[In the following autobiographical essay, Head describes the ways in which her works reflect “the whole spectrum of Southern African preoccupations—refugeeism, racialism, patterns of evil, and the ancient Southern African historical dialogue.” Denied a passport to return to South Africa, the exiled writer settled in neighboring Botswana, where she lived and wrote until her death in 1986.]

In some inexplicable way the South American writer, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, captured the whole soul of ancient Southern African history in a few casual throw-away lines in his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude:

… In the small separate room, where the walls were gradually being covered by strange maps and fabulous drawings, he taught them to read and write and do sums, and he spoke to them about the wonders of the world, not only where his learning had extended, but forcing the limits of his imagination to extremes. It was in that way that the boys ended up learning that in the southern extremes of Africa there were men so intelligent and peaceful that their only pastime was to sit and think. …¹

This astonishing observation on life in Southern Africa occurs at the very beginning of the novel and except that insofar as it is indicative of the author's vast range of intellectual compassion, the quote I use is quite unrelated to the general development of the novel's themes and preoccupations. What is so astonishing is the accuracy of the observation. Southern African history is associated with so many horrors—police states, detentions, sudden and violent mass protests and death exploitation and degrading political systems. Any thought that it could have once been one of “the wonders of the world” seems unreal.

And yet, long ago, before the period of colonial invasion, it was a beautiful world. The British historian, Anthony Sillery, in his book Founding a Protectorate, gives a little indication of life in Southern Africa before it was almost totally conquered by foreign powers:

… at the beginning of the Scramble for Africa the southern route presented to Great Britain the most readily available means of access to the interior. … Southern Africa, especially for an Englishman, was a friendly country. The chiefs, many of them courteous, civilized men, were hospitable, and the people helpful and only rarely aggressive. …²

Sillery contrasts this with the difficulties the invaders faced in their attempts to conquer East and North Western Africa. The tribes were generally “rapacious, suspicious, extortionate and warlike and the interior filled with steamy, fetid swamps through which nothing but a canoe could travel.”

I was born in South Africa and that is synonymous with saying that one is born into a very brutal world—if one is black. Everything had been worked out by my time and the social and political life of the country was becoming harsher and harsher. A sense of history was totally absent in me and it was as if, far back in history, thieves had stolen the land and were so anxious to cover up all traces of the theft that correspondingly, all traces of the true history have been obliterated. We, as black people, could make no appraisal of our own worth; we did not know who or what we were, apart from objects of abuse and exploitation. Each nation offers the world a little of its light; each nation boasts of the great men who shaped its destiny. We had a land that offered the world only gold; no great men were needed to articulate the longings of the people. In a creative sense I found myself left only with questions. How do we and our future generations resolve our destiny? How do we write about a world long since lost, a world that never seemed meant for humans in the first place, a world that reflected only misery and hate? It was my attempt to answer some of these questions that created many strange divergences in my own work.

Botswana is so close to South Africa that barely a night's journey by train separates the two countries from each other. Botswana was the former British Bechuanaland Protectorate which became independent in 1966. In my eyes Botswana is the most unique and distinguished country in the whole of Africa. It has a past history that is unequalled anywhere in Africa. It is a land that was never conquered or dominated by foreign powers and so a bit of ancient Africa, in all its quiet and unassertive grandeur, has remained intact there. It became my home in 1964.

When I was first published in 1968, a London literary agent wrote to me as follows: “… There isn't much of a market for South African literature here in England. People don't seem to be so interested in it. But you have new experiences by having lived in Botswana. Let us see what you can make of it. …”

I cannot pretend to be a student of South African literature; I cannot assess its evolution or lack of evolution. I only feel sure that the main function of a writer is to make life magical and to communicate a sense of wonder. I do admit that I found the South African situation so evil that it was impossible for me to deal with, in creative terms. A British visitor to South Africa once said to me: “You arrive in South Africa and see all those black faces. And you think: ‘They must have the same sensitivities and feelings as we do.’ But no matter how much you think this the system beams at you that all those black faces are not human and you leave the country without having any communication with black people at all. …”

It was this nightmare sense of despair that was suddenly lifted from me. Literature is very functional in Southern Africa and bound inextricably to human suffering; the death of South African literature is that it is almost blinded by pain; people hardly exist beside the pain. I found myself performing a peculiar shuttling movement between two lands. All my work had Botswana settings but the range and reach of my preoccupations became very wide. People, black people, white people, loomed large on my horizon. I began to answer some of the questions aroused by my South African experience.

My work has covered the whole spectrum of Southern African preoccupations—refugeeism, racialism, patterns of evil, and the ancient Southern African historical dialogue.

REFUGEEISM

Refugees flood into Botswana from three points—South West Africa (Namibia), Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), and South Africa. In 1967 I was officially registered as a South African refugee and for two years I lived with the refugee community in Northern Botswana. My first novel, When Rain Clouds Gather, grew out of this experience. It was a fearfully demoralising way of life, of unemployment and hand-outs from the World Council of Churches. Liberation and power loomed large on the horizon for refugees from Zimbabwe and due to this they were the only refugees at that time who were regularly air-lifted out of Botswana for military training. They were all in opposing camps and their quarrels about power were violent and brutal. A young refugee from Zimbabwe quietly detached himself from the group and held long dialogues with me. He wanted an alternative to war and power. He had no faith in the future black leadership of Zimbabwe. There was no one articulating the hopes of the people and he did not want to die for a worthless cause. I latched eagerly on to his dialogue and my first novel provides an alternative for young men. I created a symbolic type of refugee personality. I implied that he was a man of talent. I made him briefly face the implications of black power and then turned him abruptly away from the madding crowd to spend a lifetime in a small rural village, battling with food production problems.

My first novel is important to me in a personal way. It is my only truly South African work, reflecting a black South African viewpoint. The central character in the novel, a black South African refugee, is almost insipid, a guileless, simple-hearted simpleton. But that is a true reflection of the black South African personality. We are an oppressed people who have been stripped bare of every human right. We do not know what it is like to have our ambitions aroused, nor do we really see liberation on an immediate horizon. Botswana was a traumatic experience to me and I found the people, initially, extremely brutal and harsh, only in the sense that I had never encountered human ambition and greed before in a black form.

RACIALISM

With all my South African experience I longed to write an enduring novel on the hideousness of racial prejudice. But I also wanted the book to be so beautiful and so magical that I, as the writer, would long to read and re-read it. I achieved this ambition in an astonishing way in my second novel, Maru. In Botswana they have a conquered tribe, the Baswara or Bushmen. It is argued that they were the true owners of the land in some distant past, that they had been conquered by the more powerful Botswana tribes and from then onwards assumed the traditional role of slaves. Baswara people were also abhorrent to Botswana people because they hardly looked African, but Chinese. I knew the language of racial hatred but it was an evil exclusively practised by white people. I therefore listened in amazement as Botswana people talked of the Baswara whom they oppressed:

“They don't think,” they said. “They don't know anything.”

For the first time I questioned blind prejudice:

“How do they know that? How can they be sure that the Baswara are not thinking?”

The research I did among Botswana people for Maru gave me the greatest insights and advantages to work right at the roots of racial hatred. I found out above all that that type of exploitation and evil is dependent on a lack of communication between the oppressor and the people he oppresses. It would horrify an oppressor to know that his victim has the same longings, feelings, and sensitivities as he has. Nothing prevented a communication between me and Botswana people and nothing prevented me from slipping into the skin of a Moswara person. And so my novel was built up in blinding flashes of insights into an evil that hung like the sickness of death over all black people in South Africa.

PATTERNS OF EVIL

My third novel, A Question of Power, had such an intensely personal and private dialogue that I can hardly place it in the context of the more social and outward-looking work I had done. It was a private philosophical journey to the sources of evil. I argued that people and nations do not realise the point at which they become evil; but once trapped in its net, evil has a powerful propelling motion into a terrible abyss of destruction. I argued that its form, design, and plan could be clearly outlined and that it was little understood as a force in the affairs of mankind.

THE ANCIENT SOUTHERN AFRICAN HISTORICAL DIALOGUE

If one wishes to reach back into ancient Africa, the quality of its life has been preserved almost intact in Botswana. It is a world that moves so slowly that it seems to be asleep within itself. It is like a broad, deep, unruffled river and as accommodating. Anything that falls into its depth is absorbed. No new idea stands sharply aloof from the social body, declaiming its superiority. It is absorbed and transformed until it emerges somewhere along the line as “our traditional custom.” Everything is touched by “our traditional custom”—British Imperialism, English, Independence, new educational methods, progress, and foreigners. It all belongs. So deep is people's sense of security that their general expression is one of abstraction and quiet absent-mindedness.

Botswana is one of those countries that survive by sheer luck and unexpected good fortune. On several occasions it teetered on the brink of being absorbed into Rhodesia or being governed by South Africa. During the period of colonial occupation, it produced two of the greatest black leaders the continent may ever know—Khama, The Great, and his son, Tshekedi Khama—men distinguished for their personal integrity and the power with which they articulated the hopes of their people. During the period of colonial occupation the British scoured the land from end to end in an endeavour to uncover its mineral wealth. Accidentally, after independence, the largest diamond mine in the world was discovered by a jet plane photographing the Kalahari desert with an infrared light camera. It is thought that had the British still been in control they would have wrecked the country rather than forsake such wealth.

Botswana benefitted by the catastrophe which fell upon South Africa. At the time of exploration into the interior all black chiefs were illiterate. They were helplessly dependent on verbal explanations given to them about documents which appealed for gold and diamond exploration concession rights. The verbal explanations never tallied with the contents of the documents, which dealt with the wholesale purchase of the land by the foreign invaders. In African custom the land could never be bought or sold; it could be apportioned for use to foreigners who had been befriended by the tribe or who had rendered services. The above and many other fraudulent means, like intoxicating the chiefs with brandy and then getting them to sign concession documents, were used to wrest the land from the tribes. Most of the tribes of South Africa were landless by the 1830s when foreign invasion reached the southern tip of Botswana.

Then a reaction set in. The powerful London Missionary Society which had its headquarters at Kuruman, near the southern tip of Botswana, began to campaign about the land question. Missionaries like John Mackenzie wrote books and papers exposing the means by which the land had been taken from black people and the suffering which ensued. The land question and almost every other question relevant to the black man's destiny converged in Botswana. It is on record that the British did not want Botswana. In their despatches they called it “a God-awful country to live in.” It was grim and unproductive, subject to seven-year cycles of severe drought. It was called the “thirstland” by the early explorers as surface water was almost non-existent. Eventually, the country was given a general blanket coverage of “British Protection” because its only advantage to the British was that the land was almost uniformly level and provided an ideal situation for a railway line through to the interior. Apart from the railway line, they left the land and the people intact and undisturbed. Botswana uniquely remained black man's country.

The people could still have been destroyed by so many hostile forces—the northward thrust of the Afrikaner Boer, the Germans and the Portuguese. It was not the British who sought out Botswana but the people of Botswana who sought out the British. A vague feeling floated in the air at that time that it was only the British who could be trusted to have honest dealings with black people. Yes, where financial greed was not a major British concern, the British took time off to hold exquisite dialogues of integrity.

Corresponding to the time of the declaration of the British Protectorate, Botswana produced a leader of such magnificence, Khama III or Khama, the Great, that the British bowed in awe and deference before him. His standards of integrity were so high that the British conceded to him what they would not concede to any black man at that time—a voice in Britain during the scramble for Africa. Thus, the details of foreign occupation were meticulously worked out. Although the country attracted few white settlers due to the harshness of its climate, the few who came in entered on tiptoe and minded their p's and q's. Khama III established a tradition whereby the chiefs of the land maintained a control over government and trade and he also retained the right, during his rule, to deport any white settler or missionary who displeased him.

The people of the land were never exposed to or broken by the sheer stark horror of white domination. They kept on dreaming as from ancient times and they kept alive the portrait of ancient Africa. It was this peaceful world of black people simply dreaming in their own skins that I began to slowly absorb into my own life. It was like finding black power and black personality in a simple and natural way. If the country is destroyed in the post-independence years, it will be by horrors within itself and not by foreign powers.

Notes

1. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Penguin Modern Classics, 1972), p. 20.

2. Founding a Protectorate: History of Bechuanaland by Anthony Sillery (Mouton & Co., 1965), p. 70.