Tales of Tenderness and Power (African Writers Series)

45.00

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During her lifetime (1937-1986), Bessie Head was hailed as one of Africa’s greatest writers. This anthology of stories, personal observations and historic legends – some previously unpublished – is a fitting tribute to her versatility and power as a storyteller and commentator.

Tales of Tenderness and Power draws on writings which have roots in the author’s own experience in Botswana. It reflects her fascination with the country’s people and their history and her identification with individuals and their conflicting emotions. ‘She enjoyed observing, smiling, forgiving or raging and then recording.’ These tales reveal her affinity with human goodness and tenderness and her fear and resentment of the misuse of power.

Bessie Head has been described as writing with ‘an extraordinary simplicity and breadth of vision’. This collection will honour her vision and posthumously reinforce her literary status.

‘It should be widely read for it confirms the stature and rich complexity of Head’s literary legend.’ Andries Walter Oliphant, New Nation

Tales of Tenderness is a good book which reasserts Head as one of Africa’s great writers, and pay a deserved tribute to a woman who gave the best part of her life to literature.’ Kaizer M. Nyatsumba, Tribute

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Weight 0.130 kg

Bessie Head

Bessie Emery Head (6 July 1937 – 17 April 1986), though born in South Africa, is usually considered Botswana's most influential writer.

Bessie Emery Head was born in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, the child of a wealthy white South African woman and a black servant when interracial relationships were illegal in South Africa. It was claimed that her mother was mentally ill so that she could be sent to a quiet location to give birth to Bessie without the neighbours knowing. However, the exact circumstances are disputed, and some of Bessie Head's comments, though often quoted as straight autobiography, are in fact from fictionalized settings.

In the 1950s and '60s she was a teacher, then a journalist for the South African magazine Drum. In 1964 she moved to Botswana (then still the Bechuanaland Protectorate) as a refugee, having been peripherally involved with Pan-African politics. It would take 15 years for Head to obtain Botswana citizenship. Head settled in Serowe, the largest of Botswana's "villages" (i.e. traditional settlements as opposed to settler towns). Serowe was famous both for its historical importance, as capital of the Bamangwato people, and for the experimental Swaneng school of Patrick van Rensburg. The deposed chief of the Bamangwato, Seretse Khama, was soon to become the first President of independent Botswana.

Her early death in 1986 (aged 48) from Hepatitis came just at the point where she was starting to achieve recognition as a writer and was no longer so desperately poor.

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Tales of Tenderness and Power (African Writers Series)

45.00