Bessie Head
South Africa / Botswana
Fevered and visionary, interior collapse rendered in dense, unbroken passages: the prose itself seeming to lose and regain its footing.
Head was born in a South African psychiatric hospital to a white mother committed by her family for an affair with a Black man; classified 'Coloured' under apartheid, she was raised in foster care and a mission orphanage before working as a teacher and journalist. Political persecution drove her into exile in Botswana in 1964, where she lived for years as a stateless refugee in the village of Serowe, farming and writing without formal citizenship.
A Question of Power, published in 1973 and her most autobiographical novel, follows a mixed-race exile's descent into a visionary mental breakdown in that same rural setting, drawing on breakdowns Head herself suffered. She wrote two further major novels and a village history of Serowe before her death from hepatitis in 1986, only belatedly recognized as one of southern Africa's essential postcolonial voices.
Their books in the atlas
- 1968
When Rain Clouds GatherLvl 4colonial & postcolonial - 1973
A Question of PowerLvl 8psychological novel
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