Bessie Head

Bessie Amelia Emery was born on the sixth of July 1937 at the Fort Napier Mental Hospital at Pietermaritzburg, in the Natal Province of the Union of South Africa, the daughter of Bessie Amelia Birch Emery — a white woman of the wealthy Pietermaritzburg Birch family who was confined to the Fort Napier hospital for the duration of her pregnancy after the family discovered she was pregnant by a Black stableman.

She was removed from her mother at birth and placed by the Pietermaritzburg authorities first with a white foster family who returned her on identifying her mixed-race appearance, and then in 1943 with a Coloured foster family — Nellie and George Heathcote — at the Sophiatown district of Johannesburg, where she was raised across the following ten years.

She was placed at thirteen at the St. Monica’s Anglican Home for Coloured Girls at Hillary, near Durban, where she completed the primary teaching certificate in 1955. She taught primary school at the Clairwood Coloured School at Durban from 1956 to 1957.

She moved to Cape Town in 1958 and took employment as a journalist at the Drum magazine — the Black Johannesburg picture magazine of the 1950s — and at its sister publication Golden City Post.

She married the journalist Harold Head in 1961 and gave birth to her only child Howard in 1962. She left South Africa on a one-way exit permit in March 1964 — the equivalent of one-way exile from the apartheid state — and settled at the village of Serowe in eastern Botswana, then the Bechuanaland Protectorate, on a teaching post at the Tshekedi Memorial Primary School.

She wrote at Serowe across the closing years of the 1960s the manuscript of her first novel When Rain Clouds Gather — the chronicle of the white agricultural-development worker Gilbert Balfour and the South African political refugee Makhaya Maseko at the fictional Botswana village of Golema Mmidi. The novel was published in 1968 at the London house Gollancz.

She published across the following eighteen years three further novels — Maru (1971), A Question of Power (1974), and Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind (1981) — and two short-story collections.

She was granted Botswana citizenship in 1979 after fifteen years of refugee status and lived the remaining seven years of her life as a citizen of Botswana at Serowe.

She died at Serowe on the seventeenth of April 1986 of complications of hepatitis, at forty-eight.

She is honored here as the principal novelist of Serowe.