SOURCE: Thomas, H. Nigel. “Narrative Strategies in Bessie Head's Stories.” In The Tragic Life: Bessie Head and Literature in Southern Africa, edited by Cecil Abrahams, pp. 93–104. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press Inc., 1990.

Today one almost feels the need to apologize for analyzing the works of writers like Bessie Head, Chinua Achebe, Buchi Emecheta, Ngugi Wa Thiongo, and most other African writers. For if one is to follow recent trends in criticism, one should not be looking at how fiction conveys truths lost in the diffuseness of reality, rather one should be hypothesizing about metafiction and postmodernism, that is to say, preoccupying one's self with finding critical theories to account for the literature created by those whom we are told are at the “cutting edge” of literary creation because they manage to unsay everything they have said, manage to deconstruct the fictive universe which more often than not they have not yet constructed. Thus, those who have been crowned deans of contemporary literary criticism would have us believe that our time should be spent deriving meaning from a process that cannot mean; for—and in this they are mostly correct—“postmodernist literature” is about the meaning of non-meaning. This approach is certainly well-suited to a civilization that can no longer believe anything, to cultures where language has lost its bonding quality principally because language has become a mask concealing the feared unknown in the other.

When we turn to African societies, we witness ferment everywhere, much of it very disconcerting. But instead of reproducing chaos and deforming reality and syntax to reproduce this ferment, the vast majority of African writers use language to construct verbal laboratories with which to probe chaos and discover its implications. If one compares the non-fiction and fiction of Bessie Head, one discovers very quickly that Head's fiction is an intensification, a distillation, if you will, of Botswana history and actuality in order to suggest its impact of those who live it. Indeed, her collection of testimonials from Serowe residents on subjects ranging from history to contemporary medical practice economics, in Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind, is a handy source of the raw materials that Head reworked—and never distorted—in order to create her four novels and collection of short stories. It is evident from Head's handling of her themes that her concern in writing fiction was to praise what she deemed praiseworthy, condemn what she saw as oppressive, and highlight what she saw as social folly. In a Voice of America interview, she told Lee Nichols:

“… I would never fall in the category of a writer who produces light entertainment. … My whole force and direction comes from having something to say. What we are mainly very bothered about has been the dehumanizing of black people. And if we can resolve these situations—and I work both within the present and future—if we can resolve our difficulties it is because we want a future which is defined for our children. So then we can't sort of say that you have ended any specific thing or that you have changed the world. You have merely offered your view of a grander world, of a world that's much grander than the one we've had already.”

(1981, 55–56)

This is essentially the vision of a bard. It follows, therefore, that Head's fictions is didactic but only, for the most part, implicitly so. Her approach is not to obscure the subjects she writes about, or to leave interpretation strictly up to the reader, but rather to clarify without being reductive or simplistic. In fact, all her short stories reflect a complex awareness of human nature and human motives. Some of them, like “The Collector of Treasures,” “Looking for a Rain God,” and “Life,” achieve the status of tragedy in the Aristotelian sense of the twin emotion they evoke—fear and pathos.

The narrative strategies authors of fiction choose are determined primarily by their themes and intentions and secondarily by writers' knowledge of fictive technique. We already know, from the citation from The Voice of America interview, why Head wrote fiction. But what determined her technique? I think that the oral origins of much of the material she reworked into fiction affected her technique profoundly. The material simply imposed itself. The tales have as their central concern Serowe village life, and in this they resemble the folktale cycles, embodying several stories about a single protagonist. In creating fiction from the oral accounts of the tribe, Head transforms herself into something of a literary griot; we have already seen that the task she sets herself gives her a bardic role. Both of these roles imply a particular treatment in the interpretation of the material. The griot recounts in a historical fashion and it is important that s/he enter the minds of his/her characters to reveal their thoughts and motivations. The bard is interested in the lessons s/he can draw from the past so that s/he can interpret the present and predict the future. Implicit in the bardic approach, therefore, is copious commentary, interpretation, if you will, of the forces impinging on the characters' actions.

To the foregoing one needs to add the fact that Head received her formal education in South Africa, and therefore in the Western tradition. Certainly, we see from her first forays into writing fiction that she had already mastered fictive technique—her arrangement of the episodes in When Rain Clouds Gather for their dramatic effect and her transformation of the awaited rain and the setting into symbols are masterly done. Hence, what we are to understand is that Head combined Western literary and African storytelling methods in writing the stories—she calls them tales very advisedly—that comprise The Collector of Treasures. One very evident Western technique in these stories is her conflation of history and several oral accounts into single stories.

As I have mentioned already, the arrangement of the stories contributes to their meanings. A quick summary of the themes the stories cover will be in order. In general the stories are about the failure of colonial civilisation and the perennial oppression of women in Botswana society (for a profound analysis of the latter in Head's novels, see Ola, 1986). More specific themes are: the defiance of tribal custom in asserting individuality where only communally-sanctioned behaviour is permitted; psychological turmoil resulting from the conflict between Christian and indigenous practices and beliefs; the motives behind the creation of indigenous Christianity; the inevitable erosion of communal values when they come into contact with urban vice; the debilitating impact of deep-rooted beliefs in witchcraft; the triumphing of the irrational (regression) in times of deep duress; the wisdom inherent in the communal courts (kgotla); the lethal elements of consumer values; the advantages of traditional over European marriage rituals; the limits of mask-wearing; the social disintegration that follows the dissolution of the mores of a society; the victimization of women and children in a society where no firmly enforced codes exist for their protection. All the foregoing themes are touched upon explicitly or implicitly in the first two stories of the collection. The first story reveals tribal fracturing resulting from individual initiative, showing what Head felt was a weakness of tribal organization; it also shows the insufficiency of tribal law to regulate human emotions; it equally reveals the ritualization of prejudice against the female sex, since it is women who are blamed for the fragmenting of the tribe. Head chooses and arranges the events of this story to show how, under tribal governments, people are prohibited from cultivating individuality; she thus prepares us, as it were, to understand the void males experience when, following independence, they are required to display initiative but find that they possess none. The second story introduces us to the Christian Church in action, the contempt its missionaries hold for those members of the community who are not members of the Botswana aristocracy, and thus indirectly shows us one reason why several people do not take the teachings of Christianity seriously, why indigenous churches spring up, why beliefs in witchcraft remain unassailable, and why in times of crises people look to the ancestors for answers rather than to reason for solutions.

Turning to the oral sources of these stories, we find Head signalling to us from the beginning of the collection that much of the material in her stories is derived from oral sources. The first story is an etiological tale, derived from oral history. All the marks of the folktale are present: an omniscient narrator, copious summary, reduction of motives to a few primary ones, as well as a moral. The tale itself, however, is intended to condemn women for the suffering of the tribe; Head narrates it so that tribal hegemony at the expense of individual expression (creating a child-like obedience in the populace) is the real culprit. It is an excellent example of the material itself being rearranged so that the traditional view is presented and at the same time undermined, a combination of oral an literary techniques.

The oral sources of the stories or the influence of the oral forms of storytelling are evident in the beginning of Head's stories. One gets a formula that suggests the following decision: Now this story happened in a place called X. Let me describe that place for you before I tell you the story. This is the case with the story “Jacob: The Story of a Faith Healing Priest.” In “Heaven Is Not Closed,” there are two narrators: one is Head, providing the setting for the story; the other is an oral storyteller that tells the story of Galathebege's life-long struggle to choose between Christian and Botswana customs and beliefs to the audience of mourners. The second narrator reports the audience's responses to the story. Another example of the oral influence is Head's need to give a resumé of the story in the first paragraph. For example, in “Heaven Is Not Closed,” Head begins the story as follows, “all her life Gathethebege earnestly believed that her whole heart ought to be devoted to God, although one catastrophe after another occurred to deflect her from this path. It was only in the last five years of her life, after her husband, Ralokae, and died, that she was able to devote her whole mind to her calling. …” The paragraph goes on to complete the summary of the story. When this is not the case, the stories begin, like the oral historian describing the life and times of a particular personage before recounting his deeds, by informing us of the forces to which the particular protagonist is reacting. This is not to say the Head does not make this presentation of setting—social, historical, or physical—interesting. Often, as in the present example, this filling in of background or the presentation of summary is graphically executed. Whey they contribute to the organic or the intellectual unity of the story, as I shall show later, the authorial intrusions are successful, even indispensable. The oral influences in Head's fiction are also evident in the closure of the stories, which more often than not, express the moral of the story. This is especially noticeable in “The Wind and a Boy,” which ends as follows, “And thus progress, development, and a pre-occupation with status and living standards first announced themselves to the village. It looked like being an ugly story with many decapitated bodies on the main road” (p. 75).

Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind is an excellent tool for the examination of Head's technique of conflating several incidents into a single story. The first story of the collection is a brilliant example of this process. It is an evocation of ancient migrations as well as nineteenth and twentieth century political crises: the crises over Khama the Great's conversion to Christianity and his consequent abandonment of certain ethnic practices, resulting in battles between him and his father and uncle and a fragmenting of the tribe; Tshekedi Khama's own migration to avoid a full-fledged war with his nephew Seretse on account of latter's marriage outside the tribe (See Serowe, pp. 3–18, 77, 95). Although Head discusses the Mfecane—a series of interethnic wars that raged on for close to twenty years in the region (See Serowe, 180–182)—she excludes war from this story. The reason is that Head felt that the migrations had been “established over the centuries to avert bloodshed in a crisis”; this tendency she saw as “underlying the basic non-violent nature of African society as it was then. This gives the lie to white historians, who for their own ends, damned African people as savages” (Serowe, 95). Thus, in “The Deep River River: A Story of Ancient Tribal Migration,”: Head conflates an excludes in accordance with her vision of the true nature of African people.

The second story in the collection, “Heaven Is Not Closed,” also illustrates quite well Head's technique of conflation. The story explores the psychic dislocation resulting from Khama the Great's policies in imposing Christianity on the entire society. This problem, which created warfare and much tribal fracturing, is examined in “Heaven Is Not Closed” for the divided loyalties and religious incertitude Khama's policies created. The arrogance of the early missionaries and their a priori contempt for everything that was non-European are juxtaposed with the indigenous pride some Botswana felt for their customs. Head's reason for distilling various stories to arrive at this core and for structuring the elements in this particular way is to show the extent to which the early Christian missionaries alienated the population, notwithstanding Khama's imposition of Christianity on the Botswana people (the core of the story exists in one of the reminiscences included in Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind (see pp. 30–31)). While Head felt a deep admiration for Khama, she nonetheless had strong views about the consequences of his Christianization policy:

When I think of Khama's conversion to Christianity and his imposition of it on the tribe as a whole—it more or less forced him to modify or abolish all the ancient customs of his people, thus stripping them of certain securities which tradition offered. … People might have not realized this, and this might account for the almost complete breakdown of family life in Bamangwato country, which under traditional custom was essential for the survival of the tribe.

(Serowe, xiv-xv)

Head's compression technique sometimes assumes the form of symbol. This is the case in “The Wind and the Boy,” where Robinson the protagonist exemplifies potential strength created from intelligence, resourcefulness, and a blending of the eclectic from all traditions, while his killer, the driver of the brakeless automobile, exemplifies the reckless, who give themselves value by acquiring Western modes of existence the deadly power of which they do not understand.

It is in the contrasting structure of some of Head's stories (as well as in their arrangement in the collection) that her perception of herself as a writer in the bardic tradition is best revealed. “The Collector of Treasures” and “Jacob: The Story of a Faith Healing Priest,” are particularly useful for this discussion. “The Collector of Treasures” is the story in which Head probes at her deepest the breakdown of family structure in Botswana. Head's intention is to show how promiscuity on the part of the men deprives the nation of a vast part of its human resources. Basic to the story's structure are two families: one that should be headed by Mokopi, except that he drinks and whores away his civil service salary; the other, that of Paul Kebolo, a responsible man, whose wife is happy, well-adjusted woman, with an overwhelming generosity to others. Mokopi's wife is a talented woman: “she could knit, sew, and weave baskets” (Collector, 90) but she must raise three children all by herself.

This story is one of the best-realized in the collection. Its artistic success is due partly to its theme but more so to Head's use of contrast (a technique that accounted in large measure for the brilliant artistry of her earlier work: When Rain Clouds Gather). Paul Kebolo's responsibility in providing for his family and still having enough to help along Mokopi's wife is contrasted with Mokopi's spending his money on sex and alcohol. Paul's compassion for Dikeledi is contrasted with Mokopi's conviction that you only feed a woman's children if that woman is your mistress. Such compassion also stands out against Mokopi's understanding of money as a weapon to be used in humiliating those dependent on him for it, in this case his wife. Mokopi's hopping from bar to bar and bed to bed is contrasted with Paul's transformation of his home into a centre where thinking people can discuss political and social issues. Finally Kenapele's happiness, because Paul does not evade any of his marital responsibilities, is contrasted with Dikeledi's initial stoicism and unhappiness and eventual imprisonment.

At the end of the story Paul Kebolo adopts Dikeledi's three children and promises to provide them with a secondary education; for upon realizing that Mokopi had come to her home merely to humiliate her, Dikeledi castrates and simultaneously murders him. Thus the trauma created by male irresponsibility has to be palliated by others already shouldering their own responsibility. The tone of Head's commentary in the story is an angry one. She likens men like Mokopi to bulldogs and jackasses, who, their sexual pleasure ended, have no responsibility toward their off-spring (more will be said about the authorial commentary in this story in that section of the essay reserved for it). The ramifications of male parental irresponsibility is Head's principal concern in writing this story. A secondary theme, embodied in the other half of the story's dialectic, is the somewhat Herculean task of the responsible parents, who in addition to raising their own children, must raise the abandoned children too. Elsewhere Head tells us that ninety-seven percent of the children born in Serowe are out of wedlock and that most of them “will never know who their real father is” (Serowe, 58). In this same article Head blames the blanket imposition of Christianity on the population and the indifference of colonial government to the tribal mores it destroyed for the moral void created among Botswana males (pp. 58–61). In one of the four testimonials regarding the breakdown of Botswana family life included in Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind, Lebang Moreni, age 18, states that men deny that they are fathers of the children to avoid paying child support. When they are made to pay, they sometimes leave the village. If they remain they sporadically provide a fraction of the amount required, and the law courts lack the will to enforce its sanctions. Such support, however, is limited only to the first child. A woman who already has a child cannot expect the law to force the father(s) to subsequent children to support them.

Many, many women are now rearing children on their own and it is not a good life. Children see one man after another calling on their mother and they lose all respect for her. Our children run wild, are very cheeky and have become thieves. Most of the thefts which now take place in Serowe are done by small boys. They raid houses for money, cigarettes or food. Theft was never a part of our life. I had a father and I know what a beating meant for bad behaviour.

(pp. 64–65)

“The Collector of Treasures” is a dramatized compression of such testimony as well as Head's ideas on the consequences of child abandonment by Botswana fathers. Head continues the same theme, though not with the same degree of contrast—for the emphasis is on responsible men choosing their spouses—in the story “Hunting.”

Whereas Head's use of contrast in “The Collector of Treasures” heightens the story's artistry, an attempt at a similar structuring in “Jacob: The Story of a Faith-Healing Priest” produces a colossal failure. In the latter there are two separate stories, each a version of, and a judgment on, the extreme motivations that give rise to the faith-healing churches. Because Head fails to integrate the actions of both of the main characters the story is truncated. By spending some two pages on a setting that is of no relevance to the theme of the story (this is a case where oral story telling conditioning is an impediment) and by grafting a romance of very limited value on to it, the focus of the story is diffuse. In “The Collector of Treasures” it is rare that the narrative departs from Dikeledi. She provides the narrative pivot. In “Jacob: The Story of a Faith Healing Priest” Jacob does not provide enough of that focus.

The aspect of Head's narrative approach likely to be most controversial is her constant intrusion in her own voice in the stories. I support that Head felt that in order for her readers to appreciate the behaviour of characters like Mokopi, Life, and Mma Mabele, she needed to provide the social background of these characters. Because this information is not implicit in the dramatized action of the stories, they sometimes evince an essayistic (expository) quality. My feeling regarding these interventions is that Head wanted them there and chose to hold on to the oral story telling model of sketching in background whenever it is deemed necessary for a better understanding of the story being told. In Head's case, such intrusions can be a vital dimension of the story. In these stories, one simply has to see the author's presence in the story in the manner one accepts some playwrights' creation of a stage narrator whose purpose is to put events in their proper perspective. Wayne Booth tells us that it is usual for critics to condemn commentary in fiction. But Booth goes on to invite literary critics to “at the very least … decide with some precision whether any of the particular achievements of the author's voice have been worth the sacrifice of whatever principles we hold dear” (1961, 169). We need only look at Melville's Billy Budd, where commentary is vital to peripetia, operates in lieu of direct characterization of Billy Budd, and presents the novella's historic setting—for confirmation of the validity of Booth's advice. For we have accorded Billy Budd classic status.

We could appreciate the value of the intrusions by removing them and examining the difference such alterations makes to the meaning of the stories. Most of them would diminish in significance. It is also easy to see that entire novels or novellas would have been required to dramatize much of the information that Head provides in summary form in her own voice. If one function of art is to compress for effect, then, here the use of authorial commentary is justified.

The main reason for the authorial commentaries of Head's short fiction is to provide social setting, which, in these stories, is as vital as the background colours a painter chooses for his paintings. It is because of these settings that we understand the mores that inhibit or incite the characters. As I have already mentioned, in the West, a basic feature of the short story is the assumption that the writer and reader belong to a similar cultural mosaic and hence bring a similar value scheme to creation and creative interpretation. Head could make no similar assumption, for her characters are fundamentally non-Western.

A close look at the story “Life” will show the foregoing in operation. The first paragraph of the story tells us in Head's own voice that village people rejected whatever they considered harmful and absorbed whatever they considered beneficial. “The murder of Life had this complicated undertone of rejection” (Collector, 37). When we later discover that Life is a prostitute, an unknown occupation in the village, our emotions intensify, but only because Head has already told us in her own voice that Life's return to the village was necessitated by the recall of all Botswana citizens from South Africa in 1963, the year when formal boundaries were established between South Africa and Botswana in preparation for the latter's independence. During the seventeen years Life had lived in Johannesburg she developed into a prostitute. On her own, we know that she would never have returned to the village.

Irony is achieved in the story partly through Head's ironic naming of the character, but moreso because Head tells us of the community's expectations of Life. “‘She is going to bring us a little light,’ the women said among themselves as they went off to fetch their work tools.” Head's commentary reads as follows: “They were always looking ‘for the light’ and by that they meant that they were ever alert to receive new ideas that would freshen up the ordinariness and everydayness of village life” (p. 38). Life brings a Luciferan light to the community. Her companions eventually are not the light seekers: they abandon her; rather they are the pariahs: the beer brewers, who vicariously admire her for turning the tables, for making men pay for sex. In this respect she teaches the community something for hitherto women were the ones exploited in sex; for the first time women see that they could make men pay for sex and could in this fashion wield power over them. The attempt to force the community's mores on her, to cure her of the urban sickness of prostitution, through marriage, fails. It results in her murder and her husband's imprisonment. There is light in that too: that once the values of the city enter, communal mores are unable to neutralize them. Without Head's commentary we could not appreciate the significance of the drama and irony inherent in this story.

To conclude, it is evident from Head's short stories that one of her principal concerns was an understanding on the reader's part of the social forces determining the actions of her characters. Where the events of the story do not fully imply what those social forces are, she provides them in her own voice. This practice, along with the retention of some of the traits of the oral sources of the stories, makes the stories appear different from typical twentieth century short stories in the Western tradition. I suspect that, faced with the question of her departure from standard short story practice, Head would have been interested in whether the reader understood the stories, was moved by them, and was instructed by them. In my own case the answer is yes. Her reply would be, “Well it is because of all those rules that you accuse me of breaking.”

Works Cited

Achebe, Chinua. Morning Yet on Creation Day. London: Heinemann, 1975.

Booth, Wayne. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1961.

Head, Bessie. The Collector of Treasure and Other Botswana Village Tales. London: Heinemann, 1977.

———. Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind. London: Heinemann, 1981.

———. Interview with Lee Nichols. In Conversations with African Writers: Interviews with Twenty-Six African Authors. Edited by Lee Nichols. Washington, D.C.: Voice of America, 1981.

Ola, Virginia U. “Women's Role in Bessie Head's Ideal World.”ARIEL 17: 4 (October 1986), 39–47.

wa Thiong'o, Ngugi. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: James Currey, 1986.

Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. London: Methuen, 1984.