“People is people”: African personhood in the works of Bessie Head 

 

 

by  

Gloria Castrillón 

8606001T 

 

 

A thesis submitted to the 

Faculty of Humanities 

University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg 

 

in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of 

Doctor of Philosophy 

 

 

 

Supervisor: Professor Isabel Hofmeyr 

 

 

Johannesburg 

2023



ii 

DECLARATION 

I declare that this thesis titled, “People is people”: African personhood in the works of Bessie 

Head, is my own unaided work. It is submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the 

University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. It has not been submitted before for any other 

degree or examination by any other university. 

 

Ethical Clearance Waiver number: HRECNMW23/03/03 

 

Gloria Castrillón 

8606001T 

 

 

                   

Signature   Date 15 March 2023 

 

 

 

  



iii 

ABSTRACT 

From the vantage point of Bessie Head’s oeuvre as a whole, I trace the development of her 

approach to personhood. Rooted in a post-oppositional view of love expressed as acts of 

ubuntu, she develops a new paradigm of African personhood distinct from western conceptions 

of the person. In Nguni languages, ubuntu is the term given to the view that personhood derives 

from a network of relationships, encapsulated in the saying “I am because you are; we are 

because you are” (Ogude, 2018, p. 1, emphasis in original). Rejecting the forms of literary and 

political protest of her time and focusing on the rural context, Head applies three narrative tools 

to lever change. These are, love-based relationships between individuals; love as acts of ubuntu 

between people; and sage philosophers who mediate history, embedding Head’s view of 

personhood in Africa’s history.  

 

Chapter 1 places Head’s works in context and sets out the parameters of the relationship 

between law and human rights. The chapter examines the post-oppositional approach which 

informs Head’s attempts to deviate from binary-based views of tradition and progress, western 

and African, from which she proposes her particular view of African personhood. Chapter 2 

examines Head’s life, works and critical reception. Chapter 3 examines human rights with 

specific reference to South Africa’s Freedom Charter. The Charter and the political pressures 

surrounding its generation were central to Head’s contemporaries’ protest literature. Head 

rejects this genre, so the chapter also surveys her political outlook.  

 

In Chapter 4, the roots of Head’s re-envisioning are examined in The Cardinals and When Rain 

Clouds Gather. In these early novels, Head uses love as the stimulus for personal and 

communal change. In The Cardinals, love is individual, and change is limited to two characters. 

In When Rain Clouds Gather, love expands in scope and, realised through acts of ubuntu, 

provides the foundation for the marriages and other individual relationships. Together, these 

enable the realisation of personhood in the context of community.  

 

In Chapter 5, the operation of love extends further in Maru and A Question of Power. In Maru, 

love is tasked with overturning the foundations of racism and reversing the tyranny of tribal, 

hereditary supremacy. In A Question of Power, love is set against its biggest foe: evil and Satan. 

By the end, however, it is clear it is unable to perform the transformative social work Head 

assigns it. Thus, in the last three books, she galvanizes a set of semi-fictional, semi-historical 



iv 

sage philosophers whose words and actions typify her post-oppositional reconceptualisation of 

Serowe’s history. 

 

Chapter 6 examines the liminal position of The Collector of Treasures as it bridges the 

transition from the first four to the last two texts. In it, diverse storytellers debate the 

incongruities and ambiguities in the African and western traditions.  

 

Chapter 7 examines how Head’s sages become more overt spokespeople for her argument that 

change is essentially African and animated by love and ubuntu will give rise to an African 

personhood. In Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind, Khama the Great, Tshekedi Khama and 

Patrick van Rensburg are actualised African persons as they effect love-grounded, ubuntu-

motivated change, creating the basis of Africa’s future. In A Bewitched Crossroad, Head uses 

the fictional interpolations of her most developed sage, Sebina, to mine both the ‘real’ history 

of Southern Africa and western ways to develop a post-oppositional African vision.  

 

In the Chapter 8, Head’s efforts to breathe life into a new ‘race’ of Africans are summed up. 

Head proposes that ‘African’ is not defined by race, colour or ethnic identity, but by post-

oppositional responses, the ability to transform the lives of others, and leadership qualities 

needed for the future. Identifying the common thread across the texts clarifies Head’s 

articulation personhood as embedded in Africanness and not in the western presumptions 

underpinning the novel form.  

 

  



v 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 

There are so many people to thank by the end of a doctoral thesis that I hope I have not missed 

anyone. If I have, my apologies – if you know me well, you know I have the worst memory. 

To my supervisor Isabel Hofmeyr – a huge thank you for your continued and uninterrupted 

belief in me and for agreeing to take me on as a student, yet again – although this time it 

worked! Thank you for a wonderful friendship which spans decades and for your eagle-eyed 

supervision. I now look forward to PhD-free playdates. 

 

To Dimitri Vratsanos, thank you for everything. Now I will have my own and you can stop 

offering me yours. To my younger daughter, Clara Vratsanos, thank you for all your care and 

love, for the coffee, lunches, and cuddles, and for the countless other ways in which you 

supported and encouraged me.  To my first-born and ‘comrade-in-doctoral-arms’, Alyssa 

Vratsanos, you were a classmate in a journey normally undertaken alone – thank you for the 

companionship, the discussions, the pushing and shoving, and the cool, calm eye on the admin 

(you know I’m a disaster at this). Thank you also to Kabir Dhupelia for the walks and 

breakfasts, hikes and coffees, and continuous, quiet support. You are my favourite son-in-

law.  To Rosa Zalk, thank you for teaching me to be a better godmother. I promise I will try 

now to be a good one!  

  
Thanks to my parents, Gloria and Mariano; my sisters, Sandra and Carol; and my in-laws, Mary 

and Nico. To my friends, old and new: Cathy Burns, Efthyia Vardas, Natasha Erlank, Stephen 

Sparks, Nafisa Essop-Shaik, Jim Stiles, and Jonathan Stadler (for saying I’m not too old). To 

the “Thalmans”, my friends and ‘other’ family, Sunil Menon, Sunita Menon, Kabir Dhupelia, 

Misha Dhupelia and Kirti Menon (more on whom below) – thank you for the dinners, words 

of encouragement, and other sundry diversions.  

  
A special thank you to my old friend and, more recently, colleague, Kirti Menon. The many 

ways in which you have supported me in this are incredible and, although too many to list, 

include making possible the time and space I needed, insisting I do it even when I wavered, 

checking in on me, and just being present. Thank you so, so much. To Kibbie Naidoo, also a 

colleague and now a friend, thank you for the virtual and real deep breaths, for emails and other 

messages, and for the pivotal reading on ubuntu.  



vi 

I would also like to acknowledge the late Ina Pretorius for her unwavering belief in me, and 

the late Vanessa Merckel whose presentation on her doctoral study introduced me to post-

oppositional thinking.  

 

To my other colleagues in the Division for Teaching Excellence at the University of 

Johannesburg, thank you so much for the many ways in which you made my studies possible. 

You have all been so kind and so lovely: Angie Magabane, Mthu Vongo, Meagan Strydom, 

Noxolo (Fifi) Soji, Odwa Mntonintshi, Portia Mashinini and Portia Wright. The support of the 

University of Johannesburg with the payment of my fees is also gratefully acknowledged. 

 

Finally, this thesis would not have been completed without Breezeblock Café in Brixton – 

cappuccinos, wi-fi, the generator, and the friendly staff who suggested (and insisted on) breaks 

as needed.   

 

  



vii 

TABLE OF CONTENTS 

DECLARATION ....................................................................................................................... ii 

ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................................. iii 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ....................................................................................................... v 

Chapter 1: Introduction .......................................................................................................... 1 

1.1. Head’s work in context ............................................................................................. 9 

1.2. Contestations and contradictions – not all who are human are persons .................. 12 

1.3. A post-oppositional paradigm for change: Ubuntu and love .................................. 14 

1.4. Structure of the thesis .............................................................................................. 24 

Chapter 2: Bessie Head’s life, works and critical reception .............................................. 27 

2.1. Bessie Head: a brief biography ............................................................................... 29 

2.2. Head’s works ........................................................................................................... 44 

2.3. Critical reception ..................................................................................................... 45 

2.3.1.  A story to tell: biography and autobiography .................................................. 45 

2.3.2.  Race, class and gender ..................................................................................... 50 

2.3.3.  History, tradition, and orality ........................................................................... 54 

2.3.4.  Gardening, rurality, and ecopolitics ................................................................. 58 

2.3.5.  New worlds, new people .................................................................................. 61 

2.4. Concluding remarks ................................................................................................ 63 

Chapter 3: Bessie Head in context South African literature, protest and human 

rights........................................................................................................................................ 65 

3.1. Human rights in South Africa ................................................................................. 66 

3.2. The Freedom Charter, the UDHR, and South African literature ............................ 72 

3.3. Head and politics ..................................................................................................... 78 

3.4. Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 87 

Chapter 4: The ‘rag-bag’ novel - Head’s protest begins The Cardinals and When 

Rain Clouds Gather ............................................................................................................... 90 

4.1. Introduction ............................................................................................................. 90 



viii 

4.2. The Cardinals .......................................................................................................... 94 

4.3. Setting a course: When Rain Clouds Gather ......................................................... 101 

4.4. Forms of love ........................................................................................................ 111 

4.5. Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 115 

Chapter 5: Is love really enough?  Maru and A Question of Power ............................... 117 

5.1. Introduction ........................................................................................................... 117 

5.2. A philosophy of love in and for Africa ................................................................. 121 

5.3. Maru ...................................................................................................................... 123 

5.4. A Question of Power ............................................................................................. 128 

5.5. Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 137 

Chapter 6: The Collector of Treasures as liminal text ..................................................... 139 

6.1. Introduction ........................................................................................................... 139 

6.2. The Collector of Treasures in critical context ....................................................... 141 

6.3. Learning from the stories and the tellers of tales .................................................. 146 

6.4. Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 163 

Chapter 7: An unfinished journey Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind and A 

Bewitched Crossroad ........................................................................................................... 165 

7.1. Introduction ........................................................................................................... 165 

7.2. Brief summary of the texts .................................................................................... 169 

7.3. Serowe and Akenfield: same but different ............................................................. 172 

7.4. The sage philosopher............................................................................................. 175 

7.5. The limits of tradition............................................................................................ 181 

7.6. Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 186 

Chapter 8: Conclusion An unresolved ending .................................................................. 188 

REFERENCES ........................................................................ Error! Bookmark not defined. 



1 

Chapter 1: Introduction 

 

Writers … are mirrors of the times in which they live. Perhaps time and history 

will coin a special name for those who were the pioneers of African literature, and 

whose publication history coincided with African independence (Eilersen, 2001, 

p. 33).  

 

In 1993, I completed a thesis on Bessie Head (Castrillón, 1993) titled “Invention or reflection? 

Tradition and Orality in the Works of Bessie Head”. In that thesis, I examined how Head used 

creatively invented conceptions of orality and of tradition “as the vehicles for her recreation of 

a sense of what she believes the essence of African life should be” (Castrillón, 1993, p. 183). In 

an article arising from the thesis, I argued that Head makes use of written resources (the diaries 

of the missionary J.D. Hepburn, for example) and other imaginative resources (such as presenting 

as ‘oral’ a history based predominantly on written sources) to create the vision of an Africa in 

which she would like to live (Castrillón, 2004). Embarking on this doctoral thesis many years 

later, having studied law and ethics in the intervening time, I had initially thought to embed this 

study in a human rights and literature framework. Such an approach made sense given the 

unique history of South Africa (where Head was born) and Bechuanaland’s transition from 

British protectorate to independent Botswana, which Head experienced subsequent to moving 

there in 1964. In part, I initially thought I would examine Joseph Slaughter’s assertion that new 

postcolonial modes of literature examine how law functions as culture, which would alert us to 

reading practices which contribute to the “world based on human rights” (Slaughter, 2009, 

p. 44). The history of the interwovenness of literature and law, and in particular of human rights 

and literature, is a long and extensive one and there is a deep, rich international scholarship on 

this form of activism which, it will later be shown, took on a particular form in South Africa’s 

antiapartheid struggle. 

 

Against the backdrop of the politics of her time, and given her stated dislike of binaries, Head 

sees the politics of her time as fundamentally divisive and seeks an entirely different frame of 

reference. In this thesis, I argue that, beginning with When Rain Clouds Gather, where we see 



2 

ubuntu1 and love in operation in a rural community, and ending with A Bewitched Crossroad, 

Head develops a post-oppositional, integrative ‘African’ approach to personhood. Her texts 

speak in various ways to the challenges of moving beyond binary boundaries (having rights/ 

not having rights; white/black; traditional/modern; African/Christian, among others) through a 

syncretic application of love, ubuntu and history.  

 

From the vantage point of Bessie Head’s oeuvre as a whole, this thesis traces her 

conceptualisation of a new paradigm of African personhood beginning with The Cardinals and 

ending with A Bewitched Crossroad. Importantly, she expressly rejects the forms of literary 

and political protest used by her contemporaries and most commonly associated with South 

African literary production at the time. She deploys as the narrative vehicle a post-oppositional 

construction of love expressed as acts of ubuntu and actualised in a series of love-referenced 

relationships. The thesis demonstrates the ways in which Head’s conception of African 

personhood is premised on a particular conception of Africa’s history and of African identity 

distinct from western conceptions of the person. Head shifts the locus of her stories (with the 

exception of the posthumously published The Cardinals) to a rural African context, applying 

three narrative tools to lever the change she believes is necessary for Africa’s future. These are 

love-based relationships between individuals; love as acts of ubuntu between people; and the 

development of sage philosophers who mediate Head’s view of personhood as embedded in 

Africa’s history.  

 

In Europe, overt links between literature and human rights date back most clearly to A Memory 

of Solferino (hereafter Memory), published in 1862. The text provided a “vivid depiction” of 

the battle between Austria-Hungary and a France-led coalition during the unification of Italy, 

describing in gory detail the day before the battle and the battle itself (Lofquist, 2017, p. 104). 

Although ostensibly journalistic, the text’s “unvarnished accounts” detail the brutality with 

which the soldiers abandoned to die or had limbs amputated without anaesthesia (Barnett, 2011, 

np). The text played a critical role in recommending and realising the formation of charitable 

societies and international conventions which ensured protection for the wounded and for 

medics, whether uniformed and civilian (Barnett, 2011, np). Memory is unique in its success 

in this regard, as it led to the establishment of the International Red Cross and the adoption of 

 
1 James Ogude defines ubuntu as “a specific understanding of personhood and that is that the full development of 

personhood comes with a shared identity and the idea that an individual’s humanity is fostered in a network of 

relationships – I am because you are; we are because you are” (Ogude, 2018, p. 1, emphasis in original).  



3 

the Geneva Convention in 1864.2 Subsequently, as Kerry Byström points out, personal 

narratives and story-telling shaped “the stories of others in order to help these ‘others’ claim 

rights” (Byström, 2012, p. 638).  

 

Claiming rights has long been part of South Africa’s history, a fact that is directly referenced 

in the 2011 publication by Amnesty International of a collection of short stories: Freedom: 

Short Stories Celebrating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Amnesty International, 

2011). The book opens with two forewords, one by South Africa’s late Archbishop Emeritus, 

Desmond Tutu, well known internationally as the Chairperson of the South African Truth and 

Reconciliation Commission (TRC), and the second by Vered Cohen-Barzilay of Amnesty 

International in Israel. Cohen-Barzilay’s foreword is a personal account of the “tremendous 

power of literature” which, she says, moved her from ‘warrior’ to writer. She attributes this 

sea-change to the 2004 Italian novel, Prima di lasciarsi (Before We Say Goodbye). 

“Literature”, she concludes “can inspire us to change our world and give us the comfort, hope, 

passion, and strength we need in order to fight to create a better future for us, as well as all 

humanity” (Amnesty International, 2011, pp. 11–12).  

 

The view of literature as the driving force for political, social and personal change is not 

uncommon. Lynn Hunt (2007) argues that the novel, for example, provides the base for human 

rights in its sentimental form, and Byström points to the genre’s ability to help people feel 

empathy for others, even when different to the reader (Byström, 2012, p. 641). In Slaughter’s 

words, “everyone should know why human rights are important, that we do need a little human 

rights just now, and that literature does have a capacity to minister to that need” (Slaughter, 

2009, p. 6). In the interdisciplinary spaces created in the 1970s in the United States, literature 

was seen as able to illuminate the “law’s gaps, rhetoric, and moral stance”, with proponents of 

this view arguing for the techniques of literary interpretation to be applied to the law (Baron, 

1999, p. 1060). Two approaches emerged: law in literature, and law as literature. Law in 

literature is exemplified by the 1922 publication of “A List of One Hundred Legal novels” 

which lawyers were encouraged to read, given that legal principles are a “main part of the 

author’s theme” (Wigmore, 1922, p. 26). Law as literature, more complexly, it was argued, 

presents “a common understanding of the process by which communities and communitarian 

values come to be formed” (West, 1988, pp. 129–130), and legal arguments are “cultural texts” 

 
2 Founding and early years of the ICRC (1863-1914) | International Committee of the Red Cross 

https://www.icrc.org/en/document/founding-and-early-years-icrc-1863-1914


4 

(West, 1988, p. 130) which communicate the consensus of a community. Lenora Ledwon 

(2015, p. ix) argues that the approach makes clear an “awareness that the jurisdiction of both 

law and literature is the realm where language, story and human experience meet”. Of course, 

not all critics agree. Richard Posner grumbles about the connection, saying that law and 

literature have been yoked together in ways indicative of “the obligation of idealizing humans 

and society” (Chang, 2008, p. 71) as part of the weaponry of a battle waged by those with a 

“pervasive left-liberal bias” in a “misconceived humanizing project” (Posner, 1998).  

 

Slaughter’s research in this area comprises an intense and nuanced picking apart of a specific 

sub-category of this relationship: the mutual interdependences between human rights (as 

expressed in codas such as the UDHR), and the novel form (particularly the Bildungsroman). 

In his work, he shows how these together achieve a common socialising project, adopting a 

particular, western view of the development of the human personality and the claimed 

universality of human rights (Slaughter, 2009, p. 9). This shared "egalitarian imaginary" 

(Slaughter, 2006, p. 1407) takes the form of a homogenising relationship encapsulated in the 

Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). In a survey of texts spanning authors as 

diverse as Goethe (Slaughter, 2009, p. 97) and Kenyan author Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye 

(Slaughter, 2009, p. 120), Slaughter concludes that the “idealist, third person Bildungsroman 

responds to the modern imperative to ‘become civilised’, or what Foucault terms ‘self-

regulating subjects’” (Slaughter, 2009, pp. 226–227). 

 

Interrogating the complexity of the relationship between human rights and the novel form, 

Slaughter tells how the drafters of the UDHR drew on different interpretations of Robinson 

Crusoe in a debate on the extent of the individual’s responsibility. At the core of the issue was 

the  

 

individual's debt to the community for having developed what the UDHR 

elsewhere calls the ‘human personality’ and the extent to which ‘the community’ 

can take responsibility for the development of human personality (Slaughter, 2006, 

p. 1406). 

 

The original phrasing of the declaration was, “everyone has duties to the community which 

enables him to freely develop his personality”. Subsequent to the invocation of Robinson 

Crusoe, this was reworded to read “everyone has duties to the community in which alone the 



5 

free and full development of his personality is possible”. The rewording intended to moderate 

the excessive individualism of the Declaration (Slaughter, 2009, p. 46). Both sides used 

“literary proof” to reach consensus, which the committee’s deliberations had been unable to 

resolve (Slaughter, 2006, p. 1407), and Daniel Defoe took his “official place among the 

unacknowledged legislators of the world” (Slaughter, 2006, p. 1406). The tension between 

individual and community pointed to above signals a further concern with human rights: 

ostensibly universal, rights are seen as not having a cultural, political or historical context 

(Cheah, 2006, p. 152), and “cultural forms like the novel have cooperated with human rights 

to naturalize their common sense” (Slaughter, 2006, p. 1417) and emphasize their universal 

character.3  

 

Against this mutually interdependent relationship between the human rights and literature, the 

novel (and in particular the bildungsroman) becomes a popular fictional form for “the literature 

of social outsiders” including women and other excluded groups with a surge in the publication 

of novels by indigenous peoples, diasporic and immigrant populations, and other minorities 

(Slaughter, 2006, p. 1411). The previously marginalised, “democratic citizen-subjects” tell 

their stories which are received as allegorical stories of ‘third-world’ culture and society 

(Slaughter, 2006, p. 1410). The result is that the Bildungsroman genre comes to be seen as 

having no “viable social work to perform for the Anglo European white male (the ostensibly 

already incorporated and capacitated citizen)” (Slaughter 2006, p. 1410). So-called third world 

literature wittingly and unwittingly serves to reinforce the sovereign interest of some in favour 

of the rights of the other (Ramji-Nogales, 2014, p. 699). Literature performs the sociocultural 

work that the law is unable to do for itself, providing the affective training needed for the 

deployment of human rights (Antaki, 2013, p. 978) enabling readers to critique existing social 

structures (Antaki, 2013, p. 976).  

 

Of course, ‘behind’ the universality of human rights is the tautology that humans have rights 

because they are human, and as humans have rights (at minimum, to dignity). And behind this 

 
3 Contestations on universality of human rights occurred early in the drafting process. Sophia McLennan and 

Alexandra Moore tell of archival research which brought up a questionnaire administered by UNESCO in 1947. 

The questionnaire was designed to help the drafters of the UDHR to determine whether there was global consensus 

on human rights. The resulting report, written by the ‘Philosopher’s Committee’ showed that UN members shared 

at least the view that all had “the right to live a life free from the haunting fear of poverty and insecurity” 

(UNESCO, 2014). As UN members deconstructed each article, challenges to the question of universality were 

temporarily assuaged. A universal declaration of human rights, it was argued, was not the means to resolve 

philosophical differences, but was a pragmatic solution to affect political and social practices (McClennen and 

Moore, 2018, p. 22). 



6 

tautology is another, prior question: “if human rights are the rights one has by virtue of being 

human, the definition of what it means to be human is of paramount concern” (Parikh, 2019, 

p. 8). Novels by “social outsiders” which expose the “disparities and paradoxes” of the “idealist 

vision of human personality development” either affirm or critique prevailing social structures 

and development discourse (Slaughter, 2009, p. 28). But it is here, at the “crossroads of human 

rights and literature” (Parikh, 2019, p. 2) that I realised that although a literature and human 

rights view of Head’s works may yield value, my attention had by this time been drawn 

particularly to her views on what it means to be a person, and to how this view had morphed 

from her early to her later texts, moving the genre boundaries from fictional narrative to an 

intertwined fictional and historical narrative as her approach took form. Head’s works can be 

read from a viewpoint identified by Eleni Coundouriotis as follows:  

 

In the effort to make Global South claims on the meaning of human rights more 

robust, African historians have moved beyond the relativism critique of rights to 

reclaim the universalism of rights in such a way that it does not exclude African 

meanings (Coundouriotis, 2021, p. 7). 

 

In line with Sean Hawkins, Coundouriotis agrees that notice should be taken of Africans who 

are striving to create, imagine, define and defend how they view rights. The loss of meaning of 

human rights can be addressed by a “reworking of existing language so that it is rendered 

mutually comprehensible” (Coundouriotis, 2021, p. 7). 

 

Head’s membership of a lineage of South African and African writers who grapple with issues 

of African identity and in particular what it is to be a person is well-established, as the critical 

works surveyed in Chapter 2 show. However, her answer to the question of what it means to be 

African provides an often-unique perspective not traditionally associated with the South African 

anti-racist and protest writings of her generation. Although she clearly abhors all forms of 

discrimination and oppression, she persistently asserts that apartheid4 is only one instance of the 

harm people can inflict on others. A close reading of her fictional texts indicates that she makes 

 
4 ‘Apartheid’ is the Afrikaans word for 'apartness' and was both the ideology and policy of the National Party 

which came to power in South Africa in 1948. Premised on ‘separate development’ of different ‘races’, it affected 

all aspects of people’s personal and political lives, prohibiting integration between races, and significantly 

disadvantaging black African, ‘coloured’ and Indian South Africans. 



7 

no overt reference to a ‘rights’ paradigm in these, nor do her arguments against discrimination 

and oppression proceed from the equality of dignity the UDHR ascribes to all humans. 

 

Nonetheless, she expressly examines and questions the workings of power and political systems 

especially where they are repressive and discriminatory. She sees abuses of power as 

fundamentally similar whether present in racism, slavery, the position of women, oppressive 

traditions, colonial domination, or the workings of ‘evil’. She overtly rejects binaries, both those 

implicit in western superiority and racism, or those in African nationalism and seeks in the fiction 

and non-fiction she wrote to propose an alternative paradigm. In this thesis, I consider how we 

can think about her corpus by assessing the trajectory of her ideas in developing a new approach 

to defining personhood and how the redefinition she proposes takes form. She expresses 

repeatedly her view that African ideas will be the source of the new future for all people. In a 

1984 piece, titled “A search for historical continuity and roots”, she says: 

 

South Africa, with its sense of ravages and horror, has lost that image of an Africa, 

ancient and existing since time immemorial, but in Botswana the presence of the 

timeless and immemorial is everywhere - in people, in animals, in everyday life 

and in custom and tradition. 

I hope two disparate worlds could be considered to have combined harmoniously 

in me. I have never been able in my writing to represent South African society but 

the situation of black people in South Africa, their anguish and their struggles, 

made its deep impress on me. From an earlier background, I know of a deep 

commitment to people, an involvement in questions of poverty and exploitation 

and a commitment to illuminating the future for younger generations. I needed an 

eternal and continuous world against which to work out these preoccupations. One 

of my preoccupations was a search as an African for a sense of historical continuity, 

a sense of roots, but I remember how tentative and sketchy were my first efforts, 

not finding roots as such but rather putting on layer after layer of patchy clothing. 

This patchy clothing formed the background to most of my work (Head, 1990, 

p. 86). 

 

Elsewhere she says that she wishes to write the “possibility that Africa can produce a lot of 

idealist young men … to solve centuries of exploitation and poverty” (Head, 1990, p. 73). For 

her, the positive attributes of her characters are in their “extreme willingness to abdicate from 



8 

positions of power and absorb themselves in activities which would be of immense benefit to 

people” (Head, 1990, p. 73). She is assertive in her declaration that she has  

 

built an horizon in which black men of talent were portrayed in activities which were 

‘a new beginning’. I wanted to widen the image on the horizon and to give young 

black men alternative choices. It was like a suggestion I hoped would move into the 

future while not too much could be done about the chaos of the present (Head, 1990, 

p. 73).  

 

The rejection of binaries is core to Head’s vision and in this crucial sense her texts constitute a 

profoundly complex, early example of South African post-oppositional thinking, distinct in its 

use of love and the rural from many of her vociferous and expressive anti-apartheid 

contemporaries. In this post-oppositional framework, Head applies the core constructs of ubuntu, 

evident so often in her texts as love, and embodied in a variety of different (and often completely 

opposing) systems. Whether African traditional religion, ubuntu, good and goodness, ‘true’ 

Christian or Jesus’ love, Gandhi’s Hinduism, and so on, she is continuously re-envisioning an 

African intellectual tradition that actively recalibrates the precepts of African nationalism using 

love as the persistent cipher.  

 

Briefly, the problem is that ‘love’ – particularly as she envisions it in the first two books – is not 

able to go far enough in envisioning the change she wishes it to. In the early books, it is clear that 

love changes the lives of the individuals it impacts (as in The Cardinals) and, when it is the source 

of construed, familial relationships, the lives of those with whom they surround themselves (as 

in When Rain Clouds Gather). The early texts are clear creations of new, small, family-based 

circles in which love achieves some kind of change, taking into its control those included in its 

scope. The problem is, however, that even reading these love stories as allegorical love cannot 

go far enough towards achieving the fundamental changes to society Head believes are essential 

to subvert racism and end oppression. In When Rain Clouds Gather, for example, characters who 

fall outside (by their own choice) the scope of the workings of love are simply written out of the 

story. Thus, Matenge, through suicide, is simply removed from the community.  

 

Head’s portrayal of love and of acts of ubuntu shifts somewhat from its depiction in the first two 

texts to the next two: Maru and A Question of Power. In these, she consciously extends the reach 

of the power she accords to love and to the acts of ubuntu which serve to counteract the negative 



9 

forces of racism (as in Maru). Giving love dominion over the whole of history – both good and 

evil – from its mythological sources to the question of racism in South Africa and the evils of 

Hitler (as in A Question of Power), love has a great deal of work to do. By the end of these two 

novels, and especially A Question of Power, although the power of love/ubuntu is felt by the 

individuals in profoundly transformative ways, it is restricted in its functional operation to these 

characters and their immediate circles. Thus the first four texts may be grouped together, and the 

conclusion reached that despite Head’s attempt to write from a post-oppositional paradigm in 

which love and ubuntu do the philosophical work of addressing discrimination and oppression, 

its impact remains constrained to individuals and families and to a limited extent to communities 

and communal activities (cooperative gardening and farming projects). The novels are in many 

ways social and historical ethnographies, and some of her characters are depicted as sages, with 

the ability to embrace change and act in terms of ubuntu and love.  

 

In the second set of texts, comprising The Collector of Treasures, Serowe: Village of the Rain 

Wind, and A Bewitched Crossroad, Head plumbs the history of Serowe and Botswana for the 

re/sources she needs to present her Africanist view of the world. Her view is deeply syncretic 

and given her rejection of binaries contains multiple and contradictory strands of thinking. 

Unequivocally, however, she begins from the premise that despite the oppression of Africans by 

colonisers, African and western ideas were and are on an equal footing from the point of view of 

their value and meaning and she develops her sage philosophers, showing us how they find 

solutions to the problems of the village, how they recall and tell the stories and histories of the 

region and make sense of events for themselves and others.  

 

Head’s sages are ‘true’ Africans and, it becomes clear, that any idea or person, construct or value 

that does the positive work she sees as necessary for change and development is characterised as 

African by nature. Thus, white and black, male and female, Christian and traditional, western 

and African – are all African if they do the visionary work she seeks to have done. In this way, 

Head’s place as an African writer is incontestable.  

 

1.1. Head’s work in context 

Ngũgĩ argues that African literature “is an ever-continuing struggle to seize back their creative 

initiative in history through a real control of all the means of communal self-definition in time 

and space” (Ngũgĩ, 1992, p. 4). Defining the African self is at the core of this literary canon 



10 

which represents “the sum total of all the national and ethnic literatures of Africa” (Achebe, 

2013, p. 429) and the arts have become an act of socio-political activism (Okpadah, 2020, p. 

84). In southern Africa, the role played by the oral tradition has been key as, for example, in 

the critical work of Tim Couzens who wrote: “Africans have a continuous tradition of literature, 

oral and vernacular, adapting partly to written and European forms when history and inclination 

dictated” (cited in Heywood, 2004, p. 159). The scope of literature in South Africa ranges from 

the early contributions of A C Jordan’s Ingqumbo Yeminyanya in 1940 (translated into English 

and republished as The Wrath of the Ancestors), to Sol Plaatje’s Native Life in South Africa,  to 

Drum magazine edited by Es’kia Mphahlele (Heywood, 2004, p. 26), the critical works of 

Njabulo Ndebele (Driver, 1996, p. 228), and the musical compositions and writing of Todd 

Matshikiza. At Drum’s height, Head was one of only two African women who had published 

in English, Noni Jabavu was the other. (Driver, 1996, p. 227). Given the centrality of political 

protest to Southern African fiction, Head’s works were often seen as problematically apolitical. 

I argue that their intent is to fundamentally shift the view of personhood prevalent at Head’s 

time: whether that expressed by the racist/apartheid structures, or by the pan-Africanist 

antiapartheid discourses. While Head’s writing is distinct in some ways from that of her 

contemporaries, it adopts a stance in respect of the politics of the time, as will be set out in 

Chapter 2. Serowe and A Bewitched Crossroad continue to attract far less critical attention than 

the earlier novels which may account for the undervaluing of Head’s approach in the literature. 

Critics found Head’s later texts especially difficult5, but it is in these that Head actively begins 

to create an alternative to the binaries dominant in understandings of in/equality at the time, 

approaching the problem from the perspective of African personhood. 

 

While the early texts make use of the typical novel form, the later texts are expressly historical-

fictive in style and form. Head uses fictional narrative and historical and ethnographic writing 

styles so that these texts become a “site of struggle” about “interpretive control” (Lewis, 2007, 

p. 33). Although not linear, Head’s understanding of the complexities of personhood, and of 

the individual’s role in the broader social and political context in which s/he lives and by which 

s/he may be equally constrained and enabled becomes ever more complex as her texts move 

through time and place and through internal and external realities and forces. The tragedy of 

 
5 Early responses to A Bewitched Crossroad include Craig MacKenzie (1989a, p. 47) and Barry Ronge. MacKenzie 

saw value in its reappraisal of history but concluded that it does not succeed either as fiction or history as it is an 

idiosyncratic blend of both (1989a, p. 18). Ronge dismissed the text in the popular press primarily it seems because 

he found the names of the characters to be “tongue-twisting mind-benders” (Ronge, 1985, p. 27). 



11 

course, is that her death at 48 years old means that we will never know what the completed 

path would or could have looked like.  

 

What Head terms her “Southern African preoccupations” (Head, 1990, p. 67) include 

refugeeism, racialism, patterns of evil, and the ancient Southern African historical dialogue. 

Through these she provides a complicated and enriching reframing of African personhood and 

community in a rural African context through an intense engagement with the particular history 

of this specific locale. As a result, “literature speaks to the possibilities of freedom that political 

systems are often blind to” (Potter and Stonebridge, 2014, p. 2). Using ubuntu and love 

expressed through reconstructed and reconstituted forms of kinship structures, Head moves her 

characters from alienation to personhood, and from exclusion to inclusion. The move from a 

traditional novel to more ethnographic and historiographic forms of storytelling (such as in the 

gathering of oral testimony, and the use of archival and other materials) is part of Head’s efforts 

to redefine and rearticulate the history of Serowe in which the confluence of historical and 

other forces impact the everyday lives of people. Her aim is to clarify and define ‘Africanness’ 

and African personhood as flexible and creative, engaged with the political and other pressures 

of the time. The texts elasticise time, forcing the reader to step back into the history of the 

village, to consider the present, and to explore an as yet undefined future. Making concrete the 

assertion that Africans were not the simple recipients of the forces of change imposed upon 

them, Head maintains a post-oppositional stance, rejecting simplistic binaries in favour of more 

complex and tonal understandings of the aspects of the histories she presents.  

 

Head’s multidimensional additions to the southern African literary canon and to the ways in 

which the inherent binaries may be addressed speak to Ajayi’s view of colonialism as an 

“episode” in and not the whole of Africa’s history. Head’s refusal to reject everything colonial 

and accept everything African is clear – she shows the two in continuous conversation with 

each other, as a new third way evolves before us. Ajaye’s observation that the colonial “impact 

on Africa was very uneven” (Falola, 2000, p. 170) and that “Africans retained initiative, [such 

that] the ability of Europeans to make entirely new departures in African history was limited” 

(Falola, 2000, p. 171) is particularly evident in Serowe and A Bewitched Crossroad. 

 



12 

1.2. Contestations and contradictions – not all who are human are persons 

In reconstituting African personhood, Head references three core constructs. First, she uses a 

post-oppositional approach to love as a cipher for preferred behaviours to counter racism. 

Second, love as ubuntu-like acts redefines the ways in which humans in Africa come to know 

their own personhood. And finally, applying some of the methods and approaches of 

ethnohistory, and of ‘history from below’, she creates her ‘sage philosophers’ through whose 

wisdom and ways we come to a new vision of Africa’s past, present and future. 

 

Head’s post-oppositional stance allows her to draw on a wide range of sources for love, whether 

spiritual or intellectual resources. Key among these is ubuntu and African religion. In the earlier 

texts, it is acts of love and ubuntu which enable the creation of alternative kinship structures, 

independent from both colonial and state impositions, and also from the constraints of tradition. 

In the later texts, she carries these concepts through as ‘watermarks’, as she develops a set of 

characters who serve as sage philosophers through whose words and actions she exposes, 

grapples with, untangles, constructs and fictionally resolves some of the tensions implicit in 

the binaries of western/African; colonised/coloniser; free/unfree; colonial/African; 

Christian/African, etc. Referencing Africa and Africans of the past, she provides a response to 

the question of how to speak or think of African concepts given the history of the region:  

 

Modern African thought seems somehow to be basically a product of the West. 

What is more, since most African leaders and thinkers have received a Western 

education, their thought is at the crossroads of Western epistemological filiation 

and African ethnocentrism … The conceptual framework of African thinking has 

been both a mirror and a consequence of the experience of European hegemony 

(Mudimbe, 1988, p. 198).  

 

In Head’s depiction of the history, and notwithstanding the aggression and power of the 

colonial and apartheid states, it was Africans who received or rejected the ideas of the 

colonisers, integrating them into their way of life where they chose to (or where they had no 

choice) to either negative or positive effect. From her writings, Head addresses what 

Coundouriotis terms the need to “ward off received ideas” such as patterns of “representing 

Africa as a place of extremes of violence, poverty, and disorder” (Coundouriotis, 2021, p. 2). 

Her literary works offer her unique perspective on the interrelatedness of the personal and the 



13 

historical and actively assert her view of the changes needed to allow for the rebuilding of a 

“world of sweet and courteous exchanges between men” (Head, 1984, p. 75). 

 

In an examination of two projects to decolonise human rights through transcultural dialogue, 

José-Manuel Barreto (2018) shows how Hindu dharma reveals how western conceptions of 

rights fail in respect of valuing the “complex connections of individuals with society and 

cosmos”, while the west would perceive dharma as neglecting injustice and social conflict in 

favour of harmony (Barreto, 2018, p. 493). Similarly, Muslim Umma in the period of Mecca 

saw equality and dignity allocated to all, contrary to the Shari’a restrictions on non-Muslims 

and women. Umma thus contributes to views on the “collective rights and duties to the 

community” (Barreto, 2018, p. 494). Critically for Africa, “struggles against slavery, colonial 

racism and discrimination – ills or legacies of modern imperialism – have also been advanced 

in the name of natural rights, civil rights and human rights” as the examples of writing by 

Ottobah Cugoano and Olaudah Equiano demonstrated in 1787 and 1789 respectively (Barreto, 

2018, p. 497). Barreto does not characterise these as alternatives to human rights or as 

challenging their construction, but rather as part of a “history that runs alongside the history of 

modern colonialism and is elaborated from a Third World perspective” (Barreto, 2018, p. 499). 

Head’s writing aligns with these broader moves as she seeks alternatives to contemporary 

constructions of rights. Katrina Powell examines a number of oral traditions (including 

Appalachian, Aboriginal, Māori and African), finding that these “resist linear plot lines” and 

stand in opposition to the western tradition of rationalism (Powell, 2018, p. 136). Religious and 

social codes which are transmitted orally and the values to which these refer may then be used 

as frames of reference from which to reconsider “universal human rights (as we conceive of 

the concept now)” now (Powell, 2018, p. 136): 

 

Oral traditions, steeped in indigenous rhetorics, more often than not focus on 

communal histories, values of a society, and lessons to be learned by the larger 

community through the trials of an individual. So while the goal may not be to draw 

international attention to a particular human rights violation, human rights issues 

such as violent interactions, land rights disputes, and debates over individual 

sovereignty do occur in oral texts. … recent convergences, then, suggest that 

human rights literary studies examined through an oral tradition lens might lend 

insight into the ways that stories are told and whether they are persuasive or 

effective in enacting change (Powell, 2018, p. 137, emphasis added). 



14 

 

Protest literature, broadly the mode with which South Africans writing under apartheid is most 

readily associated, was a response to the extreme depersonalisation and dehumanisation 

inherent in that system (Ndlovu, 2019, p. 111). Protest, designed to catalyse outrage, presents 

the most harrowing examples of human rights abuses in its call to action. As pointed out in 

Chapter 2, Head finds the narrowness provided by writing about apartheid constrictive, seeking 

rather to establish a form that relativises debates about personhood and problematising the core 

binaries upon which protest was premised.  

 

1.3. A post-oppositional paradigm for change: Ubuntu and love  

Can Africa do without human rights? Are there African alternatives to the discourse of human 

rights? According to Jack Donnelly (1982), discussing human rights in Africa, or human rights 

an Africa, is pointless. Even where rights can be said to exist in Africa, they “were not based 

on one's humanity per se but on membership in the community, status, or some other ascriptive 

characteristic” (Donnelly, 1982, p. 308). Secondly, attempts to show that rights are inherent in 

African thinking are irrelevant to human rights conversations and would destroy human rights 

as we know them because such approaches would seek to restore “the balance between the 

individual and society in this fashion” (Donnelly, 1982, p. 308). Individual human rights as the 

west has conceived of them are essential in his view because they are the “means for realizing 

human dignity” and protect against the “generally undesired, reemergence of the traditional 

order” which does nothing other than undermine rights (Donnelly, 1982, p. 312, emphasis 

added). Although he sees rights as the historical product of western thinking dating to 18th 

Century John Locke, he nonetheless vociferously asserts the need for their universal validity – 

rights “cannot be treated as merely a historical product without destroying the concept” 

(Donnelly, 1982, p. 314). In 2007, he follows this with “the idea of equal and inalienable rights 

that one has simply because one is a human being that was missing not only in traditional 

Asian, African, Islamic, but in traditional Western, societies as well”. African views must thus 

support human rights given that there are no “significant bodies of human rights ideas or 

practices prior to the twentieth century” (Donnelly, 2007, p. 285). As Coundouriotis argues 

that Donnelly’s definition of dignity is tied up with the notion of worthiness: human rights are 

not needed for life, but are needed for a life of dignity (Coundouriotis, 2021, p. 18). Head’s 

texts demonstrate little congruence between the apparent primacy of rights and her view that: 

“No matter what kind of fool you made of yourself, people in southern Africa were still 



15 

oppressed” (Head, 2010, p. 87). In her fiction, Head creates new characters and contexts which 

realise dignity, addressing Coundouriotis’s assertion that “Without the recognition of others (a 

crucial component of the African idea of dignity—Ubuntu…), dignity remains unrealized” 

(Coundouriotis, 2021, p. 24). 

 

Recently, Caitlin Stobie (2022) has linked Head’s context in Botswana and the legal, ethical 

and cultural norms relating to abortion, with the notion of choice within the larger language of 

rights. She argues that Head explores this issue in an approach “grounded in the traditional 

philosophies of Hunhu and ubuntu” (Stobie, 2022, p. 7). She contrasts the responses in When 

Rain Clouds Gather (Chief Sekoto, who is compassionate and understanding to Chief Matenge 

who is a masculinist bully) seeing in the actions of these men Head’s uncoupling of power and 

tenderness from “gendered associations” (Stobie, 2022, p. 15). In Stobie’s view, Head’s 

approach to abortion is distinctively African, confronting readers “with images of bodies at all 

stages of life: foetal forms, stillbirths, abandoned children, virgins, sex workers, newlyweds, 

biogenetic and adoptive mothers, dying leaders, and more”, with the result that “creativity and 

fermentation function synonymously in her fiction” (Stobie, 2022, p. 24).  

 

The assumption that a western view of the person is the only supportable one makes no sense. 

Regardless of context, all individuals assume roles and attitudes redolent with the values of 

families, cultures and societies, which must be explored. Explicit in Donnelly’s view is the 

assertion that whether Africans – amongst others – know it or not, it is better for ‘them’ that 

universal human rights be maintained. Many have argued against such a view whether held 

overtly or covertly (Bisong, 2019; Cobbah, 1987; Metz, 2007; Ndima, 2015) and have proposed 

that an entirely different set of assumptions is needed for Africa. Such alternatives must, they 

argue, be premised on the belief that African approaches to rights and obligations are at the 

very least as significant as non-African ones and we ought actively to seek to make sense of 

and judge these.  

 

As indicated earlier, Slaughter’s works elucidate the link between the novel and human rights 

discourses of the sort proffered by Donnelly. His book, Human Rights Inc. reflects the 

“multiple meanings of incorporation” one of which is the “notion that human personality 

development is a process of socialization, a process of enfranchisement” and through which 

the person is personified (Slaughter, 2009, p. 20). Sylvia Wynter (1984) had already asserted 

the need to see behind the personification of the human in her exploration of the history of 



16 

western thought, showing how the construction of the Other was part of essentialising the 

person as an economic entity. Wynter’s (1984) argument substantiates the view that there is no 

‘universal’ truth inherent in the western view of the person. These are, instead, “stories that 

iterate and normalize homo oeconomicus” and we live 

 

in a moment where the human is understood as a purely biological mechanism that 

is subordinated to a teleological economic script that governs our global well- being 

/ ill- being - a script, therefore, whose macro- origin story calcifies the hero figure 

of homo oeconomicus who practices, indeed normalizes, accumulation in the name 

of (economic) freedom (McKittrick, 2015, p. 10).  

 

Kwasi Wiredu (1998) asserts that African philosophy does not proceed from the same 

assumptions of the individual person that inform western philosophy, arguing that what is 

needed is an analysis of the “elements of culture that play significant roles in the constitution 

of meanings in the various African world views” (Wiredu, 1998, p. 23). He focuses on language 

as a way to disengage African “thought-formations” without making continent-wide 

generalisations about Africa. Wiredu shows that “the existential verb ‘to be’ does not occur in 

the Bantu group of languages”, meaning that the “concept of being as existentially construed” 

is substantially different (Wiredu, 1998, p. 24). Although some have argued that this is a lack 

in African languages, the converse is equally true: that “this existential concept of being is a 

semantically defective concept, notwithstanding its great currency in Western metaphysics” 

(Wiredu, 1998, p. 24). Using the lessons from development studies, where implementing 

change in ways that “entail the abandonment of traditional orientations” or which are not 

“controlled by traditional perspectives” is ineffective and superficial (Anyadike, 2016, p. 1), 

literary analyses premised on fundamental human rights precepts may fail to glean from the 

narratives of alternative visions of the self.  

 

Head’s texts, set in a rural, African village, offer a completely different view of what the 

‘incorporation’ of the person may mean. She sees in Botswana’s specific history the potential 

for a new approach into the problem. Despite being a British protectorate, she says, Botswana 

remained independent in that 

 

its customs and traditions were left intact and people’s traditional rulers had a large 

say in governing their people. Thus, the real Southern African dialogues took place 



17 

in Botswana. Christianity was a dialogue here, as was black people’s ownership of 

the land and the retention of the ancient African land tenure system, as was trade 

(Head, 1990, p. 55, emphasis added). 

 

That Head sees multi-tonal conversations at the core of interactions between oppressors and 

the oppressed is clear. In emphasising the dialogues, she highlights Africans’ agency as a ‘way 

into’ seeking alternatives to analyses of the past and as the basis for a future. From a post-

oppositional paradigm in which she weaves together love with aspects of ubuntu she 

fictionalises an early basis of an approach to personhood which contains not only the 

foundations of change but does so outside of the binaries inherent in protest and protest 

literature.  

 

Ubuntu is the Nguni word for “a specific understanding of personhood and that is that the full 

development of personhood comes with a shared identity and the idea that an individual’s 

humanity is fostered in a network of relationships – I am because you are; we are because you 

are” (Ogude, 2018, p. 1, emphasis in original). The concept is not unique to South Africa, as 

similar terms and ideas are found in Bantu languages across the African continent. Examples 

include umundu (Kikuyu from Kenya), umuntu (Kimeru from Kenya), bumuntu (kiHaya and 

kiSukuma from Tanzania), vumuntu (shiTsonga and shiTswa from Mozambique), bomoto 

(Bobangi from Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)), and gimuntu (kiKongo from DRC), 

and giKwese (from Angola) (Kamwangamalu, 1999, p. 25). Ubuntu as expressed in the Nguni 

aphorism above demonstrates the “universal bond that connects all people to each other and to 

all other types of existence in the universe, including currently living human and nonhuman 

beings, ancestors, the yet unborn, and the natural world” (Graness, 2018, p. 44). As early as 

1969, John Mbiti, whose writings we know Head valued, demonstrated how ubuntu was central 

to African religions and philosophies, providing the foundations of an 

 

African morality [that is] … more ‘societary’ than ‘spiritual’; it is a morality of 

‘conduct’ rather than a morality of ‘being.’ This is what one might call ‘dynamic 

ethics’ rather than ‘static ethics,’ for it defines what a person does rather than what 

he is … Kindness is not a virtue unless someone is kind; murder is not evil until 

someone kills another person in his community. Man is not by nature either ‘good’ 

or ‘bad’ (‘evil’) except in terms of what he does or does not do (Mbiti, 1970, pp. 

279–280). 



18 

 

Head says Mbiti’s ideas appeal to her because they are “wide and generous enough to take in 

all the humble who shall, one day, unexpectedly, inherit the earth” finding in this approach that 

“it is easy to imagine a universe and a people instantly immersed in a religious way of life. 

There are trees in this universe … [and] Also chickens and birds and rivers and sunsets and 

everything that flows and lives (Head, 1990, p. 51).  

 

Whether ubuntu is a value system, an ethical system, or a moral system is the subject of much 

debate among philosophers (Futter, 2016; Metz, 2007, 2014), and a detailed discussion is 

outside of the scope of this thesis. Peter Bisong (2019, p. 37) argues that there is confusion 

between African worldviews or cultures (which comprise religion, myth, philosophy and 

magic), and African philosophy. The problem as he sees it is that much of what constitutes 

African philosophy is seen as spiritualism (Bisong, 2019, p. 37) and it is consequently relegated 

to an inferior position. Thaddeus Metz (2007) argues forcefully for ubuntu to be seen as a moral 

theory. Canvassing several approaches to ubuntu in the literature, he shows that the distinct 

morality of ubuntu resides not in the individual “but rather in a relationship between 

individuals” (Metz, 2007, p. 333) which constitutes a shift of the definitional core of what it 

means to be a person. It is this definitional core which Head’s narratives fictionalise. 

 

The shift results, Metz argues, from the fact that ubuntu contains a core concept not found in 

western theories: “that interpersonal relationships of some kinds have basic moral status” 

which is more significant than the ‘banality’ of seeing African approaches as simply 

‘communitarian’ (Metz, 2007, p. 333). Although Bisong criticises Metz for his portrayal of 

African philosophy as spirituality (Bisong, 2019, p. 491), asserting that it is essential to keep 

apart the religious from the philosophical to be able to see in Africa a true philosophy as 

opposed to a western endorsement of African superstition or mythology (Bisong, 2019). In 

Futter’s (2016) assessment, he concludes that whatever ubuntu is, it reflects a multiplicity of 

ideals rather than an ideal which, given Head’s post-oppositional stance, seems a useful place 

to begin. As Bhekizizwe Peterson indicates, ubuntu remains:  

 

one of the most salient and resonant indigenous moral concepts that African artists 

and intellectuals have wrestled with in attempts to think through the complexities 

of personhood, particularly in the aftermath of colonialism [as well as] one of the 



19 

most used and abused terms in South Africa's public and political lexicon 

(Peterson, 2019, pp. 55–56). 

 

In a discussion of ubuntu’s provenance in South African history and literature, Peterson notes 

that the “most recent and sustained public recuperation of the notion of ubuntu can be traced 

to the early 1990s, particularly in relation to the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation 

Commission” and was “much touted by adherents of the African Renaissance that was 

championed by President Thabo Mbeki” (Peterson, 2019, pp. 55–56). But ubuntu was also 

linked historically to the emergence of Black Consciousness and was a “key concept in much 

of black theology in South Africa” (Peterson, 2019, pp. 55–56). Although, for example, the 

Freedom Charter does not make direct reference to ubuntu, its communalistic language (for 

example, “The people shall share in the country’s wealth” and “The Land Shall be Shared 

Among Those Who Work It!”) aligns to ubuntu.  

 

It is worth engaging with Tutu’s views on ubuntu as there are connections between his and 

Mbiti’s approach, and thus to Head’s work. In the second foreword to the collection of short 

stories published under the title Freedom (Amnesty International, 2011), Archbishop Emeritus 

Desmon Tutu argues that stories and their telling allow us to see “into the world we live in, the 

people we are, the people we can be, and we understand that we are human” (Amnesty 

International, 2011, pp. 5–6). Ubuntu is:  

 

difficult to render into a Western language. It speaks of the very essence of being 

human. When we want to give high praise to someone we say, ‘Yu, u nobuntu’; 

‘Hey, so-and-so has ubuntu.’ Then you are generous, you are hospitable, you are 

friendly and caring and compassionate. You share what you have. It is to say, ‘My 

humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in yours.’ We belong in a bundle 

of life. We say, ‘A person is a person through other persons.’ It is not, ‘I think 

therefore I am.’ It says rather: ‘I am human because I belong. I participate, I share’ 

(Tutu, 2012, emphasis added). 

 

Tutu argues that it is ubuntu and not rights themselves that drives humans to “work together to 

counter the effects of natural disasters” and it is in this sense it is universal (Tutu, 2012). For 

Tutu, Josiah Cobbah’s question of whether Africans “need to ‘modernize’ to become 



20 

individuals in the Western sense” (Cobbah, 1987, p. 324) is answered. African perspectives 

such as ubuntu provide valid alternatives to the dominant discourse. 

 

In Tutu’s view, dignity and rights adhere to all people and although the UDHR is “like a fresh 

dawning sun” (Amnesty International, 2011, p. 7) it is nonetheless to the collective, to ubuntu, 

that he turns. Humans are not, Tutu says,  

 

single entities operating in a vacuum. No, we are all connected to each other, and 

our behaviour, whether good or bad, reverberates across society and down the 

generations ... If we dehumanise others, we dehumanise ourselves (Amnesty 

International, 2011, p. 7) 

 

Tutu fuses ubuntu and Christianity, arguing that it is impossible to act in keeping with the one 

without the other. Forgiveness is Christian (Ephesians 4:32: “Be kind to one another, 

tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you”). Apartheid’s victims 

ought to forgive the perpetrators of abuses because of ubuntu (Murithi, 2006, p. 32).  

 

Tutu’s integration of ubuntu and forgiveness has been criticised, as it “individualized the 

victims”, preventing apartheid from being seen as a crime against humanity despite its 

ethnic/racial basis (Mamdani, 2002, p. 33). As a counter to Mahmood Mamdani’s critique, 

Michael Battle (2000, p. 178) asserts that Tutu’s ubuntu captures a “relational spirituality” in 

opposition to “other social forms of communalism” (Battle, 2000, p. 178), overcoming “the 

tendency to discount personality for the sake of community” (Battle, 2000, p. 179), a tension. 

Nonetheless, Mamdani’s point that the individualisation of victim and perpetrator places the 

suffering of individuals at a remove from the systemic, underpinning racism of apartheid 

stands. Head grapples with this tension between individual and systemic, saying that the writer 

has to have the “biggest … long-term view” possible if problems like racism are to be solved 

(MacKenzie and Clayton, 1989, p. 13). In Maru, Head depicts racism as universal and not 

about white and black people, asserting that “the language used to exploit Basarwa people, the 

methods used to exploit them, the juxtaposition between white and black in South Africa and 

black and Basarwa in Botswana is so exact” (MacKenzie and Clayton, 1989, p. 11).  

 

How Head both universalises and personalises suffering is in the use of love and acts of ubuntu. 

It is important then, that the philosophical link between love and ubuntu put forward by Mpho 



21 

Tshivhase (2018), coincidentally South Africa’s first black woman to obtain a doctorate in 

philosophy, is addressed. All moral theories, she points out, require a foundation, and proposes 

that the philosophical foundation for ubuntu is love. By love, Tshivhase does not mean romance 

nor even friendship. Rather, she argues, the love at the base of ubuntu is a “disinterested love” 

(Tshivhase, 2018, p. 198) which “exists for its own sake and not for the sake of causing 

something else to happen” (Tshivhase, 2018, p. 198). An ubuntu founded on ‘disinterested’ 

love moves it away from interactions between individuals and their specific interrelationships, 

and towards a more generalised view of human social interactions. In this construction neither 

love nor ubuntu require that people are known to one another, nor even that they are in contact 

with each other, as in a community (Tshivhase, 2018, p. 198). Grounding ubuntu in love 

ensures the move from the relational into humanity.  

 

Tshivhase points out that several critics have like Tutu focused on the altruistic aspects of 

ubuntu and its value for society, while thinkers such as Metz and Mogobe Ramose have 

defended its validity as an ethical theory. Tshivhase is interested in ubuntu as a meaningful 

moral theory “regardless of whether humans take it seriously for a scholarship or find it 

beneficial for their status as social beings whose existence necessitates relationality of some 

form or another” (Tshivhase, 2018, p. 200). Placing humans rather than love at the centre of 

ubuntu renders it meaningless outside of people, notwithstanding the relationality of the human 

condition and the need for ubuntu in cases of moral deliberation, where it could provide 

“guiding principles for appropriate moral behaviour” (Tshivhase, 2018, p. 202) 1). Agreeing 

with the theorists cited above that ubuntu is ontological, epistemological, relational and an 

ethical theory, she seeks to identify the “grounding for ubuntu, where such grounding need not 

be instrumental to humans” (Tshivhase, 2018, p. 202). 

 

In this construction, love is an “unattached theory” which “would avoid the centralisation of 

the (human) beloved” (Tshivhase, 2018, p. 203). Love is “valuable in and of itself”, 

independent from how it is aspired to or diverged from. Ubuntu grounded in love is comparable 

to a tree’s shade which “is there every day even if no-one or no-thing finds refuge in the shade, 

uses the shade or recognises that it is there, to begin with” (Tshivhase, 2018, p. 204). Although 

ubuntu might involve some kind of love for humanity, it is not this love on which it should be 

grounded. The love at the base of ubuntu includes the “‘other’ [which] could be any living 

being that one encounters, and whose presence necessarily invokes ubuntu as an appropriate 

response to that ‘other’” (Tshivhase, 2018, p. 204). This love:  



22 

 

[it] is not based on a single focus. Herein there is no beloved; there is simply love 

– a kind of love whose object is everything and nothing at the same time. The nature 

of this love is such because nothing in the universe stays the same and so the fluidity 

of existence requires a mode of love that is not fixated on the concrete aspect of 

anything since everything is at any one point something which becomes nothing at 

some moment or other. A love that is fixated on something is limiting and limited… 

The point is that this kind of possessive or attached love can be paralysing and it 

can prevent one from spreading the love, as it were... ubuntu, when founded on 

love, would not require reciprocity – the golden rule would not be an aspect of it 

… If we want to view ubuntu as the highest form of generality, then we cannot 

have it focused on maintaining a particular kind of social relationship (Tshivhase, 

2018, p. 205). 

 

In addition, she argues that the view of ubuntu as personhood per se is an error, only assuming 

once discussed in relation to humans (Tshivhase, 2018, p. 206).  

 

In discussing alternatives to western rights constructs, Cobbah (1987) proposes an African 

approach to human dignity centred in kinship systems which, he notes, are not a source of 

distress for human rights activists. He points out that it is the “political and civil abuses 

perpetrated by African dictator regimes on their opposition” that is at the heart of the activists’ 

concerns (Cobbah, 1987, p. 328). For Cobbah, as these regimes are not actually African but 

have taken the form of western liberal state structures in which human rights address abuses, 

these criticisms of ‘African ways’ are invalid. Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò (2022) is critical of such 

thinking, arguing that the scholarship of decolonisation inhibits African thought, restricting it 

to a history that has passed. He differentiates between two postcolonial types, the first of which 

is political independence or freedom which he argues should release in a polity “the capacity 

to become history-makers” (Táíwò, 2022). The second is an ideology that forces “an ex-colony 

to forswear, on pain of being forever under the yoke of colonisation, any and every cultural, 

political, intellectual, social and linguistic artefact, idea, process, institution and practice that 

retains even the slightest whiff of the colonial past” (Táíwò, 2022). Decolonisation in this 

second view equates with emancipation from all forms of colonialism, a flawed approach in 

his view. Of particular concern is that on decolonial narratives such as these, the “dominant 

conception of colonialism” is “stilted” and does not account for its historicity: 



23 

 

Except for cases of genocide or the violent reduction of native populations to 

cultural and social insignificance, the epoch of colonisation was not sufficient, at 

least in Africa, to bring about any significant destruction or degradation of the 

essential elements of the culture and conditions of the colonised peoples (Táíwò, 

2022).  

 

Ezekial (Es’kia) Mphahlele – the reader will remember he is a contemporary of Head – picks 

up on this aspect of negritude when he argues that the struggle against white supremacy is 

needed to “assert our human and not African dignity. This latter we have always taken for 

granted” and that despite apartheid there “still survive the toughest elements of African 

humanism which keep us together and supply the moral force which we need in a life that 

rejects us” (Mphahlele, 1963, p. 82).  

 

Head’s fictional works pick up on several of these strands of thinking. Of her rejection of the 

black: good/white: evil binary she says, “… you can’t say all white men are evil. ... You can’t 

say African people, because they walk around in rags and tatters, are good” (Vigne, 1991, p. 54, 

emphasis in original). Mphahlele too asserts that he does not accept the romanticised Africa, a 

“symbol of innocence, purity and artless primitiveness”, noting that violence is “often a healthy 

human state of mind” which negritude leaves out (Mphahlele, 1963, p. 83). The romanticised 

Africa means that we “are told only half - often even a falsified half - of the story of Africa … 

[the] synthesis of Europe and Africa does not necessarily reject the negro-ness of the African” 

(Mphahlele, 1963, p. 83).  

 

Like Mphahlele, Táíwò argues that we should focus on the present and pay attention to 

crosscurrents in creative works in multiracial societies, citing South Africa as an example. The 

current postcolonial movement, he argues, sees as worthwhile only those cultures that are 

‘indigenous’ or ‘traditional’. Scholarly works should also open themselves up “to new ways of 

being human derived from the concepts and practices of those who imperialised us” especially 

as many Africans prefer “a more inclusive world which celebrates the entire range of human 

possibilities, including being other than African” (Táíwò, 2022, n.p.). After all, “‘African’ does 

not come in only one flavour”. Scholars must heed the call to “take the agency of the colonised 

seriously and to pay attention to what they do with the legacy of colonisation” which has 

become almost absolutized. In line with Ajayi (2000), Táíwò argues that “especially in Africa, 



24 

colonialism is neither as powerful nor as profound in its impact as our decolonisers proclaim” 

(Táíwò, 2022). It is impossible thus to turn only to colonialism to explain African phenomena 

or to the “fractures, cleavages and different historicities” across the continent. Significantly, 

“putting colonisation at the centre of ex-colonised lives is historically suspect and has the 

unintended consequence of making less legible, if not rendering completely invisible, the 

autonomous lives (despite colonisation) led by the colonised even while colonialism lasted. It 

eviscerates the lives they led before colonialism was imposed on them, and the lives they have 

crafted since they threw off the colonial yoke” (Táíwò, 2022, n.p.).  

 

The concept of ubuntu provides us with a useful paradigm from which to understand Head’s 

underlying philosophical concerns and meets a number of the concerns raised above. Ubuntu 

“cannot be reduced to a racial category very much in the same way that Western individualism 

and discourses on individual agency, rationality and autonomy are not, even when they work 

to support certain racial stereotypes” (Ogude, 2018, p. 2). A communitarian definition of 

humanness based on a collective expression does not undermine or cancel out “human 

independence and individual personhood”, in which ‘the person’ is detached from ‘the 

community’ (Ogude, 2018, p. 2). Rather, James Ogude argues, “personhood is attained through 

complex processes of exchange and engagement as people interact and communicate with 

those around them and with the totality of their environment”. In this view, ubuntu is but one 

“strand” of personhood in Africa, and is expressed as an aspirational moral obligation (Ogude, 

2018, p. 3). There is no absolute classification of behaviours and morals that ‘adhere’ to ubuntu 

– or that do not. Ubuntu suggests, rather, that “personhood is experienced and performed in the 

practical exercise of living and coming into being” in which relationality is the “primary 

condition of human existence” (Ogude, 2018, p. 5). Unlike the positioning of human rights in 

an inherent ‘dignity’, ubuntu is achieved, as is personhood. 

 

1.4. Structure of the thesis 

Chapter 2 places Head in context for the reader by outlining the events of her life, setting out her 

body of work, and assessing the critical responses to these. Although Head’s life story has been 

and continues to be the source of much fascination, I choose not to reference the events of Head’s 

life in my textual analyses. The events of her life are offered simply to provide the backdrop for 

an appreciation of Head’s time and context. A multitude of critical perspectives has been 

applied to her writing and she is shown through these to exploit a range of diverse paradigms, 



25 

anticipating and responding to debates about Africa and its future. A brief background to human 

rights in South Africa and the role of the Freedom Charter in the resistance movement in South 

Africa provides the setting against which Head’s intellectual and political interests are 

established and which are evident in her works.  

 

In Chapter 3, I examine how literature (particularly the novel form) and human rights have been 

intertwined with particular reference to South African literature. The chapter considers the impact 

of this relationship on literature and its criticism and examines creative expression as part of the 

struggle against apartheid. Although Head can be considered to write ‘against’ apartheid (as well 

as other forms of discrimination and inequity), she is not considered an ‘anti-apartheid’ or 

‘protest’ writer making clear assertions against the national and systematised racism of the time 

informed by the lack of rights of black South Africans. Rather, and in her own words, Head 

‘protests’ from the perspective of writing against all forms of exploitation and oppression, to find 

“an eternal and continuous world” from which her writing could be “illuminating the future for 

younger generations” (Head, 1990, p. 86). Through her writing she engages in a “search for as 

an African for a sense of historical continuity, a sense of roots” (Head, 1990, p. 86).  

 

Chapter 4 turns directly to the literature, starting with a discussion of The Cardinals and When 

Rain Clouds Gather. The chapter looks at the ways in which these early books introduce Head’s 

questioning of the binaries at the heart of the African intellectual tradition, using the traditional 

form. The urban setting predominates in South African protest writing. The Cardinals is the only 

one of Head’s texts with an urban setting. Her first published novel, Rain Clouds Gather, takes 

us immediately into a rural setting which is where her texts will remain. In her move from urban 

to rural setting and in her rejection of the white/black views of colonialism/nationalism, Head is 

recalibrating nationalism. In order to do this, she draws not only on the rural context in which 

she finds herself, but on conceptions of tradition, development and progress. The chapter also 

examines how Head introduces the concepts of ubuntu and love which are examined as 

examples of post-oppositional thinking, linking to Head’s overall purpose for writing as 

expressed in her letters and other texts.  

 

In Chapter 5, attention turns to Maru and A Question of Power. The texts demonstrate Head’s 

rejecting of dichotomous views, showing how she displaces especially racial binaries. The 

novels complicate ‘race’, replacing the old binary of black victim and white oppressor with a 

view in which it is the attributes or type of person that determines whether one is African or 



26 

not. ‘African’ is no longer defined by skin colour or other biological or human attributes, but 

by the extent to which one is a person in the fullness of the adoption and discharge of love and 

ubuntu. In rejecting “damn white, damn black” (Head, 1990, p. 6) Head creates her new ‘race’ 

with African values at the core.  

 

Chapter 6 examines The Collector of Treasures as illustrative of the concerns which will inform 

the focus of her final two texts, Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind and A Bewitched Crossroad. 

The interplay between traditional and colonial mores is evaluated through the lens of 

compassion, and of the ability of a person to embody the best of both value systems. The text 

presents the “painful muddle” of life in the village, sifting and sorting through the values from 

among which African villagers must choose (Head, 1977, p. 109).  

 

In Chapter 7, the final chapter of the thesis, Head’s sage philosopher comes to the fore. 

Expressive of the values of love and ubuntu, the sage is aware of the inevitability of change to 

tradition. As the sages navigate physical and philosophical migrations from one place to another, 

they offer suggestions to their audience as to how problems may be solved and establish through 

their characters and narratives what Head argues is essential for change and development: a 

creole African tradition capable of setting out what should be. Head historicises fiction and 

fictionalises oral and written histories to bolster for the reader the view she argues for. The 

texts reflect her response to use the research she had done in original ways (Eilersen, 2001, 

p. 8). 

 

  



27 

Chapter 2: Bessie Head’s life, works and critical reception 

 

I have always just been me, with no frame of reference to anything beyond myself 

… I fear any biographer would be bored to tears by my own life story … and I look 

back on myself as a personality, plain and ordinary, without any glamour or 

mystery (Head, 1990, pp. 3, 5). 

 

The depth and degree of interest in Head’s relatively small collection of works has not waned 

in the almost 40 years since her death in 1986. Similarly, neither has the curiosity about her 

mental state, her ‘behaviour’, and her treatment of others decreased with accounts of her 

conduct being published even decades after her death (Gardner, 1986; Gray, 2014; for example, 

Nazareth, 2006). At least part of the attraction to Head’s works may be linked directly to the 

fact that so much of what she wrote about and how she wrote it is different to what was common 

in much South African writing at the time, particularly the later pieces, Serowe: Village of the 

Rain Wind (Head, 1981) and A Bewitched Crossroad (Head, 1984). This chapter sets out a brief 

biography of Head, lists the works that comprise her legacy, and offers a survey of relevant 

critical responses.  

 

Head has been considered a protest writer, a feminist or woman/ist writer, a South African 

writer, a Botswanan writer, a colonial writer, and an African writer, among other categories 

with critics often applying one or more combinations of these categories to her oeuvre. 

Regardless of the labels, however, Head repeatedly claimed for herself the widest possible 

identity as a writer, stating that writing was: 

 

… a kind of participation in the thought of the whole world. No other occupation 

provides for such an international outlook as writing. I have my national, my 

African side but I am also very much an international kind of person (Head, 1990, 

p. 95).  

 

Head justifies the choice of novel as her fictional vehicle in 1978 because it is 

 



28 

like a large rag-bag into which one can stuff anything – all one’s philosophical, social 

and romantic speculations. I have always reserved a special category for myself, as 

a writer – that of a pioneer blazing a new trail into the future (Head, 1990, p. 64). 

 

In elucidating the role of her writing, Head aligns somewhat with acclaimed literary critic, F. 

R. Leavis, who required the novel to raise “uniquely and economically, questions about values, 

about judgments that are continuous with those we make in our daily lives” (Gregor, 1985, 

p. 437). Expressed in the 1940s, Leavis’s expectations for a novel are interrogated by Slaughter 

who demonstrates the “sociocultural, formal, historical, and ideological conjunctions between 

human rights and the novel, particularly the coming of age genre” (Slaughter, 2009, p. 3). Given 

the scope and range of critical assessments of Head’s novels, I argue that notwithstanding the 

available intricate and in-depth discussions of Head’s works, there remains the possibility for 

an approach to her writing that locates her as part of a tradition of writing in southern Africa 

which grapples directly with questions of how to articulate what it is that defines African-ness 

and personhood. 

 

It is the (roughly phrased) theme of personal development that is most overtly explored in 

critical responses to When Rain Clouds Gather (Head, 2010) and to an extent in The Cardinals 

(Head, 1993). Such a view of Head’s texts is often also implicit in other views, such as in the 

focus on her ‘madness’ or her search for identity, or on the role of women, many of which 

proceed from the assumption that the texts in question are evidence of the ‘growth’ or coming 

to awareness of the protagonist. Makhaya’s growing awareness in When Rain Clouds Gather, 

for example, or Elizabeth’s in A Question of Power conform to the goal that we have as readers 

come to expect from a novel. In part, it is the envisioning of a personal transition that underlies 

the novel as a matter of form. Slaughter terms this as the process of “becoming what one already 

is by right” which serves as the abstract statement against which the “normative story of how 

the natural and the individual might become civil and social … without recourse to social 

coercion” (Slaughter, 2009, p. 26).  

 

The lens of the novel – and in particular of the Bildungsroman – is the individual. It is she or 

he who is enmeshed in the establishment a culture of rights premised as bearer of such rights 

(Slaughter, 2009, p. 26). What Slaughter also notes, however, is that it is this same normative 

story that becomes the vehicle through which disenfranchised creative writers (those who are 

‘other’, in the subaltern’ or who are ‘writing back’) give expression to “the terms and 



29 

mechanics of enfranchisement” and over “the processes and prospects of incorporation” 

(Slaughter, 2009, p. 27). For the most part, however, such creative products tend to be 

“conservative of the prevailing egalitarian imaginary”, given in particular to clarifying rights 

or citizenship, resulting in texts that are “reformist rather than revolutionary” (1995). The novel 

form can be “retooled” however, (Slaughter, 2009, p. 31), and in the discussion that follows 

the critical responses to how Head has done so are highlighted.  

 

Alan Ramón Ward argues that Head’s works can be read as the stories of individuals and 

allegorically as stories of communities. He argues that there is a distinction in Head’s works 

 

between a belief in a set of ideas and living these ideas. Whereas the former is a 

reflective attitude, and thus prone to shifts, changes, distortions, and reversals, the 

latter is an accepted and, for the most part, an unquestioned orientation which 

directs the entirety of one’s perceptions (Ward, 2013, p. 11). 

 

Attempts to define or proscribe Head’s political views result from Head’s own vigorous 

rejection of “a duplication of colonial modes of power and self-definition in African 

nationalism” (Lewis, 2007, p. 74). Her works engage with racism and discrimination at both a 

personal and community level. Head views racism as inherent in humans and not as a 

white/black phenomenon as a result of which her narratives are deeply politicised (Ndebele, 

1986) and develop “especially acute explorations of power and resistance” (Lewis, 2007, p. 2). 

 

2.1. Bessie Head: a brief biography6 

Early years  

Bessie Amelia Head (born Emery) was born in a mental institution in South Africa on 6 July 

1937. Her mother was a white woman (Bessie Amelia Emery, ‘Toby’ to her family) who had 

psychiatric issues subsequent to the death of her young son. Head’s father’s race only became 

apparent once she was born. It is worth noting that “since 1927 extramarital sexual intercourse 

between a white and black person in South Africa had been a punishable offence” (Eilersen, 

1995, p. 8). Emery insisted that her daughter be given her name, and Bessie was given for 

adoption to a white couple. She was soon returned because she looked “strange”, “quite black 

 
6 The biography below relies almost exclusively on Gillian Stead Eilersen’s extensive work, Bessie Head: Thunder 

Behind Her Ears. There is no other text as comprehensive as this one. 



30 

and native in appearance” (Eilersen, 1995, p. 9). She was then placed with foster parents, Nellie 

and George Heathcote, a poor ‘coloured’ (mixed race) couple (Eilersen, 1995, p. 9). On 13 

September 1943, Toby died (Eilersen, 1995, p. 10) and around the same time, Head’s foster 

father died which made life difficult (Eilersen, 1995, p. 14). Head loved her foster mother 

despite being “violently beaten for the slightest thing” (Eilersen, 1995, pp. 14–15) and the 

young child worked hard, cleaning, selling and foraging for food (Eilersen, 1995, p. 15). 

 

At 13, Head was placed at St Monica’s Home when a Mr Benjamin found that Head was made 

to “work hard” in a home “so bad that [he] had to report it and get [her] removed as soon as 

possible” (Eilersen, 1995, p. 18). Head had never questioned that her foster mother was her 

mother and the manner in which she learned of the truth was traumatic (Eilersen, 1995, p. 25). 

As a result of expressing that she missed her mother, one of the missionaries announced that 

Heathcote was not her mother and she could not return to her (Eilersen, 1995, p. 24). At the 

same time, at a hearing to determine whether she could visit her foster family, she was told that 

her real mother was “insane” and her real father was “a native” (Eilersen, 1995, p. 35), events 

which affected the rest of her life (Eilersen, 1995, p. 25). Head recalled that she “harboured a 

terrible and blind hatred for missionaries and the Christianity which they represented, and […] 

never set foot in a Christian church again” (Eilersen, 1995, pp. 25–26). 

 

St Monica’s  

Head was made to abandon Catholicism and embrace Anglicanism. She escaped into reading 

(Eilersen, 1995, p. 26), her academic abilities making her part of an “elite group” at high school 

(Eilersen, 1995, p. 26). In 1953, the Bantu Education Act made it difficult for mission schools 

as government took control of African education (Eilersen, 1995, p. 29). Despite these 

developments, the new principal of St Monica’s, Margaret Cadmore, “made a tremendous 

impression on Bessie” and encouraged her enormously (Eilersen, 1995, p. 30). Head took 

longer to complete her teacher’s training certificate as she failed Physical Training and had to 

repeat (Eilersen, 1995, p. 33). 

 

Aged 18, Head was discharged from the Children’s Act and from St Monica’s. She qualified 

in 1957 with a Natal Teachers’ Senior Certificate (Eilersen, 1995, p. 33) and quickly realised 

how sheltered her life had been. The coloured community was engaged in a political tussle 

over the removal of their franchise in Natal and the Cape (Eilersen, 1995, p. 34) and, in the 



31 

previous year (1955), the Freedom Charter had been adopted at the Congress of the People. A 

few in her circle became politically active (Eilersen, 1995, p. 34):  

 

… many people from Bessie’s circle of contacts vowed never to trust or support 

the white man again and a few became active in the resistance movement, Bessie 

herself observed but could not really identify with this cause … Once again she 

chose books (Eilersen, 1995, p. 34). 

 

She became a member of the M L Sultan Library, and read extensively on Hinduism, 

Mahatma Gandhi, the Natal Indian Congress, and the Indian attack on South Africa’s 

laws in the United Nations in 1948. She was inspired by the story of Gandhi, especially 

by his belief in Allah and Christ (Eilersen, 1995, p. 36), joined a Hindu sect and took 

lodgings with an Indian family. The extent and rapidity of the changes, the new religion 

and intellectual growth led to a near-breakdown making teaching difficult and in June 

1958 she resigned and moved to Cape Town (Eilersen, 1995, pp. 37–38).  

 

Cape Town and Johannesburg 

Initially appointed as a freelance writer for the Golden City Post, Head was quickly appointed 

staff reporter. Surrounded by resistance to apartheid legislation designed to separate the races, 

Head was fully aware of these injustices saying that she worked in the “context of my early 

beginnings in South Africa as a South African black. Poverty has been with me all my life, but 

it was like a shared social problem” (MacKenzie and Clayton, 1989, p. 9). She also says that 

she knows of herself that she is “so good a writer that I am not torn by nationalistic arguments 

… these arguments just don’t matter to me – it’s all props and things that I have found 

unnecessary” (MacKenzie and Clayton, 1989, p. 11). Her journalistic work influenced her as a 

writer: 

 

I like a very clear precise style of communicating, with as much economy as 

possible. … I am not loose and baggy. I’m very concise and taut, and I intend 

saying as much as possible in the most economical way (MacKenzie and Clayton, 

1989, p. 8).  

  

In April 1959, Head accepted a position in Johannesburg at the Golden City Post and came to 

know Can Themba, Nat Nakasa and Lewis Nkosi from the offices shared with Drum (Eilersen, 



32 

1995, p. 46). The Pan-Africanists had begun to make themselves known, particularly African 

National Congress Youth League (ANCYL) leaders Robert Sobukwe, Nelson Mandela and 

Walter Sisulu (Eilersen, 1995, p. 47). Sobukwe was particularly important for Head as he was 

“continually rejecting the concept of race and stressing instead the unifying idea of one human 

race” (Eilersen, 1995, p. 47) and “for the first time ever, [Head] involved herself in politics” 

(Eilersen, 1995, p. 48). She was attracted to a “fundamental unity of African thought that was 

inspiring some of Africa’s leading statesmen of the late fifties” (Eilersen, 1995, p. 48). Head 

says her 

 

whole manner of speaking and thinking and walking changed. It totally unsuited 

me for living in such a climate and environment as South Africa. It gave me a new 

skin and a new life that was totally unacceptable to conditions down there … (cited 

in Garrett, 1999, p. 122). 

 

In 1960, Head joined the Pan-African Congress (PAC) and was introduced to Robert Sobukwe 

(Eilersen, 1995, pp. 50–51). At a protest on 21 March 1960, several prominent PAC members 

were arrested (Eilersen, 1995, p. 51), not for burning their passes (identity books) as planned, 

but on the more serious charge of incitement. Head was arrested as part of a separate raid when 

a letter from a PAC member (ironically bemoaning the PAC) was found on her. Eilersen reports 

that little can be traced about the trial but that the stress coupled with an unpleasant sexual 

experience triggered a suicide attempt (Eilersen, 1995, p. 54). 

 

After a period in hospital, Head returned to Cape Town and the Golden City Post (Eilersen, 

1995, p. 56) but soon resigned due to depression and remained unemployed for a time (Eilersen, 

1995, p. 57). During her recovery, she became friends with Randolph Vigne (Eilersen, 1995, 

p. 58) and wrote her own ‘newspaper’ (The Citizen), a strongly pro-Africanist publication 

which highlighted the “absurdities of the apartheid system” (Eilersen, 1995, p. 58). 

 

Marriage and motherhood  

In 1961, Head met and married Harold Head, l