Why Bessie Head wrote

Legendary: Bessie Head the journalist interviews a fortune teller. Photograph from the 1960s by Drum Photographer
Legendary: Bessie Head the journalist interviews a fortune teller. Photograph from the 1960s by Drum Photographer

Bessie Head would have turned 84 on Tuesday. Her novels play out in eastern Botswana, where she settled down to write. But why did she write and why is her journalism unjustly neglected? DARRYL ACCONE* writes

Dimitri Tsafendas and Bessie Head shared the weight of being of mixed-race parentage in a country governed by a clique obsessed with race, racial categories and perverse fantasies of racial purity. Tsafendas worked through the noxious effects of racism by being first a left-wing thinker and working-class hero, and then striking at the head of the apartheid state, killing its leader Hendrik Verwoerd in the very place that had enacted so many racist evils, the South African Parliament. Head was less lucky, battling poverty, political betrayal, depression, attempted suicide, a failed marriage and unprepossessing child, and, finally, hepatitis brought on by prolonged heavy drinking.

In her beginnings lay so many of Head’s later travails and traumas. Born on July 6, 1937 in the then Fort Napier Mental Institution in Pietermaritzburg to a white mother and a black father, she was given her Scottish mother’s name, Bessie Amelia Emery, but taken away at birth and brought up in a foster home until she turned 13.

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We commend the GCC inspectors for their vigilance in uncovering serious hygiene violations at establishments like Pick 'n Pay (South Ring Mall), Bravo Restaurant (Main Mall), Chicken Twist (Bonnington), Spar (Main Mall Bakery and Butchery), Choppies Butchery, Pie Time, and Fours Bakery. Their decisive action which includes temporary closures, confiscation of unsafe food, and laying charges sends a powerful, necessary message: food safety is...

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