Bessie head famous works

Bessie head childhood
Bessie head husband
Bessie head cause of death

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Bessie Amelia Head

Bessie Amelia Head was born at Fort Napier Hospital in Pietermaritzburg, Natal (now KwaZulu-Natal), South Africa, the asylum her mother was committed to at the time. Her mother, Bessie Amelia Emery, came from a wealthy family of Scottish descent. No information on her father exists other than that he was a black man who worked as a groom on the Emery estate. The relationship between Head’s parents was forbidden according to South Africa’s Immorality Act at the time. Consequently, after falling pregnant her mother was deemed mentally insane and committed to Fort Napier Hospital for schizophrenia. Head was subsequently fostered to a white family, when presumed white, then to a poor coloured family, the Heathcotes, when reclassified according to apartheid legistlation as ‘mixed-race’.

Head described her childhood as a haphazard and self-reliant one, juggled between various child welfare organizations. She attended a Catholic church and school and remained ignorant of the Heathcotes not being her biological parents throughout her primary school years. When

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Acclaimed African writer Bessie Head was born on July 6, 1937, at Fort Napier Mental Institution in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. Her mother, Bessie Amelia Emery (from the wealthy South African Birch family) had suffered from mental illness and was confined there at the time. Bessie Amelia Emery died at the institution in 1943. Head’s father was an unidentified black male, who had entered into relations with Head’s mother. The birth itself was a criminal act, since at that time, extramarital sexual intercourse between blacks and whites was illegal. Thus, Head’s biracial identity would come to occupy much of her future writings.

Abandoned by her mother’s biological family, Bessie Emery was sent to live with a foster family, a Coloured couple, Nellie and George Heathcote. By 1950, she was declared a ward of the state and sent to St. Monica’s Home, an Anglican mission school that served Coloured girls, located in Durban, South Africa. In the same year, Emery began attendance at Umbilo Road High School, where she trained for her teaching certification.

After graduation, Emery wor

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"I´m building a set of stairs that leads to the stars. That´s why I write."

Bessie Head, one of Africa´s most famous authors, was born in South Africa in 1937. She was born to a wealthy South African woman and a black servant in an era when interracial relationships were prohibited in that country. Due to her mother´s mental illness, the writer lived with a host family until the age of 13, and she then studied at a mission school before being trained to become a teacher.

After spending several years in the field of education, she decided to work as a journalist for the Golden City Post. Her ties to literature became increasingly closer: she experimented with poetry and fiction, and published her first story in The New African. However, this apparent calmness would come to an end. A failed marriage with the journalist Harold Head (with whom she had a son), a deep depression and the repressive South African regime led her to flee Botswana in 1964.

Despite the occasional financial aid from friends, the author lived in absolute poverty, forcing he