[Bessie Head's three novels] deal in different ways with exile and oppression. The protagonists are outsiders, new arrivals who try to forge a life for themselves in a poor, under-populated third world country, where traditional and modern attitudes to soil and society are in conflict. These are familiar themes in African writing but Bessie Head may be distinguished from other African writers in at least two respects. In the first place she does not idealize the African past and in the second she resists facile polarities, emphasizing personal rather than political motives for tensions between victim and oppressor. She moves beyond the stereotype of white oppressing black to show, particularly in Maru, systems of privilege and discrimination working solely within black society.
Makhaya, the hero of When Rain Clouds Gather is an exile from South Africa who has fled across the border to Botswana, having served a prison sentence for alleged political activities with banned organizations. He seeks, we are told in the opening paragraph, 'whatever illusion of freedom lay ahead'. Thus it is clear from the outset that independent Africa will not necessarily offer the victim of apartheid an easier life than the one he has left behind…. Makhaya, himself an exponent of modern, Western ideas, rejects tribalism as a barbarous system in which women are discriminated against and in which the village witchdoctors perpetuate their power over the community by encouraging superstition and ignorance. (pp. 54-5)
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