Bessie Head

Bessie Amelia Emery Head (6 July 1937 – 17 April 1986) was a South African writer who, though born in South Africa, is usually considered Botswana's most influential writer. She wrote novels, short fiction and autobiographical works.

Interview (September 25, 1976)
in conversations with african writers by Lee Nichols (1981)


 * I did a lot of reading on my own because I loved that particular world. You open up a book and you learn about something that's much more exciting than your everyday grind, a world of magic beyond your own. And I feel that the beginnings of writing really start whereby you know that when you open a book there's a magical world there.


 * I think that my whole life has been shaped by my South African experience and I would never really fall into the category of a writer who produces light entertainment for people. My whole force and direction comes from having something to say. What we are mainly very bothered about has been the dehumanizing of black people. And if we can resolve these situations-and I work both within the present and the future-if we can resolve our difficulties it is because we want a future which is defined for our children. So then you can't sort of say that you have ended any specific thing or that you have changed the world. You have merely offered your view of a grander world, of a world that's much grander than the one we've had already.


 * when there is a tragedy, detail and a picture of the country emerges because people discuss it so much.


 * You could really say that my writing experience began in Botswana. Everything about the society was magical to me and the reason I began writing is that I wanted to communicate that fascination I felt for the ways of life of the people of this country. It is almost impossible for a writer to evoke a similar feeling of magic and wonder about South Africa. It's too despairing.


 * In my novel, A Question of Power, I was extremely bothered to define evil. I was looking for answers all along to questions of exploitation. And I was looking for balances; that is, if we have to live with good and evil we ought to present them as they really are.

A Question of Power (1973)

 * It was in Botswana where, mentally, the normal and the abnormal blended completely in Elizabeth’s mind.”
 * Part 1, Page 15


 * Be the same as others in heart; just be a person.”
 * Part 1, Page 26


 * It is when you cry, in the blackest hour of despair, that you stumble on a source of goodness.”
 * Part 1, Page 34
 * When someone says 'my people' with a specific stress on the blackness of those people, they are after kingdoms and permanently child-like slaves. 'The people' are never going to rise above the status of 'the people'. They are going to be told what is good for them by the 'mother' and the 'father'.
 * Page 63


 * 'Life is such a gentle, treasured thing. I learn about it every minute. I think about it so deeply.'
 * p81


 * When people stumble upon magic they study it very closely, because all living people are, at heart, amateur scientists and inventors. Why must racialists make an exemption of the black man? Why must she come here and help the black man with a special approach: ha, ha, ha, you're never going to come up to our level of civilisation?
 * Page 83


 * The victim is really the most flexible, the most free person on earth. He doesn't have to think up endless laws and endless falsehoods. His jailer does that. His jailer creates the chains and the oppression. He is merely presented with it. He is presented with a thousand and one hells to live through, and he usually lives through them all.
 * Page 84


 * Who is the greater man - the man who cries, broken by anguish, or his scoffing, mocking, jeering oppressor?
 * Page 84


 * 'God isn't a magical formula for me,' ... 'God isn't a switched-on, mysterious, unknown current. I can turn to and, by doing so, feel secure in my own nobility.
 * Page 85


 * Love is so powerful, it's like unseen flowers under your feet as you walk.
 * Page 86


 * The year ended in a roar of pain.
 * p87


 * You don't realize the point at which you become evil.
 * Page 96


 * The loud, pounding rhythm of his drama drummed in her ears day and night.
 * p159

Maru (1971)

 * Before the white man became universally disliked for his mental outlook it was there.
 * p. 5


 * You just have to look different ... then seemingly anything can be said and done to you as your outer appearance reduces you to the status of a non-human being.
 * p. 5


 * The rhythm of sunrise, the rhythm of sunset, filled her life.


 * ...a door silently opened on the small, dark airless room in which their souls had been shut for a long time. The wind of freedom, which was blowing throughout the world for all people, turned and flowed into the room.

Quotes about Bessie Head

 * I think there's something very special about women writers, black women writers in America and those that I know of in any real sense in Africa-Bessie Head, for example, in Africa or Gloria Naylor here. There's a gaze that women writers seem to have that is quite fascinating to me because they tend not to be interested in confrontations with white men-the confrontation between black women and white men is not very important, it doesn't center the text. There are more important ones for them and their look, their gaze of the text is unblinking and wide and very steady. It's not narrow, it's very probing and it does not flinch. And it doesn't have these funny little axes to grind. There's something really marvelous about that.
 * 1986 interview in Conversations with Toni Morrison edited by Danille K. Taylor-Guthrie (1994)


 * I asked Bessie Head why a writer of such renown as she chose to remain in an isolated village, with no telephone, few modern conveniences, remote from the culture of cities. She told me Serowe suited her literary themes. She came from a humble background, she said, and preferred ordinary people. Powerful people, she went on, tended to be domineering; they don't pay their bills. The village people, she said, pay their bills "meticulously." "I have the courtesies, and love, of the people," she said. "What other life can I live?"
 * Lee Nichols, conversations with african writers (1981)


 * Bessie Head: I found her novels very, very gripping, fascinating, challenging, really intellectually intriguing.
 * Wole Soyinka in Talking with African Writers by Jane Wilkinson (1992)
 * “I once sat down on a bench at Cape Town railway station where the notice "Whites Only" was obscured. A few moments later a white man approached and shouted: 'Get off!' It never occurred to him that he was achieving the opposite of his dreams of superiority and had become a living object of contempt, that human beings, when they are human, dare not conduct themselves in such ways.”
 * “Life is such a gentle, treasured thing. I learn about it every minute. I think about it so deeply.”
 * “It seemed to be a makeshift replacement for love, absenting oneself from stifling atmospheres, because love basically was a torrential storm of feeling; it thrived only in partnership with laughing generosity and truthfulness.”
 * “The whole village was involved. There was no longer buzz, buzz, buzz. Something they liked as Africans to pretend themselves incapable of-- being oppressive and prejudiced-- was being exposed. They always knew it was there but no oppressor believes in his oppression.”
 * “A discipline I have observed is an attitude of love and reverence to people.”
 * “And if the white man thought that Asians were a low, filthy nation, Asians could still smile with relief – at least, they were not Africans. And if the white man thought Africans were a low, filthy nation, Africans in Southern Africa could still smile – at least, they were not Bushmen.”
 * “Love is mutually feeding each other, not one living on another like a ghoul.”
 * “…This seemed to Makhaya the greatest irony of Christianity. It meant that a white man could forever go on slaughtering black men simply because Jesus Christ would save him from his sins. Africa could do without a religion like that.”
 * I am building a stairway to the stars. I have the authority to take the whole of mankind up there with me. That is why I write.”
 * “Poverty has a home in Africalike a quiet second skin.It may be the only place on earth where it is worn with unconscious dignity.”
 * “The rhythm of sunrise, the rhythm of sunset, filled her life.”
 * “Before the white man became universally disliked for his mental outlook, it was there. The white man found only too many people who looked different. That was all that outraged the receivers of his discrimination, that he applied the technique of the wild jiggling dance and the rattling tin cans to anyone who was not a white man.”
 * “When no one wanted to bury a dead body, they called the missionaries; not that the missionaries really liked to be involved with mankind, but that they had been known to go into queer places because of their occupation. They would do that but they did not often like you to walk into their yard. They preferred to talk to you outside the fence.”
 * “There was something Dikeledi called sham. It made people believe they were more important than the normal image of humankind. She had grown up surrounded by sham.”
 * “At such times he would think, "What will I do if she does not love me as much as I love her?" A terrible reply came from his heart, 'Kill her.”
 * “The man who slowly walked away from them was a king in their society. A day had come when he had decided that he did not need any kingship other than the kind of wife everybody would loathe from the bottom of their hearts.”
 * “The contradictions were apparent to Makhaya, and perhaps there was no greater crime as yet than all the lies Western civilization had told in the name of Jesus Christ. It seemed to Makhaya far preferable for Africa if it did without Christianity and Christian double-talk, fat priests, golden images, and looked around at all the thin naked old men who sat under trees weaving baskets with shaking hands. People could do without religions and Gods who died for the sins of the world and thereby left men without any feeling of self-responsibility for the crimes they committed. This seemed to Makhaya the greatest irony of Christianity. It meant that a white man could forever go on slaughtering black men simply because Jesus Christ would save him from his sins. Africa could do without a religion like that. 135”
 * “That is, adoration was patient and waiting while love or, if you liked, plain sexual passion banged everything about. It either shouted or thought it knew too much, and it had always left him cold and had not involved his heart. Therefore, if he wanted to get involved now it would be on his own terms and at his own pace.”
 * “Dikeledi could make no secret of the fact that, in relation to men, she often suffered from high blood pressure, except that the trouble with the bloodstream had eventually boiled down to one, unattainable man.”
 * once you make yourself a freak and special any bastard starts to use you. That's half of the fierce fight in Africa'
 * “The whole village was involved. There was no longer buzz, buzz, buzz. Something they liked as Africans to pretend themselves incapable of-- being oppressive and prejudiced-- was being exposed. They always knew it was there but no oppressor believes in his oppression.”
 * “Maybe he concentrated on his immediate situation. It was African. It was horrible. But wherever mankind had gathered itself into a social order, the same things were happening. There was a mass of people with no humnaity to whom another mass referred: Why, they are naturally like that. They like to live in such filth. They have been doing it for centuries”
 * “The wind of freedom, which was blowing throughout the world for all people, turned and flowed into the room. As they breathed in the fresh, clear air their humanity awakened. They examined their condition. There was the foetid air, the excreta and the horror of being an oddity of the human race, with half the head of a man and half the body of a donkey. They laughed in an embarrassed way, scratching their heads. How had they fallen into this condition when, indeed, they were as human as everyone else? They started to run out into the sunlight, then they turned and looked at the dark, small room. They said: "We are not going back there.”
 * “At such times he would think, "What will I do if she does not love me as much as I love her?" A terrible reply came from his heart, 'Kill her.”