In Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind, [Bessie Head] has written a chronicle that makes her adopted home … accessible to the imagination of outsiders…. Her task was almost intractably complex, given that she could assume no shared background knowledge among the majority of her readers. It was no doubt the novelist in her that extracted a structure for the book from the characters of Serowe's three most beneficial leaders. (p. 23)

Within this tripartite framework, the words of nearly 100 inhabitants provide the flesh of the book. One of Bessie Head's intentions has been to collect a verbal record of the old craft methods such as ploughing, potting, basket-making, tanning, thatching and building in mud. Serowe is primarily a village of mud and thatch, and by English standards it is huge, with a shifting population of up to 35,000. Its citizens give their testimonies, both personal and practical, in an unselfconscious...