Bessie Head's third novel [A Question of Power] is a remarkable attempt to escape from the limitations of mere "protest" literature in which Black South African writers so often find themselves. It would have been natural for her, and easier, to have written an attack on the indignities of apartheid which have driven her into exile in Botswana. Certainly South African racism is the ultimate source of the difficulties besetting Elizabeth, her "coloured" protagonist. But Head chooses to make her novel out of Elizabeth's response to injustice—first in madness and finally in a heroic struggle out of that madness into wholeness and wisdom. The novel's subject is power in all its physical and moral ramifications, and Elizabeth's final wisdom is understood in terms of her achievement of the power of love and human understanding. (p. 176)
Because of the essential wisdom of the novel it is unfortunate that the nightmare passages, though imaginative and remarkable in their way, are not more successful. Regrettably they too often seem to be out of the writer's control. Still, the novel is significant as a talented writer's attempt to avoid the didactic pitfalls which so often endanger spokesmen for oppressed peoples. (pp. 176-77)
Robert L. Berner, "South Africa: 'A Question of Power'," in Books Abroad (copyright 1975 by the University of Oklahoma Press), Vol. 49, No. 1, Winter, 1975, pp. 176-77.
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