Novelist, born in Pietermaritzburg, E South Africa. She published all her major work while living in Botswana from the mid-1960s until her death. Each of her first three novels - When Rain Clouds Gather (1968), Maru (1971), and A Question of Power (1974) - set lonely protagonists in a context of political and sexual oppression. Later works, such as The Collector of Treasures (1977) and Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind (1981), give literary form to Setswana folk tales and oral tradition.
Bessie Emery Head (1937-1986) is usually considered Botswana's most important writer.
Early life
As a baby, Bessie Head was fostered or adopted (sources differ) until she was 13 by a mixed race ("coloured") South African family and then sent to an orphanage, although she had contact with her mother's family, who paid for her education.
Professional Life
She became a teacher, then a journalist for Drum in the 1950s and '60s.
Move to Botswana
She moved to Botswana (then still the Bechuanaland Protectorate) in 1964 as a refugee, having been peripherally involved with Pan-African politics.
Bessie Head settled in Serowe, the largest of Botswana's "villages" (i.e.
Writing
Almost all of Head's important work was written in Serowe, in particular, the three Serowe novels When Rain Clouds Gather, Maru, and A Question of Power. Her last novel was a historical novel about nineteenth-century Botswana, A Bewitched Crossroad. Religious ideas figure prominently, specially in A Question of Power;
The novel The Cardinals, which was published posthumously, had been written before Head left South Africa.
Bessie Head remained in many ways an outsider in her adopted country, and had something of a love/hate relationship with it. A Question of Power is partly based on these experiences.
Her books (novels, stories, autobiography, essays and letters) include the partly autobiographical A Question of Power (1973), When Rain Clouds Gather (1968), The Collector of Treasures and Other Botswana Village Tales (1977), Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind (1981) and A Bewitched Crossroad: An African Saga (1984), Tales of Tenderness and Power (1989), A Woman Alone: Autobiographical Writings (1990), A Gesture of Belonging: Letters from Bessie Head, 1965-1979 (1991) and The Cardinals (1993).
Death
Her early death in 1986 (aged 49) from hepatitis came, tragically, just at the point where she was starting to achieve recognition and was no longer so desperately poor.
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