"Love is so powerful, it's like unseen flowers under your feet as you walk" ----Bessie Head
It is my desire that this blog will never become stale in its' subject matter, and even though my blog has a theme, there is a world of Romance out there both past and present to be written about.
Ardent's latest blog entry got me to thinking about my very first international sojourn, as a Peace Corps volunteer in the African nation of Botswana. African nations south of the Sahara get such bad press. It is always about disease, war, poverty, or genocide. There is little mention of the good of the extraordinary. The most recent case of bad news are the elections in Kenya. It has hit home with one of my neighbors, because presently he is hosting a student in his home who is Kenyan.
Botswana is one of the richest countries in Africa because of its' diamond resources. It does not get much attention because the people are quiet and peaceful with their neighbors. Also there are not a conglomeration of tribes there, so no tribal problems. The Batswana are very tolerant. I used to silently laugh when some Batswana would tell me, "Botswana is not true Africa. You have to got to West Africa, to see true Africa."
I was in Botswana when apartheid was running its' course in neighboring South Africa. In fact, depending on where I was, I sometimes lived as close as 15 miles from the South African border. As a non-white person I went to South Africa only once, because the climate there was very tense and even some British friends of mine who went were harassed by white South African soldiers.
There were a number of people both black and white whom the Batswana like to talk about when I was there. One of them was a person they held in high regard, the writer, Bessie Head. Bessie Head is one of Africa's greatest authors, dying at age 49 just when she was about to come into her own and get the recognition she deserved. Her life was short, difficult, lonely, and tragic. Nevertheless, out of her hardship, she birthed writing of get power and sometimes disturbing beauty.
Bessie Head was the daughter of a white South mother of patrician background and a black South African father who was a stable hand to her mother's family. The relationship was totally illicit because it broke apartheid laws which applied more to white women and black men than to white men and black women. According to my Batswana students and friends who related Head's story to me, when Bessie Head's white grandparents learned that their daughter was pregnant by their black stable hand, they had her committed to an insane asylum. There Bessie Head was born in 1937. Life was tough from the beginning. Of course, her mother's family did not want her, and neither did her father's family. Therefore, Bessie was placed in an orphanage where she grew up.
Having showed strong intelligence, Bessie went to school to become a teacher. Later she married a journalist and had a son, but she eventually became a divorcee.
Unable to tolerate life under apartheid, Bessie Head went to neighboring Botswana where she became a refugee. Even in Botswana life was hard, and Head lived in extreme poverty. She ended up in the village of Serowe, one of Botswana's most famous villages one reason of which is because it is the home of Botswana's first president, Sir Seretse Khama, another person common on the lips of many Batswana. In Botswana, Head found her calling and began writing. Also in the process she became an alcoholic and died of hepatitis in 1986.
Bessie Head's work is hard to classify under one genre. Unlike many African writer's her work is not very political. Her novels tend to be semi-autobiographical, with Biblical and classical imagery. She was also influenced by D. H. Lawrence.
Here can be seen an online project by students at the University of Botswana (which was spic and span and new when I visited it) concerning Bessie Head.
