By the time of her death at the age of forty-eight in Serowe, a village in Botswana, Bessie Head had gained recognition as a writer of extraordinary power and insight. In her concern with women and madness in A Question of Power (1973), Charles Larson claimed in a review in English Around the World (May 1974) that Head "almost single-handedly brought about the inward turning of the African novel." The novel was ranked eighth of fifteen "most influential books of the decade" by the journal Black Scholar in its March-April 1981 issue. Head has also been acclaimed by internationally renowned authors such as Angela Carter and Alice Walker and has served as an inspiration to women writers of Africa, and, more particularly, to the suppressed women of her native South Africa.

To say that Bessie Head's beginnings were inauspicious does not do justice to their full horror. Her life story encapsulates...