A Question of Power

Elizabeth comes from a segregated apartheid (meaning “apartness”) South Africa. Since the end of the 1700s, Dutch and English colonizers in South Africa created laws to keep Black people away from white people, restricting Black people to specific areas. In the story, Dan talks about “directorship since 1910” (25, 115), the year South Africa became an independent country. White people represented a minority in the country, and racist laws were used to keep the white populace in power. By the end of the 1940s, the racist National Party was in power, passing laws that banned marriages and sexual relationships between different races. They also passed a law, the Population Registration Act, requiring all South Africans to carry a card confirming their race. Elizabeth’s mom violates the laws by having sex with a Black man, and Elizabeth addresses the classification system when she states, “They were races, not people” (44).

To get away from the brutal racism (and her husband), Elizabeth moves to Botswana, a neighboring country. In “Social and Political Pressures that Shape Literature in Southern Africa,” an essay in The Tragic Life: Bessie Head and Literature in Southern Africa (ed. Cecil Abrahams, Africa World Press, 1986), Head writes about the history of Botswana.