Bessie Head

She had a 21st birthday party with old friends, then took a train for Cape Town, where she intended to become a journalist.

South Africa's urbanised non-whites were beginning to stir under the ever-more-restrictive laws of apartheid.

Several mass-market newspapers and magazines already catered to their tastes, of which the weekly Drum was the most famous.

Head sought employment instead with Drum's sister publication, the weekly Golden City Post.

She worked there for almost a year, filing courtroom stories and other small tasks given to rookies in the newsroom.

She wrote under her real name, Bessie Amelia Emery.

Although Cape Town was then of a similar size to Durban, it was vastly more diverse and sophisticated, with a much longer history.

It was and is the country's political capital, being the home to its Parliament.

In Pietermaritzburg and Durban, Bessie had been a member of a small minority group, English-speaking Coloureds (mixed-race).

In Cape Town she was suddenly a member of the largest local racial group — Coloured — but one that spoke Afrikaans in its daily life.

Although she never became comfortable in this language derived from Cape Town's early Dutch settlers, she was soon able to get by.

What she found more difficult to accept were the divisions in this community by skin tone and economic status.

She was too dark to join the elite, so she preferred to associate with the workers and underclass in District Six, the large Coloured community that lived on the west side of Table Mountain, not far from the centre.

Between her work and her lodgings in District Six, the young provincial newcomer quickly adopted to the style and pace of the big city.

She also became more acutely aware of South Africa's many internal conflicts.

Bessie Amelia Emery Head (6 July 1937 – 17 April 1986) was a South African writer who, though born in South Africa, is usually considered Botswana's most influential writer.

She wrote novels, short fiction and autobiographical works that are infused with spiritual questioning and reflection.

Bessie Amelia Emery was born in Pietermaritzburg, Union of South Africa, the child of a "white" woman and a "non-white" man at a time when interracial relationships were illegal in South Africa.

Bessie's mother, Bessie Amelia Emery, from the wealthy South African Birch family, had been hospitalised for several years in mental hospitals following the death of her first child, a boy.

She was in the huge mental hospital in Pietermaritzburg when she gave birth to Bessie.

Although she was not allowed to keep the child, she did give the daughter her own name.

Infant Bessie was first placed with white foster parents on the assumption that she was white.

A few weeks later, these parents realised that she was brown and returned her to the authorities.

She was then placed with a mixed-race or "coloured" family, the Heathcotes, in a poor non-white area of Pietermaritzburg.

Here, she grew up with a strict foster mother, Nelly Heathcote, and attended the local Catholic Church and primary school.

She never quite realised that she was not a Heathcote.

She enjoyed a near-normal childhood of her time and place, except that her foster mother resented her love of books.

When Bessie was 12, after she had completed four years of primary school education, the authorities moved her to St. Monica's Home for Coloured Girls, an Anglican boarding-school in Durban.

At first, Bessie tried to run away and go home.

Later, she began to appreciate the wealth of books and knowledge that the school offered.

At the end of her second year, she endured the first great trauma of her life.

The authorities abruptly told her that she was the daughter of a white woman, not Nelly Heathcote, and that she would not be allowed to return to her former home for the Christmas holidays.

The young teenager was devastated and withdrew into herself.

Two years later, at the end of 1953, Bessie passed her Junior Certificate examination.

She went on to do a two-year Teacher Training Certificate at a nearby college, while living at St. Monica's. Finally, at the beginning of 1956, the court declared her an adult; she was awarded a provisional teaching certificate; and she accepted a job as a teacher in a coloured primary school in Durban.

During this time she developed close friendships with several of the white staff of St. Monica's, as well as several members of the "Indian" community, and her interest in non-Christian religions flourished, especially Hinduism.

On the other hand, she had only a passing contact with the "black" African majority in Natal, who were overwhelmingly Zulu.

In mid-1958, tired of her daily routines and dreaming of bigger things, Head resigned her job.

In 1959, Head moved to Johannesburg to work on Home Post, another of Drum's sister publications; she was given her own column and a steady salary.

Here she met such noted writers as Lewis Nkosi, Can Themba, and Dennis Brutus, and experimented with her own independent writing.