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Head - English
URL: http://web.uflib.ufl.edu/cm/africana/head.htm

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Bessie Head was born in a mental hospital in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa to Bessie Emery, a wealthy white woman who had been in a relationship with a black stable-hand who worked for her family. Bessie was adoptedby a "Colored" (mixed-race) family . She was educated at a mission school, and received a teaching certificate in 1955. She taught for a few years, but did not like the job, and subsequently chose to work as a journalist. She wrote for Drum magazine. In 1960, she married a journalist named Harold Head. The marriage ended in divorce in 1964, and she took her son, Howard to Serowe, Botswana.

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Head, Bessie (1937-1986) - Norwegian
URL: http://www.hum.uit.no/alm/littvit/forfatter/Head+Bessie

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Head, Bessie. The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001 - English
URL: http://www.bartleby.com/65/he/Head-Bes.html

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Born in South Africa to a white mother and black father, she was placed in foster homes and orphanages as a child. After 1964, she lived in exile in Botswana. Her candid writing voiced her strong concerns about racism, economic stagnation, and the status of women in her adopted country.

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Literary Encyclopedia: Head, Bessie - English
URL: http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=2051

Bessie Head's life demonstrates the inextricability of one's personal life from political structures, especially in a South Africa fueled by the control of racialized bodies. Born Bessie Amelia Emery in 1937 to a white mother and black father, Bessie inherited her mother's full name at her mother's insistence. In later years she wrote of this as the only honor South African officials ever allowed her. Bessie was born during one of her mother's hospital stays at the Fort Napier Mental Institution in Pietermaritzburg. After the death of her son and a subsequent divorce, Bessie's mother began a life of successive hospitalizations for “dementia praecox”, today known as schizophrenia.

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Head, Bessie on Encyclopedia.com - English
URL: http://www.encyclopedia.com/html/H/Head-B1es.asp

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South African writer. Born in South Africa to a white mother and black father, she was placed in foster homes and orphanages as a child. After 1964, she lived in exile in Botswana. Her candid writing voiced her strong concerns about racism, economic stagnation, and the status of women in her adopted country.

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Head - English
URL: http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/Bahri/Head.html

shown in filters: Personalia

Bessie Head, one of Africa's most prominent writers, was born in South Africa in 1937. The child of an "illicit" union between a Scottish woman and a black man, Head was taken from her mother at birth and raised in a foster home until the age of thirteen. Head then attended missionary school and eventually became a teacher. Abandoning teaching after only a few years, Head began writing for the Golden City Post. In 1964, personal problems led her to take up a teaching post in Botswana, where Head remained in "refugee" status for fifteen years before gaining citizenship. All three of her major novels -- When Rain Clouds Gather, Maru, and A Question of Power -- along with other works were written in Botswana during this period. Bessie Head died in Botswana in 1986 at the young age of forty-nine.

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