When I saw that When Rain Clouds Gather (1968) by Bessie Head had been included in ‘The Big Jubilee Read’, seventy books published during the reign of the late Queen Elizabeth, I was gratified; I’d read it and knew it deserved its place. I was also reminded of a disconcerting encounter with the author, many years ago. One of the best things in my career with the BBC World Service was talking to writers about their work. The interviews might prove to be enlightening, challenging, unexpected, tricky – and occasionally not as interesting as I’d hoped; but this one didn’t even get off the ground.
I was in Botswana and excited to be back in Africa, a continent where I had spent three impressionable years in my early twenties. Now I had the chance to visit a part of Africa I’d never been to before, to collect material for radio programmes about the role of women in the independent countries bordering South Africa. It was 1984, ten years before apartheid ended. Bessie Head was an ideal candidate to discuss the scene she sets in When Rain Clouds Gather.
No women ever worked harder than Botswana women, for the whole burden of providing food for big families rested with them. It was their sticks that thrashed the corn at harvesting time and their winnowing baskets that filled the air for miles and miles around with the dust of husks and they often, in addition to broadcasting the seeds when the early rains fell, took over the tasks of the men and also ploughed the land with oxen.
I had seen such women all over Africa – and most recently on the dusty drive from Botswana’s capital, Gaborone, to Serowe, the village where the writer had lived for the past twenty years.
Serowe was the setting for three of Bessie Head’s novels and her non-fiction work called Serowe: Village of the Rainwind
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Subscribe now or Sign inWhen I saw that When Rain Clouds Gather (1968) by Bessie Head had been included in ‘The Big Jubilee Read’, seventy books published during the reign of the late Queen Elizabeth, I was gratified; I’d read it and knew it deserved its place. I was also reminded of a disconcerting encounter with the author, many years ago. One of the best things in my career with the BBC World Service was talking to writers about their work. The interviews might prove to be enlightening, challenging, unexpected, tricky – and occasionally not as interesting as I’d hoped; but this one didn’t even get off the ground.
I was in Botswana and excited to be back in Africa, a continent where I had spent three impressionable years in my early twenties. Now I had the chance to visit a part of Africa I’d never been to before, to collect material for radio programmes about the role of women in the independent countries bordering South Africa. It was 1984, ten years before apartheid ended. Bessie Head was an ideal candidate to discuss the scene she sets in When Rain Clouds Gather.No women ever worked harder than Botswana women, for the whole burden of providing food for big families rested with them. It was their sticks that thrashed the corn at harvesting time and their winnowing baskets that filled the air for miles and miles around with the dust of husks and they often, in addition to broadcasting the seeds when the early rains fell, took over the tasks of the men and also ploughed the land with oxen.I had seen such women all over Africa – and most recently on the dusty drive from Botswana’s capital, Gaborone, to Serowe, the village where the writer had lived for the past twenty years. Serowe was the setting for three of Bessie Head’s novels and her non-fiction work called Serowe: Village of the Rainwind (1981). The last was inspired by Ronald Blythe’s famous portrait of a Suffolk village, Akenfield. Like him, she used interviews with local people to bring recent history to life. Blythe loved her book and the story told by African voices of changes in an ancient tribal culture, through eighty years of British rule, towards its own brand of independence. ‘It’s not only what they say, but the tone in which they say it, which tells one immediately that here are truths and complexities which have escaped the usual records,’ he wrote in his foreword. Serowe had played a key role in the history of Botswana. It was the home of the powerful Khama family, one of whom, Khama the Great, visited England in 1895 to negotiate with the British government on behalf of what was then the British Protectorate of Bechuanaland. His grandson, Seretse Khama, also spent time in London and shocked the world by marrying an Englishwoman in 1948; I had interviewed his widow, Lady Khama, about her work as President of the Botswana Council of Women. Bessie Head had come to Botswana from South Africa, where her mixed-race parentage made her an outcast and a rebel. She drew on her own experience in all her novels and in each one it is an outsider who observes the country and its people: Maru (1971) is about a woman from the despised Bushman tribe; A Question of Power (1973) gives a disturbing insight into the mind of a South African woman suffering from destructive relationships and bouts of madness; in When Rain Clouds Gather, another damaged South African finds comfort in the rhythms of village life. The previous day I’d enjoyed talking to teachers, nurses, priests, nuns and development workers, all pleased to discuss their work and insist that the role of women in Botswana was crucial but often underestimated. One of them told me how to get to Bessie Head’s house. (She had no phone; I’d sent a letter requesting an interview to a PO Box number but left the capital before receiving a reply.) I hoped she would agree to talk to me. Unusually, it was a grey, damp day – auspicious I felt. In a drought-ridden country, people hope and pray for rain. Her son came to the front door and let me in, and then retreated, looking worried. His mother appeared from an adjoining room. She was a small, fierce woman. ‘Didn’t you get my card?’ she said. ‘I’m not doing an interview.’ I apologized and backed towards the door, but she insisted I sit down and listen to why she didn’t want to be interviewed. She was angry. People were exploiting her. Her books were on the syllabus of Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg and students had taken up hours of her time getting material for their theses. One visitor had borrowed an essay, and extracts had appeared without permission in a newspaper. A lecturer had proposed bringing his whole class to visit her during the vacation. A woman wrote from abroad to say she was coming to Botswana for a month in order to talk to her; she said she would ‘make Bessie Head famous’, a patronizing boast to which the writer responded with a contemptuous expletive. None of these people had paid her and she compared herself to a black nanny in South Africa, employed on low wages to nurture white children who grow up to become wealthy lawyers and doctors, while the nanny is thrown on the scrap heap without a pension. What she said was indisputable. But the intensity of her anger was alarming. She wept, raged, named famous writers who had slighted her at international conferences, recounted quarrels, gleefully quoted angry letters she had written. I was mostly silent, but my mind was racing. Might she agree to be interviewed if I offered to pay her? I quickly decided that this would make things worse. No meagre BBC fee could compensate for her sense of enormous injustice. All I could do was listen. She felt exploited and given insufficient respect, not particularly by me, but by people and events going back a long way in a difficult life. She had been published, praised and celebrated, and she had a proud sense of her own worth as a writer, but it wasn’t enough. I could see for myself that her success had not brought riches. The two-room house was without electricity. She sat on an iron bedstead, I on a wooden stool. In an alcove was a stove and, when she became calmer, she heated water to make us tea. A crowded bookcase was a reminder of the wealth of reading and knowledge that informed her writing. I left after an hour or so, my recorder unused. At the door, as if she too was mindful of the fact, she asked me to put any questions I had in writing. She would send me written answers. ‘That’s what I told them,’ she said, referring to the South African students. ‘I can’t treat you any differently. They’d say it was because you’re English.’ Bessie Head died of hepatitis in 1986, less than two years after my visit. Since then I have reread her books and understood more about her traumatic life, which began in a South African mental asylum where her mother was confined following her illicit relationship with a black man. As a child, Bessie was rejected, fostered, sent to a mission school, then a training college. She learned not only to earn a living but also to love books and become a writer. She was part of a radical group of writers and artists fighting against the apartheid regime. Perhaps the most personal of her novels is A Question of Power, in which the central character struggles through a mental breakdown brought about by experiences very like those of the author, including the brutal revelation the mission school principal springs on her as a teenager: ‘Your mother was insane. If you’re not careful you’ll get insane just like your mother. Your mother was a white woman. They had to lock her up as she was having a child by the stable boy who was a native.’ It’s a painful book and not an easy read. I find her earlier novel, When Rain Clouds Gather, more immediately enjoyable. The central character is Makhaya Maseko, a man on the run from South Africa, where he has served time in prison for being a revolutionary. He turns up in newly independent Botswana. ‘His reasons for leaving were simple: he could not marry and have children in a country where black men were called “boy” and “dog” and “kaffir” . . . I might like it here, was his last thought before falling into a deep exhausted sleep.’ And he does learn to love the elusive beauty of a flat, dry country with startling sunrises and occasional glimpses of brightly coloured birds in dusty hedgerows. He becomes fully involved in village life. An old man adopts him as a son; an elderly woman offers wisdom based on her benign interpretation of the Bible; a young English agriculturalist persuades him to help run a scheme to improve farming practices. And Paulina, a lonely but independent widow, offers love. The novel has no simple message about the best way forward for Botswana. And the village is no paradise. Life is hard, especially for the women, left to cope while men spend much of the year with their herds on distant cattle stations. Some people question the old ways of doing things. Others resist change. There are tensions between the chiefs who worked with the British and a new generation of local leaders. In this society, refugees are given sanctuary but are still resented. The disgruntled brother of a local chief tries to get Makhaya arrested and expelled. A British police officer – unexpectedly sympathetic – agrees to stick his neck out and gives him permission to stay. The paramount chief himself does very little, apart from indulge his appetites and avoid conflict; ‘even those who did not like chiefs had to concede that Paramount Chief Sekoto was a very charming man’. There’s plenty to smile at in this subtle novel, with its sharp dialogue, stunning descriptions and intense interior monologues, as individuals wrestle with the complexities of politics, religion, life and love. And there’s tragedy when the rains expected in September fail to arrive. Crops wither, cows collapse and die, vultures circle overhead and a young boy is stranded on a distant cattle station, far away from his family. The book ends on a note of uncertain hope and it’s tempting to compare Makhaya’s journey to redemption with Bessie Head’s own experience in Botswana. In the introduction to her factual book about Serowe, she says, ‘I have lived most of my life in shattered little bits. Somehow, here, the shattered bits began to grow together. There is a sense of wovenness, a wholeness in life here; a feeling of how strange and beautiful people can be – just living.’ On the day I visited her, I had glimpsed the fragility of that hard-won sense of wholeness. I hope she felt better for saying no to the woman from the BBC who turned up unannounced at her home. Dismayed at the time, I may have learned more from her anger than from an interview. And it sent me back to her books. Whether or not you have any special interest in Botswana (you may have enjoyed Alexander McCall Smith’s novels about a lady detective in Gaborone), Bessie Head is a guide to strange and beautiful areas of the country and its people. And beyond that, to mysterious areas of the human heart.
Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 82 © Anne Theroux 2024
About the contributor
Having retired from the BBC World Service and from private practice as a relationship therapist, Anne Theroux is able to resume her exploration of Africa, these days mostly through books and recollections. Her memoir The Year of the End was published in 2021.
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