Bessie Amelia Emery was born on 6 July 1937 in a mental hospital in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, to a white woman, Bessie Amelia Emery, née Birch, known as "Toby"; the black father's identity has never been discovered. Toby Emery had a history of mental illness and had been committed to psychiatric institutions; the discovery that she was pregnant with a mixed-race child had prompted her family to commit her once more. She died in 1943, and Bessie grew up in foster care until the welfare authorities placed her in an Anglican mission orphanage in Durban when she was thirteen. She received her high-school education there and at Umbilo Road High School, passing her Junior Certificate in 1952. She then trained as a primary-school teacher (studying toward her Natal Teachers' Senior Certificate) for another two years at the same school, now renamed Bechet High School. She later expressed bitterness at having grown up in a repressive religious environment and claimed that she never darkened the door of a church again.
Emery soon realized that she was temperamentally unsuited to teaching and moved into journalism, working mostly in Cape Town for the Golden City Post.
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