My literary awakening was forged in wonder and fear in the Botswana Book Centre in Gaborone. Within that amply-stocked bookshop in my early teens, I discovered authors who remain favourites. The aisles were narrow, and any visit came with the risk of getting blocked in by an unnerving woman ranting to herself. There I had my first encounters, in person and in print, with Bessie Head.
She didn’t shy away from her mental health issues: they were explored in her stories. In Life, a woman – Life Morapedi – returns from Johannesburg to her childhood village of Serowe, bringing with her ‘bits and bits of a foreign culture and city habits’. Her fate is flagged in the first paragraph: ‘The murder of Life had this complicated undertone of rejection.’ Initially she turns to prostitution – unheard of in Serowe – but eventually marries a man who reminds her of a Johannesburg gangster. She does not take to married life well, and goes off the rails, tragically. At the end, Head quotes a song by Jim Reeves, who was hugely popular in southern Africa: ‘That’s what happens when two worlds collide.’
First published in Encounter magazine in 1975, and then in The Collector of Treasures and Other Botswana Village Tales, Heinemann, 1977
A Personal Anthology 