Bessie Head: A tribute

Imagine a woman, placed where she has no sense of her real identity — perhaps orphaned at birth without surviving relatives, or removed from her parents. Place such a woman where the individual is defined, first by her race — 'Bantu' — European — Indian — then, remove from her a sense of racial belonging: i.e. make her the child of one White and one African parent. Then imagine this woman writing creatively, always fearful of the knowledge that the White mother she had never known had died in a mental asylum.