Bessie head famous works

Bessie head cause of death
Bessie head books
Looking for a rain god by bessie head

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The Order of Ikhamanga in Gold

Bessie Head (1937 - 1986) Awarded for:

Exceptional contribution to literature and the struggle for social change, freedom and peace.

Profile of Bessie Head (1937 – 1986)

Bessie Head was born in Pietermaritzburg in 1937, the daughter of a mixed race relationship between her Scottish mother and an African man. She was raised by foster parents and later placed in an orphanage.

Exhibiting an early intelligence, she overcame her difficult childhood to train as a primary school teacher. After four years as a teacher, she took up work as a journalist for Golden City Post.

She left for Botswana after a failed marriage. There she lived for many years in deep poverty.

She spent 15 years in a refugee community before she was awarded citizenship. Her three novels and numerous other works were all written in Botswana where she died in 1986 at the young age of 49.

Drawing on her experience as a racially mixed person growing up without a family in South Africa, Head’s writing often dealt with poor and abused black women and their experiences of racism

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Bessie Head

Botswana writer (1937–1986)

Bessie Amelia Emery Head (6 July 1937 – 17 April 1986) was a South African writer who, though born in South Africa, is usually considered Botswana's most influential writer. She wrote novels, short fiction and autobiographical works that are infused with spiritual questioning and reflection.^[1] Notable books by her include When Rain Clouds Gather (1968), Maru (1971) and A Question of Power (1973).

Biography

Bessie Amelia Emery was born in Pietermaritzburg, Union of South Africa, the child of a white woman and a black man at a time when interracial relationships were illegal in South Africa.^[2] Bessie's mother, Fiona Emery, from the wealthy South African Birch family,^[3] had been hospitalised for several years in mental hospitals following the death of her first child, a boy named Gerald Emery, who died after 8 weeks of birth. She was in the huge mental hospital in Pietermaritzburg when she gave birth to Bessie. Although she was not allowed to keep the child,^[2] she did give the d

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Bessie Amelia Head

Bessie Amelia Head was born at Fort Napier Hospital in Pietermaritzburg, Natal (now KwaZulu-Natal), South Africa, the asylum her mother was committed to at the time. Her mother, Bessie Amelia Emery, came from a wealthy family of Scottish descent. No information on her father exists other than that he was a black man who worked as a groom on the Emery estate. The relationship between Head’s parents was forbidden according to South Africa’s Immorality Act at the time. Consequently, after falling pregnant her mother was deemed mentally insane and committed to Fort Napier Hospital for schizophrenia. Head was subsequently fostered to a white family, when presumed white, then to a poor coloured family, the Heathcotes, when reclassified according to apartheid legistlation as ‘mixed-race’.

Head described her childhood as a haphazard and self-reliant one, juggled between various child welfare organizations. She attended a Catholic church and school and remained ignorant of the Heathcotes not being her biological parents throughout her primary school years. When