by Bessie Head

Bessie Head was born in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, in 1937. Until she was 13 she was raised by a foster family in a poor section of the coloured community in the Cape Province (that is, the community for South Africans of mixed descent). She spent the next six years at St. Monica’s Home, an Anglican mission school for coloured girls, where she learned through a shocking revelation from the principal that her white mother had lived and died in a mental asylum because she had sexual relations with an African stable boy. She was made to understand that she herself was being monitored for any sign of mental aberration. After her teacher training education at St. Monica’s, Head taught elementary school from 1956 to 1958 in Durban, and then worked for several newspapers in Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Port Elizabeth. Her...