Imaginative Trespasser makes it clear that Bessie Head was one of Africa's great letter writers, as well as one the continent's finest novelists. She writes for the most part from Serowe, a large village in the north of Botswana, which she hates and loves. Her subject is her struggles to establish herself as a teacher and then as an agricultural worker and writer; and the Bamangwato people, proud of their past and especially of Khama the Great, founder of their nation.
Bessie Head writes about the Peace Corps and other volunteers who come to Serowe - these and refugees from South Africa are vividly represented in her letters
Terrible experiences moulded Head's talent
August 7, 2005
By Margaret Lenta
Imaginative Trespasser: Letters between Bessie Head, Patrick and Wendy Cullinan compiled by Patrick Cullinan, with a personal memoir
Imaginative Trespasser makes it clear that Bessie Head was one of Africa's great letter writers, as well as one the continent's finest novelists. She writes for the most part from Serowe, a large village in the north of Botswana, which she hates and loves.
Her subject is her struggles to establish herself as a teacher and then as an agricultural worker and writer; and the Bamangwato people, proud of their past and especially of Khama the Great, founder of their nation.
She writes about the Peace Corps and other volunteers who come to Serowe - these and refugees from South Africa are vividly represented in her letters. We learn that the publication of a book has allowed her to build a tiny house, Rainclouds. Despite the difficulties of marketing her work, she gradually emerges as an author and is proud of her success.
Head had been born in 1937 in a Pietermaritzburg mental hospital to a mentally disturbed white woman. Named Bessie after her mother, she was registered as white, but it soon became evident that she was of mixed race, and she was entrusted to a coloured foster mother.
When she was 13 she was removed to a mission orphanage in Durban, where she was educated to Junior Certificate level and trained as a primary school teacher. During this period she was told that her birth mother (then dead) was "insane" and threatened with the same fate.
In 1958, after teaching for a year, Head moved to the Cape and worked as a journalist on The Golden City Post. A brief marriage to the journalist Harold Head resulted in a baby boy, Howard, and was followed by a separation, marginal political involvement and in 1964 her departure for Botswana on an exit permit. In Serowe, living with her son, she wrote remarkable books - Maru, A Question of Power, The Collector of Treasures and Serowe, Village of the Rain Wind, in print at the present day, are among the most important of these.
This bald account omits much pain and struggle against the cruelties Head encountered as an orphan of mixed race; desperate loneliness; crippling poverty, especially after she arrived in Botswana as a refugee; and the difficulties of acquiring the skills of an author while living remote from any kind of literary circle.
Head was not without friends, though they were far away, and one of the most generous and sympathetic was the compiler of the present volume, the distinguished poet Patrick Cullinan, who with his wife Wendy gave her support of many kinds in the years 1963 to 1977. The Cullinans gave and lent her money, wrote to her, sent her books and visited her. She replied, describing her life in this community in which she was an alien, her struggles to support herself and her child, and her gradual discovery of her own powers.
Cullinan, with his fellow-author Lionel Abrahams, founded in 1974 the publishing house Bateleur Press. The two hoped that they could help Head and enrich the literature of southern Africa by taking over the publishing, in this region, of her work. However, Head - already frustrated by long-distance dealings with publishers in Britain and the US, and uncomprehending about the nature of publishing, became suspicious of their efforts to help her.
Cullinan understands the inevitable break that occurred; he even forgives her rage and the verbal abuse of him which followed in her letters to others. He quotes her as writing:
"I lost so many good friends during the time a thunderstorm raged in my life. They actually got nervous breakdowns from my letters."
No wonder. His commentary on and the context which he offers for the letters is indispensable to the book, and his understanding that "apartheid was the infliction of race hatred... Hate happened to her very early in her life and remained with her until her death. It tempered her, it made her" is crucial.
Is the book the story of a victim, whom apartheid punished for her very existence and who was forced to live alone among people whom for most of her life she saw as hostile?
Yes, but there is something more fascinating, though equally painful in the letters: Head was made by her terrible experiences into an artist, quick and acute in her responses, understanding her own and others' pleasure and pain, and quick to hit back against a world which she believed hated her.
