My title and principal subject are drawn from Bessie Head's short-story collection The Collector of Treasures (1977); her novels have been admirably appraised elsewhere.¹ The stories lend themselves especially well to an understanding of Head's aims as a writer. Their subtitle, and Other Botswana Village Tales, indicates her kinship with the village storyteller of the oral tradition. Hers are rooted, folkloristic tales woven from the fabric of village life and intended to entertain and enlighten, not to engage the modern close critic. They are subtly didactic: it seems apt to apply to them Wordsworth's prefatory comment on the moral purpose of his Lyrical Ballads that “the feeling therein developed gives importance to the action and situation, and not the action and situation to the feeling.” Like earlier established and better-known African writers such as Ngugi and Achebe, Bessie Head (b. 1937) wishes to present, in a human and humane light, African life before as well as after the white man's coming. She seems, however, more deeply troubled than they by the contradictions within customary life, the difficulty of reconciling what she roundly calls “the insane beliefs of a primitive society”² with the mutual care and concern she has also found in a village community.

The stories invariably contain authorial comment, sometimes quite lengthy analysis of “the people” or “the society” they explore. In fact, the narrator seems often to be telling the story as an exploration, as a way to develop or even question her own understanding. There is no settled or dogmatic view of her society; the author's hard-won values, rather than the people's, ultimately hold sway. She is thus a teacher, not solely “to help my society regain belief in itself,”³ but as a reformer, insistently reminding her audience and herself of the intractability of evil.

Head's complex standpoint seems to stem in part from her unusual relationship to Botswana society. She is herself a “Coloured” South African who came to Botswana after a brush with the Afrikaner authorities in 1964. For many years she lived simply with her son in the village of Serowe, a woman and an alien exile. She was not readily accepted in a male-dominated society where—a reiterated theme—“women are just dogs” (81). The anguish of her early years there, including a breakdown and a painful readjustment to life, is movingly rendered in her admittedly autobiographical novel A Question of Power (1974). Nevertheless, unlike many South African exiles who have become divorced not only from their own country and people but from Africa itself, she has determinedly rooted herself in Botswana and become a creative interpreter of its life. In but not of it, sympathetically attached but inevitably distanced, she is perhaps unique among black African writers in her relationship to the society of which she writes.

Hers is a dual relationship. On the one hand Head performs the task of rehabilitating the precolonial past in order to show—again in Achebe's words—“that African people did not hear of culture for the first time from Europeans.”⁴ On the other she anxiously questions that society's shortcomings, seeing them as not merely the consequence of colonial victimization, but part of the universal enigma of human folly.

Even in her stories set in the past one finds a characteristic ambivalence. The piece that opens The Collector of Treasures, “The Deep River: A Story of Ancient Tribal Migration,” and her most recently published story, “A Power Struggle,”⁵ are presented not as “history” but as fictionalized versions of what little she has learned from “our traditional historians,”⁶ versions infused with her own preoccupation with power and its relationship to the individual, whether ruler or ruled. Both stories describe a dispute over succession to tribal kingship: in each case the rightful heir chooses exile rather than compromise or conflict. One protagonist, “in a world where women were of no account,” stands by his dead father's “third junior wife” and her son, whom he himself has fathered; rather than split the tribe, he simply leaves. The other, when challenged openly for the succession by his brother, “refused at crucial points to assert his power. … If power was the unfocused demoniac stare of his brother then he would have none of that world” (“A Power Struggle”). He too leaves, but little by little many of the people follow him, abandoning the murderous brother. In both stories an ugly Hobbesian universe is fleetingly illuminated by the noble dissent of an exceptional individual whose action forces people “to show their individual faces”; in each, one finds Head's delicate ambivalence: “Theirs was not a tender, compassionate, and romantic world. And yet in a way it was” (“Deep River”). Each story has a quasi-mythical pattern: brother and brother, good and evil are opposed; the people may choose. Their choice, or rather their capacity to choose, is vitally important. “A Power Struggle” closes with these words:

This thread of philosophical beauty was deeply woven into the history of the land and the story was repeated many times over so that it became the only history people ever knew. But when the white strangers came this history ended as a new order was imposed on life. The people's kings faded from memory to become myths of the past and no choice was left between what was good and what was evil.

In Serowe Head describes the tradition of migration as one “established over the centuries to avert bloodshed in a crisis and underlying the basic nonviolent 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.”⁷

The remaining twelve stories in The Collector of Treasures concern the present; they read, once one becomes aware of Head's concerns, like subtle inducements to her African readers to learn again to choose between good and evil. While evil is easily recognizable as a constant—witchcraft, human sacrifice, the abuse of women—the storyteller shows her hand most plainly in her efforts to provide models of the good. She is writing, to use Alan Paton's refrain in Cry, the Beloved Country (see WLT 57:2, pp. 233–37), for “the broken tribe,” its pride and value almost fatally eroded by the years of colonial subjection. The title story (pp. 87–103) is bisected with a long excursus characterizing “two kinds of men in the society.” While the lesser is responsible for “the breakdown in family life,” his type is explained in historical terms that invite understanding: when independence arrived, “it provided the first occasion for family life of a new order, above the childlike discipline of custom, the degradation of colonialism”; but a man arrived at “this turning point, a broken wreck with no inner resources at all. … He spun away from himself in a dizzy kind of death dance of wild destruction and dissipation.”⁸ Dikeledi, the story's protagonist, is married to such a man and can only yearn from a distance for Paul Thebolo, “another kind of man in the society with the power to create himself anew. … He was a poem of tenderness.” Thebolo and his wife befriend her, and she enjoys, for herself and her children, the “kindness and love” they bestow. When her husband returns and, jealous of Thebolo, forces himself back into the house, she castrates him and accidentally kills him. It is an act of self-sacrifice and self-violation to which, we can believe, Dikeledi has been driven, out of tender care and protectiveness toward her children, an act committed with hands which—as is seen in the story's opening prison scene—are “soft, caressing, almost boneless hands of strange power—work of a beautiful design grew from those hands.” In her society this precious power has been wrenched to perform an atrocious act, but Dikeledi remains a tender, virtuous being. The two truths are reconcilable only within the bounds of Head's story, but that story also is typically a parable of good and evil, of the interwoven but by no means wholly “beautiful design.” Beauty is immanent and can be brought forth in unexpected places if only Head's storytelling art is heeded.

It is not until the last page of the closing story, “Hunting” (104–109), that Head describes Thato, a woman blessed with a caring husband “incapable of hurting life” and gifted, like herself, with the unerring heart of a good storyteller. This is Bessie Head's gift: one hopes that, like those of the grandmother in the pathetic story “The Wind and a Boy,” her stories might awaken “a great tenderness” (73). Frank but unsentimental appeals to the heart give the tales one voice: the key words are heart, love, tenderness, compassion, sensitivity, care—and power, a force for good and not only for evil. Of Mompati, the garrulous village shopkeeper in “The Village Saint,” we are told, “It mattered that some living being cared intensely and vividly and gloriously about his fellow men” (16). And if we believe in this man and this story, it is partly because in others Head does not shrink from the harsher truths: in a later selection a woman, almost driven mad by the “evil source” of witchcraft, recovers despite the prejudice and ignorance of her fellow villagers and becomes a bleak witness; “There is no one to help the people, not even God,” she says. “I could not sit down because I am too poor and there is no one else to feed my children” (56). There is also that most terrible yet most compassionate of her stories, “Looking for a Rain God.” In a time of doubt and desperation an old man is inspired by “an ancient memory … buried by years and years of prayer in a Christian church” of “a certain rain god who accepted only the sacrifice of the bodies of children.” While their elders struggle with this terrible memory and cure, the children play, mimicking the masterful ways of grown-ups: “You stupid thing! How could you have lost the money on the way to the shop! You must have been playing again!” The story continues, “after it was all over,” to narrate the horrified fellow villagers' suspicions; the killers are arrested and condemned for “ritual murder, … but all the people who lived off crops knew in their hearts that … they could have killed something to make the rain fall” (59–60). This, characteristically, is the voice of understanding, not condemnation.

However, while Head recognizes the two truths—or two sides—there is no moral ambivalence. This is seen most clearly in “Jacob: The Faith-Healing Priest,” where the narrator is a firm guide to values: “There is much to be said about the love and sharing to be found within tribal societies and much of this is true—but true too is Jacob's uncle,” who, since the children are not pure Botswana by birth, treats his orphaned nephews as “an inferior species.” So true are both he and Lebojang, the corrupt, faith-healing priest, that “Jacob” has the force of a parable of goodness more desired as an ideal than upheld as a living reality. There is, nevertheless, a seeming ambivalence toward “the people.” They are often shown as weak, credulous dupes of their society's evil power-brokers, but the evil is in them too. From story to story the viewpoint fluctuates: “People were never fooled by façades,” (13), yet they put faith in the corrupt Lebojang; “What was harmful to them they rejected” (37), but not before they have yielded all too willingly to its fascination; “Custom demanded that people care about each other” (43), but several stories portray the isolated individual, misunderstood and shunned, exposed to “the general dirt of the village” (100). Such contradictions, inherent in life itself, in the gap between “custom” and practice, the ideal and the reality, contribute to the sense these stories convey of a living struggle for true values and worthy action. Like Doris Lessing, who refuses in her African stories to treat white color prejudice as a unique white evil, Head seeks to combat “the atrophy in the imagination that prevents us from seeing ourselves in every creature that breathes under the sun.”⁹

The narrator's or, rather, storyteller's teaching never becomes abstract. Character and relationship are the stories' substance, steadily reinforced with organic imagery and description. Images of harmony and tenderness predominate: “a stream of holiness” (11), the lives of those who love “flow together”; “the bundles of neat tears” shed by Johanna, who finds joy at last as Prophet Jacob's wife (33); the “soft, caressing almost boneless hands of strange power” of Dikeledi (90). There is also the image from common life raised to poetic intensity, as in this passage on the link between the “good story-teller” Thato and her husband:

It had been such a new and intoxicating experience watching the tractor turn up the land; the perfume of the newly-wet earth arose and floated everywhere and the man's work was compact and professional, just the way he had been taught in the agricultural demonstration school he attended. By late afternoon he had ploughed up all their land. … By night, an unmoving image had haunted her dreams of a man's head turned sideways in fixed concentration as he closely watched the contours and furrows he created behind him. She had cried a little to herself; he had seemed a creature too far removed from her own humble life. There were so many women like her who could work and plough and life wasn't going to offer them any spectacular rewards.

(106)

This description, evoking an image of order and tranquillity, comes near the close of the collection; Thato herself, however, tells stories of the “incredible muddle and nonsense people made of their lives every day. … Nothing could sort out the world. It would always be a painful muddle” (107). In Bessie Head's telling there is pain enough, but it is pain relieved constantly by the clear light of a compassionate, understanding heart. In the moral confusion of the post-colonial, post-missionary period she is one of a precious few African writers who have restored to her people, through visionary candor, the “choice between what [is] good and what [is] evil.”¹⁰ Her stories merit the authority and force of that “law” or traditional custom which, she has said, “is written in the heart of the good.”¹¹

Notes

1. See A. Ravenscroft, “The Novels of Bessie Head,” in Aspects of South African Literature, C. Heywood, ed., London, Heinemann, 1976, pp. 174–86.

2. Bessie Head, The Collector of Treasures, London, Heinemann, 1977, p. 85. Subsequent page references to this volume will be included in the text.

3. Chinua Achebe, “The Novelist as Teacher,” in his Morning Yet on Creation Day, London, Heinemann, 1975, p. 44.

4. Chinua Achebe, “The Role of a Writer in a New Nation,” Nigeria Magazine, 81 (June 1964), p. 158.

5. Bessie Head, “A Power Struggle,” Bananas (London), 22 August 1980, pp. 23–24.

6. One such “traditional historian” is the 104-year-old Ramosamo Kebonang, whom Head interviewed for Serowe, Village of the Rain Wind (London, Heinemann, 1981; see WLT 57:1, p. 160), her documentary account of the life and history of the Botswana village where she lives.

7. Serowe, p. 95. Cf. Basil Davidson, The African Slave Trade, Boston, 1961, p. 30: “There is scarcely a modern African people without a more or less vivid tradition that speaks of movement from another place. Younger sons of paramount chiefs would hive off with their followers, and become paramount themselves in a new land.”

8. Cf. Bessie Head, A Question of Power, London, Heinemann, 1974, p. 45: “How can a man be a man when he is called boy?” As John Mellors notes, the “feminist standpoint [which has been too heavily stressed in women's responses to her work] is tempered by ascribing the men's insensibility not to an inherent brutishness but to the effects of a colonialism which has left the male a broken wreck with no inner resources with which to adapt to his ‘new-found liberty’” (The Listener, 20 April 1978, p. 510).

9. Doris Lessing, “Preface,” in her African Stories, New York, Ballantine, 1966, p. viii.

10. From the ending of “A Power Struggle,” quoted earlier in this essay.

11. Serowe, p. 83.