Bessie Head: 1937-1986

Bessie Head, one of South Africa’s most prominent authors, was born in South Africa but spent most of her life in exile in Botswana. The child of an illegal 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. Drawing inspiration from these turbulent beginnings, her work deals with issues of race, discrimination, refugees, African history, poverty, and interpersonal relationships. A hint of autobiography is present in much of her writing, which often focuses on the struggles and hardships of life in postcolonial Africa.

After training as a teacher and working as a journalist, personal problems led her to take up a teaching post in Botswana, where she remained in refugee status for fifteen years before gaining citizenship. All three of her major novels, When Rain Clouds Gather (1969), Maru (1971), and A Question of Power (1973), were written in Botswana during this period. Her other works include the short story collection The Collector of Treasures (1977); a non-fiction book on the history and mythology of her adopted settlement called Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind (1981); and a further collection of early short stories called The Cardinals (1993), some of which were written whilst Bessie was still in South Africa. A collection of her autobiographical writings was published as A Woman Alone (1990), and a fully revised edition appearing in 2007. All of these titles are currently available in Heinemann’s African Writers Series.

Bessie famously wrote that she viewed her activity as a writer as “a kind of participation in the thought of the whole world”, and her definitive biography, Bessie Head: Thunder Behind Her Ears (written by Gillian Stead Eilersen) was published in 1995. Bessie died in 1986 at the age of just forty-nine. For more information on her life and work, please log onto www.bessiehead.org .

Recent books:

A Woman Alone (Heinemann: 2007)