Bessie Head - a short biography and bibliography of this KwaZulu-Natal author.
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Bessie Head - courtesy thuto.org
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Bessie Head (1937-1986), one of Africa's most prominent
writers, was born in Pietermaritzburg's Fort Napier Mental
Institution. The child of an "illicit"
union between a Scottish woman and a black man, Head was
taken from her mother
at birth and raised in a foster home until the age of
thirteen. Head then
attended missionary school and eventually became a
teacher. Abandoning teaching
after only a few years, Head began writing for the
Golden City Post. In 1964,
personal problems led her to take up a teaching post in
Botswana, where Head
remained in "refugee" status for fifteen years
before gaining citizenship. All
three of her major novels - When Rain Clouds
Gather, Maru, and A Question of
Power - along with other works were written in
Botswana during this period.
Bessie Head died in Botswana in 1986 at the young age of
forty-nine.
Though Bessie Head's life might be seen as sombre and
traumatic, her works
present love and light alongside the pictures of hardship
and isolation that she
paints. Head uses intense imagery and vividly describes
the beauty found in both
human and environmental nature. She praises good as she
condemns evil, and
expresses her hope for peace and change with her criticism
of the apartheid. Head wrote that she viewed her activity
as a writer as "a kind
of participation in the thought of the whole world'.
Selected WorkFrom Maru, 1971
When people of Dilepe village heard about the marriage of
Maru, they began to
talk about him as if he had died. A Dilepe diseased
prostitute explained their
attitude: 'Fancy,' she said. 'He has married a Masarwa.
They have no standards.'
By standards, she meant that Maru would have been better
off had he married her.
She knew how to serve rich clients their tea, on a snowy-
white table cloth, and
she knew how to dress in the height of fashion. A lot of
people were like her.
They knew nothing about the standards of the soul, and
since Maru only lived by
those standards they had never been able to make a place
for him in their
society. They thought he was dead and would trouble them
no more. How were they
to know that many people shared Maru's overall ideals,
that this was not the end
of him, but a beginning?
When people of the Masarwa tribe heard about Maru's
marriage to one of their
own, a door silently opened on the small, dark airless
room in which their souls
had been shut for a long time. The wind of freedom, which
was blowing throughout
the world for all people, turned and flowed into the room.
As they breathed in
the fresh, clear air their humanity awakened. They
examined their condition.
There was the fetid air, the excreta and the horror of
being an oddity of the
human race, with half the head of a man and half the body
of a donkey. They
laughed in an embarrassed way, scratching their heads. How
had they fallen into
this condition when, indeed, they were as human as
everyone else? They started
to run out into the sunlight, then they turned and looked
at the dark, small
room. They said: 'We are not going back there.'
People like the Batswana, who did not know that the wind
of freedom had also
reached people of the Masarwa tribe, were in for an
unpleasant surprise because
it would be no longer possible to treat Masarwa people in
an inhuman way without
getting killed yourself. Bibliography1968. When rain clouds gather.
1971. Maru.
1974. A question of power.
1977. The collector of treasures and other Botswana
village tales.
1981. Serowe, village of the rainwind.
1984. A Bewitched Crossroad : an African saga.
1989. Tales of Tenderness and Power.
1990. A Woman Alone : autobiographical writings.
ed. Craig MacKenzie.
1993. The Cardinals: with meditations and
stories.
1991.
A gesture of belonging : letters from Bessie Head, 1965-
1979. (ed)
Randolph Vigne.
For more information please visit
KZN Literary
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