extra money during the early years of her life in Botswana. For fifteen years, she lived as a refugee at Bamangwato Development Farm.
The Novels On the strength of The Cardinals, which was still unpublished, Head was offered a contract with New York publishing house Simon and Schuster to write a novel about Botswana, which became independent from Britain in 1966. The result was When Rain Clouds Gather (1968). Head’s first published novel is the story of Makhaya Maseko, a political refugee from South Africa who escapes to Botswana after serving a prison term for sabotage. When Rain Clouds Gather was widely acclaimed as a surprisingly mature first novel.
Head was less concerned with political or economic ideology than with moral principles, such as generosity, courtesy, and respect for the common person. For her, both white neocolonial oppression and the black nationalist backlash were impediments to African progress. With what she called in When Rain Clouds Gather the ‘‘hate-making political ideologies’’ of newly independent Africa came a new set of reactionary ideas, and she regarded people who promoted those ideologies as ‘‘pompous, bombastic fools.’’
During 1969–1970 Head suffered sporadic attacks of mental illness. Nevertheless, in 1971 she published her second novel, Maru. The theme of this novel is racism, not of whites against blacks as might be expected, but the prejudice of the Tswana people, the Botswana majority, against the Masarwas, the Bushmen or indigenous people of the Kalahari Desert. As in When Rain Clouds Gather, Head cannot unite the sphere of public life and social commitment with that of the inner life and individual fulfillment.
A Question of Power (1973) is Head’s most perplexing novel and the one that has received the most attention from critics. Openly autobiographical, the novel charts the terrifying course of her mental breakdown, her recovery, and her ultimate affirmation of the values— humility, decency, generosity, and compassion—that provide the basis for Head’s moral perspective in all three novels.
Head did come to love her adopted country and was fascinated by its history. In the early 1970s, Head became interested in the history of the Bamangwato people, one of Botswana’s main tribes. Her oral history of the tribe, Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind, was commissioned but then rejected by Penguin. The book was virtually complete by 1976 but did not appear in print for another five years. Meanwhile, a collection of stories that Head was inspired to write by her interviews with the Serowe villagers was published in 1977 as The Collector of Treasures, and Other Botswana Village Tales. This collection was considered for the New Statesman’s Jock Campbell Award. The stories vividly and richly evoke the sense of a living, bustling village struggling to cope with the intrusion of new forces into the traditional social fabric and explores the social condition of women.
Global Recognition and Later Life Head gained further renown as a writer in the 1970s. She was invited to speak at a 1976 workshop at the University of Botswana alongside other notable South African writers and was invited to international writers’ conferences, to which she traveled after being granted a special United Nations refugee travel document. Finally, in 1979, she was granted Botswanian citizenship and visited Europe for the first time when she took part in Berlin’s Horizons ’79 Africa Festival. In 1984, she traveled to Australia. Though she was hailed as one of the most important female African writers in English, Head had endured a difficult life and began to drink in her later years. Her health declined, and she contracted hepatitis. After sinking into a coma, she died in April of 1986 at the age of forty-eight.
Two volumes of Head’s writings have been published posthumously: Tales of Tenderness and Power (1989) and A Woman Alone: Autobiographical Writings (1990). Each collection begins with a substantial biographical introduction and ends with Head’s observations about the role of storytellers in South Africa.
Works in Literary Context
African Feminism Head has been acclaimed by such internationally renowned authors as Angela Carter and Alice Walker and has served as an inspiration to female writers of Africa, and, more particularly, to the suppressed women of her native South Africa. Noting in Black Scholar that Head has ‘‘probably received more acclaim than any other black African woman novelist writing in English,’’ Nancy Topping Bazin adds that Head’s works ‘‘reveal a great deal about the lives of African women and about the development of feminist perspectives.’’ According to Bazin, Head’s analysis of Africa’s ‘‘patriarchal system and attitudes’’ enabled her to make connections between the discrimination she experienced personally from racism and sexism and the root of oppression generally in the insecurity that compels one person to feel superior to another.
Works in Critical Context
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Bessie Head
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