Latoya M.
Terrance H.
February 14, 2002
English 2nd Period

Biography of Bessie Head
 

     Bessie Head was born on July 6, 1937, in a mental hospital in Pietermaritzbury, South Africa. She was the daughter of a rich, white heiress of a horseracing fortune and a poor, black stable boy. Bessie Head was taken from her mother at birth and raised in a foster home until the age of thirteen. She was educated at a mission school where she received a teaching certificate in 1955. She taught a few years and did not like the job. She wrote the Drum magazine.
    In 1960, she married a journalist named Harold Head. The marriage ended in divorce in 1964, and she took her son, Howard to Serowe, Botswana. In Botswana, she began writing novels. Her first novel was, When Rain Clouds Gather in 1968. It is a story of a political refugee from South Africa who escapes to Botswana after serving time in prison. Head’s best-known novel, A Question of Power, in 1973 is the third. Like Bessie Head, it was also about a colored South African.
     The writing of Head covers many aspects of her personal experiences as a racially mixed person, growing up without a family in South Africa. Her works deal with many issues like herself growing up. Bessie Head wrote other biographies such as, When the Rain Clouds Gather, A Question of Power, and Maru.
    Bessie Head seems to have a lot of view of her works. Within this framework, the position of authority remains unchanging, whereas the character of the person who fills it is all-important. Behind her, Bessie Head leaves her works of creative genius echoing like thunder in our ears. Head was eventually cured and came back to write The Collector of Treasures and other Botswana Village Tales and Tales of Tenderness and Power.
    Head died in 1986 at the age of 49. She spent most of her life battling alcoholism.