Why Bessie Head wrote
Friday, July 09, 2021

Legendary: Bessie Head the journalist interviews a fortune teller. Photograph from the 1960s by Drum Photographer
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.
Still in Molepolole, a young woman was also reported missing, only for her decapitated body to be found inside in a shallow grave! The issue of missing persons has always been a challenge in our country, and a considerable number of missing persons are unfortunately found dead! Something troubling is the murders related to missing persons, which touch on an array of issues, including the killing of intimate partners, often referred to as passion...