Bessie Head

Who is Bessie Head?

Bessie Amelia Emery Head was born on 6 July 1937 in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, the daughter of a white mother and a Black father at a time when interracial relationships were criminalised under South African law; her mother gave birth to her in a mental hospital after being institutionalised by her own family. Head trained as a teacher and worked as a journalist in Cape Town and Johannesburg before, in 1964, leaving apartheid South Africa with her young son on an exit permit and settling in Serowe, Botswana, then still the Bechuanaland Protectorate. She lived there in poverty for years, working on a communal farming project, and it took fifteen years before she was granted Botswana citizenship. Drawing on her adopted village and its people, she wrote the novels that made her one of the most acclaimed African writers of the twentieth century, including When Rain Clouds Gather (1968), Maru (1971), and the autobiographical A Question of Power (1973), alongside the short-story collection The Collector of Treasures (1977), which portrays rural Botswana life with unflinching honesty. She died in Serowe in 1986. Though born in South Africa, Bessie Head is embraced across Botswana as one of the country's foremost literary voices.

Sources: Bessie Head, Wikipedia (cross-checked with Britannica) · Bessie Head (1937-1986), BlackPast.org · "Bessie Head: Botswana and South Africa's Shared Literary Great", Literary Ladies Guide