The first in a series on African women writers whose lives and work reshaped the continent’s literature.
African literature was built in unequal conditions. Men like Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and JM Coetzee became the canon. Women wrote too, but with less support, more risk, and little recognition. They wrote from exile, from prison, from small rooms and classrooms.
Bessie Amelia Emery Head was born on July 6, 1937 inside Fort Napier Mental Institution in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. Her mother, Bessie Amelia Emery, came from a wealthy white Birch family of Scottish descent; her father was a Black worker on the family estate. Their relationship violated South Africa’s Immorality Act, which criminalised sex across the colour line.
Fort Napier was the main mental hospital for Natal and already notorious by the 1930s. Patients were admitted by court order or at the insistence of relatives; diagnoses often blurred into social judgement. To declare a woman insane for bearing a child with a Black man suited both medical practice and white family respectability. What became Bessie Head’s origin story was, for her grandmother and the doctors, an administrative solution.
Birch’s own mother pressed for her daughter’s committal; doctors at Fort Napier diagnosed schizophrenia and confined her. The baby was taken away at once and was given her mother’s name. Her mother remained institutionalised until her death in 1943, recorded as “lung abscess” and “dementia praecox”. That same daughter, later known as Bessie Amelia Head, was exiled by abandonment—and would return to South Africa only after her death, as a writer claimed by the same country that had branded her birth a disgrace.
Dorothy Driver—Head’s foremost scholar and editor of her collected work—has written that “Head’s voice rings out to us with a lamentably contemporary relevance: ‘choked’, as she tells Hayes, in a white-dominated South Africa … and then alienated in Botswana as a refugee and as a female writer of ‘mixed race’, ‘deprived all round’.” (Driver, Bessie Head’s Australian Interviews, Writers in Conversation, 2014). Driver reminds us that Head’s life is the imprint of race, gender, and exile on one of South Africa’s most prominent writers.
Head spent her first year with a white foster family until her complexion revealed her parentage. She was returned to the State and placed with George and Nellie Heathcote, a poor coloured family in Pietermaritzburg. She grew up believing Nellie was her mother.
At 12, when she was a pupil at St Monica’s Anglican Home for Coloured Girls in Durban, she was told the truth. School officials informed her that Nellie was not her mother, that her biological mother was white and confined in an asylum, and that she would not be going home for the holidays. The disclosure was blunt, without comfort or explanation. It left the defining rupture of her life: illegitimacy, abandonment, and the knowledge she had been written off at birth.
Head trained as a teacher in Durban and worked briefly in schools before turning to journalism. In 1958, she moved to Cape Town to write for the Home Post, later the Golden City Post. She joined the Pan Africanist Congress in Johannesburg, married fellow journalist Harold Head, and gave birth to a son, Howard. The marriage collapsed. In 1964, she took Howard and a suitcase of manuscripts and left South Africa on a one-way exit permit. She crossed into Bechuanaland, now known as Botswana. She would never return.
Head settled in Serowe, a large village in Botswana. She taught, grew vegetables, and wrote at night by candlelight. She lived in poverty, often close to destitution. Friends and publishers abroad sent small remittances. To the poet Patrick Cullinan, she wrote that poverty was her “second name”. In another letter, she dismissed him as “a glib, fast-talking hippie” who romanticised Africans. Cullinan later recalled her gaze as “unblinking”.
Head’s first novel, When Rain Clouds Gather (1968), told the story of Makhaya, a South African refugee who arrives in a Botswanan village during drought. Farming and survival were its themes. In it, she wrote, “The contradictions were apparent to Makhaya, and perhaps there was no greater crime as yet than all the lies Western civilisation had told in the name of Jesus Christ.” The book rejected imported consolations. What mattered was whether people could live.
Her second novel, Maru (1971), made an argument many nationalists did not want to hear: African nationalism carried its own hierarchies. In Botswana, the Masarwa, or San, were kept at the bottom—condemned to servitude, dismissed as “Bushmen”, and denied education and dignity.
Head placed a Masarwa character, Margaret Cadmore, at the centre. Margaret is an orphan who becomes a teacher in a Tswana village. Her very presence unsettles the community. In one of the novel’s most searing lines, Head writes: “How universal was the language of oppression! They had said of the Masarwa what every white man had said of every black man: ‘They can’t think for themselves. They don’t know anything.’”
The parallel was deliberate. A society that demanded freedom from colonialism was repeating the logic of its oppressors.
The love triangle between Margaret, Maru and Moleka asks whether a community can grant humanity to those it has always despised. A liberation movement that preserved caste could not claim moral authority.
The novel unsettled many because it stripped nationalism of its innocence. It insisted that African societies, like all societies, had their own exclusions and cruelties—that injustice was primarily a colonial phenomenon but also a local one.
In 1969, Head suffered a psychotic breakdown and was admitted to Lobatse Mental Hospital. Out of that experience, she wrote A Question of Power (1973). Its protagonist endures hallucinations, paranoia, and the torment of gods and demons. The prose is described as jagged, sometimes incoherent, but exact in its evocation of psychosis. “Life is such a gentle, treasured thing,” she wrote. “I learn about it every minute. I think about it so deeply.”
For some, A Question of Power was unbearable. For others, it remains one of the most honest depictions of mental illness in fiction. It was drawn directly from her time in hospital, the poverty of exile, and the instability that haunted her life.
Head’s politics were consistent: a refusal of ideology. She distrusted nationalism, colonialism, and Christianity alike. In A Question of Power, she wrote: “When someone says ‘my people’ with a specific stress on the blackness of those people, they are after kingdoms and permanently child-like slaves.” She did not flatter authority, colonial or African.
For more than two decades, she lived in Serowe, raising Howard, farming, writing, sometimes well, often ill, and always precarious. She had no passport, no citizenship, and no protection.
In April 1986, she died of hepatitis, aged 48. She had delayed treatment and collapsed in Serowe, where she was buried.
Recognition came after death. In 2003, the South African government awarded her the Order of Ikhamanga in Gold for literature. In 2007, the Bessie Head Heritage Trust was established. Her papers are held at the Khama III Memorial Museum in Serowe. Both South Africa and Botswana now claim her.
Her reputation has shifted. In Botswana, where she once struggled for acceptance, she is now celebrated as a national figure. South Africa, which barred her for life, now teaches her in schools. Literary critics in Europe and America regard her trilogy as central to African literature in English. The story of her mother’s committal, driven by her grandmother and confirmed by doctors, has become the lens through which many read her work: a writer marked from birth by the intersection of race, gender, and institutions.
“I am building a stairway to the stars,” she once wrote. “I have the authority to take the whole of mankind up there with me. That is why I write.”
Next week: Tsitsi Dangarembga of Zimbabwe, shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize for This Mournable Body.
Ira Mathur is a Guardian Media columnist and winner of the 2023 OCM Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction.
