‘Life’ by Bessie Head

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

‘The Collector of Treasures’ by Bessie Head

“And what may your crime be?”

“I have killed my husband.”

“We are all here for the same crime,” Kebonye said, then with her cynical smile asked: “Do you feel any sorrow about the crime?”

“Not really,” the other woman replied.

“How did you kill him?”

“I cut off all his special parts with a knife,” Dikeledi said.

“I did it with a razor,” Kebonye said. She sighed and added: “I have had a troubled life.”

South African writer Bessie Head chronicled the slow development and change of the South African state as it began to reckon with the wounds of colonialism and apartheid. She had a particular interest in the experience of women, often forgotten in the national story, with the changes that occurred in society around them.

In ‘The Collector of Treasures’, Dikeledi Mokobi has been sentenced to life in prison for killing her husband, with several other women in jail for the same crime. Her story echoes that of so many women around the world. She married one bad man, Garesego, to escape another, her uncle, and lived to regret the decision after he disappeared, having developed a taste for the finer things in life after wage rises resulting from South African independence, leaving her to raise her children on her own.

Dikeledi manages to raise her children by herself, striking up a friendship with a neighbour, Paul, and his wife. When her oldest son goes to secondary school and she finds herself short of money for the fees, she reaches out to her erstwhile husband to ask for help and is refused and accused of being Paul’s lover. Paul confronts her husband but he continues to spread the rumour of her being Paul’s lover about the town.

When, abandoned by his own concubine, Garesego decides to come back and demands Dikeledi welcome him back to her home, it is one humiliation too many. Dikeledi methodically sharpens her knife, and castrates him, killing him.

This is the second castration in this list, but while the one in Baldwin’s story is the ultimate expression of racism and dehumanisation, in Head’s story it is a liberation. Despite the fact Dikeledi ends up in jail, she is freer than she has ever been.

First published in The Collector of Treasures and Other Botswana Village Tales, Heinemann, 1977

‘Let Me Tell a Story Now’ by Bessie Head

I would never have heard of Bessie Head if she hadn’t been strongly championed by Alice Walker, who particularly admires her devastating novel “Maru”. Bessie Head also wrote many short stories, of which this is among the shortest. It relies on a rhetorical device which is hardly new, but the timing is really well judged. She begins by decrying the frustrations that go with any identity once it has been imposed upon you: her identity as a writer and the identity chosen for her by the state mean, she says here, that limits are put by others on what she can and cannot do, on what she can write. Here comes the device: “For instance, I would like to write the story about a man who is a packing hand at the railways…” and then she writes the story, or most of it anyway, before saying that she can’t write it. Apart from the obvious joke here, there is a powerful sense of a writer working against the times and against the form of the story itself.

(Heinemann African Writers Series, 1989; again, out of print I’m afraid.)