adminThe Reader With Lovemore R. Mataire
BORN on July 6 1937, Bessie Head died at the age of 49 in 1986 in Botswana just at a time when she was making a niche as a writer of repute in her exploration of the damaging impact of social and oppressive ills on the individual psyche.
A Question of Power (1974) is an autobiographical novel, written at a time when the author was under severe mental strain following her arrival in Botswana from South Africa, St Pietermaritzburg where she was born to a wealthy South African woman and a black servant.
At birth, the young Head was already a social outcast born out of wedlock in a relationship that was scorned and despised by society, given the racial disparities that existed in apartheid South Africa.
Through Elizabeth, the main protagonist, the author recreates her own life when she responds to an advertisement for a teaching post in Botswana and immediately viewed the country as some kind of sanctuary away from a cheating and abusive husband. Just like the author, Elizabeth first engages in teaching, becomes a journalist for the Drum magazine and later becomes involved in co-operative farming venture designed to boost the economy of the village of Motabeng.
Upon her arrival in Botswana, Elizabeth finds herself socially isolated and unable to fit and cope with the rural life in Serowe. Within months of her arrival she starts showing signs of insanity.
She starts hallucinating and her fantasy world created by her disturbed mind; she is obsessed with questions of the soul and the nature of good and evil.
A Question of Power can therefore be read on two levels. On the first level, the story is about Elizabeth a young woman who goes to Botswana from South Africa in search of peace and a different environment offering a different illumination into her deprived life. It is an insider description of the mind of a suffering, delusional person. The second level is that the book can be read as a record of Elizabeth’s mental breakdown and her weaving in and out of the terrifying world of insanity.
It explores the power relations and the political social evils inherent in society and how these impact on the individual’s awareness of her sense of worth. By conflating these two levels, the author demonstrates that social evil inflicted on individuals can literally lead to madness. The protagonist’s mental journey is harrowing as she slips in and out of mental illness, dream, hallucination and reality.
Reared by a foster mother that she thought was her real mother, Elizabeth is shocked to learn that her mother is white and is confined in a nearby mental hospital. Her teachers are warned of a possible mental breakdown as was the case with her mother. “Your mother was insane. If you are not careful you will 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 native.”
But it is only after escaping to Botswana that she experiences moments of mental dementia in a country that she envisages to have escaped the worst evils of colonial domination as a British Protectorate. However, in rural Botswana, she is faced with a constricting social system as the African villagers are suspicious of her urban ways and frown upon her individualistic behaviour.
Like the Bushmen who are despised because of their light skin, Elizabeth suffers the same treatment from the villagers and suffers not only social isolation, but intellectual deprivation.
Online Reporter