Every once in a while, ever so rarely, when you stumble upon a literary gem, it lights up your whole world. Bessie Head was a pearl in an oyster shell.
It wouldn't do justice to confine her literature to one country. Born in South Africa, she wrote most everything of note in Botswana, and her writing was markedly African. She is regarded as a Botswanian writer since her story collections concern rural Botswana in its literal and figurative landscape.
She was born mixed-race, 'colored' to a white mother from a wealthy family in Pietermaritzburg and a black stablehand who worked on their estate.
South Africa's Immorality Act of 1927 barred sexual relations between members of different races, and her family was able to incarcerate Head's mother in the mental hospital because of her transgression." (Bessie Head | Encyclopedia. Com, n.d.)
Bessie Amelia Emery Head was born on July 6, 1937, at that hospital, and was immediately taken away. Her mother stayed there, mentally ill, for six more years before committing suicide. Bessie never knew her. She was placed in a white foster home initially since they assumed she was white (source: Wiki).
A few weeks later, realizing that she was 'brown,' she was returned to the authorities and placed with a 'colored' household in Pietermaritzburg's poor non-white neighborhood. Thus began her journey - already marked by the color of her skin and as a woman - in Apartheid Africa.
She went to boarding school at 12, worked as a journalist, met her husband, gave birth to a son, and soon after saw the end of her brief marriage.
The defining turn came in 1964; when looking for a new life, she applied for asylum in the neighboring Protectorate of Bechuanaland (now Botswana).
South Africa sat on the southern border of the Protectorate which was predominantly the arid Kalahari. The British had taken control of the Tswana territories and tribes in 1895 to enforce African dominance and connect its Cape colonies to those further north.
Mafikeng in South Africa became the capital of Botswana, and this meant that South African influence in terms of race relations was quite profound in Botswana. For instance, the constitution that led to the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910 had a provision for the eventual incorporation of Botswana into South Africa.(Makgala, n.d., p. 1)
The move to democratic self-governance was already underway in the Protectorate, leading to independence for the arid country in September 1966, just four years after Algeria, another African nation 6000 km to the north of Botswana had gained freedom from their French colonizers.
Bessie moved to Bechuanaland as a political refugee in 1964 in the midst of this political upheaval. She was refused a visa due to her leftist political affiliations. She had to take a one-way exit permit out of South Africa and never returned to the country of her birth.
She lived most of her 22 years in Botswana in extreme poverty, and it was here that she unleashed her writing to the world. 'The Collector of Treasures' was the title story in a collection by the same name. Head settled in Serowe, the largest village in Botswana, and much of her writing depicts life here.
The Collector of Treasures
Head's stories are complex, multi-layered, fascinating, timeless creations about the lives of rural African women in the middle of the 20th century. A summary is, therefore, inadequate.
Long before Lorena made the act a verb in the English language by chopping off her husband John Bobbit's phallus with a knife in 1993, Bessie Head wrote this tale in 1977 of a rural Botswanan woman, Dikeledi, whose hand is forced to enact the part of speech. It doesn't really need language to send a chill down every man's spine.
It begins with Dikeledi traveling in a police truck on a day-long journey from Puleng in the northern parts of Botswana to the prison in the 'new independence town' of Gaborone - a border town with South Africa and also the capital city - in the South.
They travel across 'ploughed fields … and vast expanses of bush'. At one point, "the prisoner seemed to strike at some ultimate source of pain and loneliness within her being and, overcome by it, she slowly crumpled forward in a wasted heap, oblivious to everything but her pain."
Dikeledi is led into the prison, and we know that she is there for life on charges of manslaughter when an attendant sees her file. She is placed in a cell with four other women, all convicted of murdering their husbands.
One of them is Kebonye, who asks Dikeledi about her 'tragic' name. Dikeledi tells her that she was named after her mother's tears for her father, who died when she was born. Her mother had also passed away when Dikeledi was six (just like Bessie) and she was raised by an uncle.
When Kebonye questions Dikeledi about her crime of killing her husband and how she did it, she replies, "I cut off all his special parts with a knife." and no, she does not feel sorrow for doing it.
Kebonye informs Dikeledi that she had killed her husband with a razor. The dead husband used to kick her between her legs. She had once miscarried due to the abuse. He was an education officer who used to suspend school teachers for making school girls pregnant, but he had done the same. She killed him when the parents of one such girl came to inform her of one such time, and she had had enough.
As she begins her life in prison, Dikeledi collects the treasure of Kebonye's kindness and friendship. In a life that had been full of 'loneliness and unhappiness,' Kebonye's friendship was like 'gold amidst the ash.' She had gathered such riches to survive her forsaken life.
We then move to Dikeledi's past life which leads her to prison. Here Bessie Head launches into an exposition of her theory that there were really only two kinds of men in society. One was like a dog in heat, living life like the lone phallus in the world, living 'near the animal level' and behaving 'just the same.'
This kind of man was in the majority. He had to comply with regulations without thought, these rules did not allow individual freedom. Men were given a superior position in the tribes, and women were 'an inferior form of human life.'
Then there was Botswana’s colonial history, during which many men from countries such as Botswana were migrant laborers in the mines of South Africa. He was the white man's 'boy' and just a 'machine-tool' for the South African mines, working there for meager wages.
All this changed with the independence of the land of Tswana. When the British retreated, they handed over governance to men who had no 'resources' to deal with these responsibilities. They were not capable of handling this power. This man was like a 'broken wreck,' and 'he spun away from himself in a dizzy kind of death dance of wild destruction …'
He did not have his traditional tribal taboos shackling him anymore, nor was he subservient to the British. This heady freedom lead to the creation of this almost evil, monstrous creature.
Garesego Mokopi, Dikeledi's husband, was one such creature. His salary went up four-fold after the independence of Botswana, and he went on a wild binge. In the story, it is no coincidence that Garesego leaves his wife and three sons, aged just one to four, in the year of Botswanian independence. He goes on a sexual orgy, living and sleeping with multiple women in the village.
The other kind of man (in Head's conception of the binary) had 'the power to create himself anew.' He concentrated all his energies on his own family, and he could go on with 'his own quiet rhythm: like a river. A poem of tenderness.'
Head juxtaposes Paul Thelobo as this ideal man who settles down in Puleng - once again in the year of independence - in 1966.
Paul and his wife, Kenalepe, and their three children, move into the yard next to Dikeledi's. Over the next eight years, a profound friendship develops between the Thelobos and Dikeledi. The two women are inseparable. Their companionship becomes one of Dikeledi's collected treasures.
Dikeledi, a seamstress, stitches dresses for Kenalepe and her children, refusing to accept payments in cash for her services. For this, Paul pays her in kind, with gifts of food and groceries that keep Dikeledi and her children well-fed.
Life is good during this phase. Dikeledi works hard and has enough to get by. She raises her children with the satisfaction of a proud woman standing on her own feet. She has no desire for another man, having endured the worst with Garesego. She is happy.
However, as it must, life throws a curveball. Banebothe, her eldest son, is doing well at school. He is ready for secondary school with a good grade. Dikeledi realizes that she is R20 (From 1961-1976 - Botswana was a member of the Rand Monetary Area (RMA), and the South African Rand served as the national currency) short on his school fees.
Banabothe is Garesego's son - he has never met his wife or their children in the last eight years, and they are not divorced. Considering this, for the first time in all those years, Dikeledi decides to ask Gare for help in providing the small remaining sum for his son's education. She goes to his office, is rebuffed by Gare, and told to ask Paul for the money since she is his 'spare.' He states that the whole village knows that she is sleeping with Paul since he supplies her family with food.
Dikeledi, who has never begged for anything, gathers her pride and walks away. Soon this incident snowballs. Dikeledi tells her friend, Kenalepe, about this conversation, who in turn tells Paul. An upright and proud man, Paul confronts Gare and gives him a black eye.
Gare thrives in the attention of the village over this incident. He tells everyone his wife's lover punched him. He makes it known that he will pay for his mistress' son's education but not his own son's.
This backfires with villagers telling him that he ought to resolve the issue. He writes a note to Dikeledi and asks her to prepare a meal and bath for him since he was coming to the house. This clearly indicated to Dikeledi that he was coming to re-establish his claim to his “hen-pen.” His only objective was intercourse with her after all these years to establish his dominance over her and over Paul, whom he perceived as an opponent.
Dikeledi did as she was told, for she couldn't ask him not to enter her house - "Black women didn't have that kind of power."
Kenalepe saw the "final and tragic expression on the upturned face of her friend" - an indication of something ominous to come. That night after she had dutifully fed Gare and prepared his bath, and as he slept naked, she went up to the bed, took the knife that she had sharpened and hidden, and with one stroke cut off his genitals. In so doing, his artery to the groin got severed, and he bled to death even as she stood and watched intently.
She asked her son Banathobe to get the police while Paul, hearing Gare's dying screams from across the yard, comes to the hut. Once he has gone in and seen what happened, he promises Mme. Banathobe (as Paul customarily and respectfully calls her, by her eldest son's name) that she needn't worry about her children. He will take them in as his own and provide them with an education.
Head's ideal of ‘compassionate masculinity.’
The Collector of Treasures deals with many ideas and ideals, not least amongst them, a vision of the masculine perhaps still utopian in Head's world and indeed, many other worlds.
In contrast to many other feminists who believe that women will never achieve total liberation until they separate themselves from their oppressors, Head was intent upon directing her fiction toward the reimagining of the masculine as a first step toward developing a new vision of relationships between women and men. She was committed to a mode of fiction that might transmit a new construction of the African male." (Ingersoll, n.d., p. 95)
Indeed, Head never felt comfortable with the feminist label, much as her stories dealt with women and their oppression, much as she created feminine characters of incredible resilience. Her world-vision was not the binary that feminism is often wrongly thought to be, even though her outlook on men as either evil (Garesego) or ideal paragons of virtue (Paul) was binate.
Gare was the stereotypical African male, one who led in numbers. Paul was his dichotomous image. Too good to be true in the world that she lived in - a man of morals, a man who loved his wife, was concerned for his family, did not fall prey to animal urges, and was honorable.
Seeing her dear friend Dikeledi's barren life, Kenalepe offers her husband Paul as a sexual partner to enjoy a good man's attention. Dikeledi refuses the offer. When Kenalepe mentions this to Paul, he does not reveal his emotions. One night when Kenalepe is unwell, and Dikeledi is taking care of chores at the Thebolo house, Paul enquires affectionately about what she was doing.
Two soft pools of cool liquid light were in his eyes, and something infinitely sweet passed between them; it was too beautiful to be love.
Too beautiful to be love.
Masculine attention for the feminine, Paul's for Dikeledi, was beyond love and sex and hinged on a tender friendship and understanding.
This is "Head's paradigm of the New Man, the male who places the tenderness conventionally associated with the feminine above the power conventionally associated with the masculine." (Ingersoll, n.d., p. 98)
Here, we may understand Head's insistence on not being called a feminist in times when feminism was largely viewed as a western ideal. 'I am not a feminist ( … ) in the sense that I do not view women in isolation from men'. Indeed, it harks to her own reserves that she didn't view herself in a different light despite the milieu she lived in. Like many of her female characters, she never victimized herself. "My femaleness was never a problem to me". Her concern with the matters of the mind assured her of her place in the world of letters. "The world of the intellect is impersonal, sexless." (Chabwera, n.d., p. 13)
She didn't envision women without men, even though she kills the ones like Garesego. Instead, she envisages a world left only with men like Paul, where women like Dikeledi and Kebonye have perhaps at least symbolically 'killed' those like Gare.
Bessie Head is not a fanatic. The story is not anti-man either. It only attacks, symbolically castrates, and kills the negative kind of man, the one that is stopping transformation." (Zarandona, n.d., p. 20)
This symbolic castration is a conceived severing of male subjugation - the emasculation of a phallocratic society—a world where women no longer live with men's rules.
Head was no stranger to alienation and prejudice. As an African woman, race, and gender were in-your-face realities for her. The struggles of her characters reflected the hostility of her environment.
In a hostile world that rejected her as an abandoned woman, Dikeledi faced prejudice and hardship. Even Kenalepe pities her state. "It's not good for a woman to live alone" when she urges Dikeledi to find another man. Dikeledi has no desire for another man like Gare who would only bring 'trouble to her life.' However, it is clear that a man like Paul would indeed be attractive to her sensibilities.
Head's inclination for duality apposes her life to that of her friend. Kenalepe herself wonders "at how life imparts its gifts. Some people get too much. Others get nothing at all."
It is so clear and noteworthy, however, that Dikeledi does not view herself as a victim. She is self-aware, and she knows she has been dealt a rough hand. Her parents are dead by the time she is six. She is raised by an uncle who treats her like a servant. She is married off to Gare, a friend of her uncle's so that he can be rid of her. Gare leaves her to fend for herself. He finds her boring. She raises three children single-handedly, fixing thatched roofs of huts and stitching clothes, and working as hard as she can. She is resilient and proud.
She lives a rural life in a traditional world that affords little room for movement. Yet, she is aware that a man like Gare can only bring trouble into her life while at the same time being conscious of the attractions of a man like Paul. She is sexually aware of her likes and dislikes when she talks of how Gare would 'jump on and jump off.' She is a loyal friend when she takes care of Kenalepe and refuses her offer of Paul as a sexual partner. She knows Paul loves his wife. She is dignified and majestic when she walks away from Gare's office, refusing to beg him to take care of his own son.
Dikeledi is stoic in her preparation to kill Gare and in her knowledge that she will never see her children again. She knowingly gives up her life to stand up to the man who had traumatized, violated, and abused her in many ways. She will not have him back in her home - the home that she had painstakingly built over the eight years that he had left her. The world did not give her any power, so her defiance is castrating the symbol of her subjugation. She would rather die in prison than live enslaved to the male ego.
"An outstanding feature of Head's women is that each character is an individual in her own right." (Chabwera, n.d., p. 15)
Dikeledi doesn't just survive during those years; she thrives on the kindness of friends like Kenalepe. This friendship between women is a crucial part of the story. Moving from life with Kenalepe in the village, she collects the fortune of Kebonye's companionship in prison. Her resilience in finding joy and a mechanism for survival in the toughest of circumstances is remarkable.
Is Dikeledi too strong to be factual, just as Paul is too good to be palpable?
In Head's fiction, where she presents idealized and yet all too real characters, she builds a vision in the reader's heart, an ache for an alternative world, a restlessness for a dream.
She showed us flashes of it in her novels and stories, only to die too early. She was granted citizenship in Botswana after 15 years of living the life of a desperately poor refugee. Hepatitis killed her at the young age of 48, just when she was not so poor anymore and was coming into her own in the literary world. She persevered despite her adverse circumstances. Head wrote hundreds of letters, many of these to authors and publishers across the world.
Head didn't let her life get in the way. In a letter to an agent, she writes, "...my beautiful books are going to live beyond my lifetime."
In another, dated 1976 during a particularly trying time, to Toni Morrison, "Well, here I am walking in, if only perhaps to let my hair down and have a good cry. This letter is going to go on and on, so complicated have my affairs been." (Bessie Head, n.d. Popula.)
In another, she writes to a new agent about how the roof in her house leaked badly, and how she had broken a disc in her back trying to get a heavy water drum in. She needed a water connection and asked for an overdraft on her work.
We ask why Paul, the new age man, is at best utopian in Head's actual world, even though she makes attempts to make him human, just as we ask why we all can't be as persevering as Dikeledi and Head in confronting male-, (racial- or religious-) prerogative.
This perseverance and confrontation in the face of all forms of prejudice marked Bessie's life. She stayed the course despite all odds. She did indeed have the authority from life itself to write.
Bibliography:
Bessie Head | encyclopedia. Com. (n.d.). https://www.encyclopedia.com/people/literature-and-arts/south-african-literature-biographies/bessie-head
Bessie head: A life of letters. (n.d.). Popula. https://popula.com/2018/07/17/bessie-head-a-life-of-letters/
Chabwera, E. (n.d.). Womanhood in Bessie Head’s fiction.
Crous, M. (n.d.). Díkeledí’s revenge: A reading of Bessie Head’s The collector of treasures.
Ingersoll, E. G. (n.d.). Reconstructing masculinity in the postcolonial world of bessie head. https://core.ac.uk/reader/236121780
Makgala, C. J. (n.d.). Botswana, Colonial System: Repressive Apparatus, Ideology, Adaptations, Social Impacts.
Maye, B. (n.d.). The collector of treasures (1977) by Bessie Head: Lives of African women in 1960s. The Irish Times. https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/the-collector-of-treasures-1977-by-bessie-head-lives-of-african-women-in-1960s-1.4557538
Ola, V. U. (n.d.). Women’s Role in Bessie Head’s Ideal World.
Zarandona, J. M. (n.d.). From Periphery to Centre? The Collector of Treasures by Bessie Head (1977). The Translation and (mis)reconstruction of an African woman's identity in Spanish, Italian and French.