[An] outcast is the central figure in Bessie Head's first novel [When Rain Clouds Gather, a] naked sociological commentary….

There is too much undiluted sociological and agricultural textbook language, but the book is justified by loving and humorous descriptions of African land and people, by powerful, generous feeling and passionate analysis of the situation of the black African. She is especially moving on the position of women, emerging painfully from the chrysalis of tribalist attitudes into a new evaluation of their relationship to men and their position in society; and she is coolly humorous about British colonial administrators, reserving rancorous irony for the newly-emergent twopenny-halfpenny revolutionaries. Bessie Head is herself an African refugee from South Africa: she has opted for understanding, generosity and gradual progress, and her book is a splendid argument for this stand.

Mary Borg, "Victims," in New Statesman (© 1969 The Statesman & Nation Publishing Co. Ltd.), Vol...