51 pages • 1 hour read
Bessie HeadA Question of Power
Fiction | Novel | AdultA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Historical Context: South Africa and Botswana
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. She says, “[T]he British did not want Botswana,” and they thought it was a “God-awful country to live in” (16). Thus, Black people in Botswana governed their country, and Head says “they were never exposed to or broken by the sheer stark horror of white domination” (17). In A Question of Power, Head presents Botswana as a relatively calm and peaceful place, despite the inner turmoil that continues to drive conflict in the narrative.
Authorial Context: Bessie Head, Elizabeth, and Mental Health
Elizabeth and Bessie Head have much in common. Like Elizabeth, Head is from apartheid South Africa. Her mom was white, and her dad was Black. Authorities deemed Head’s mom “insane,” a stigmatizing term to describe mental health conditions, and she died by suicide in a mental health facility. Head married and eventually left her husband, and she took her son to Botswana. Similar to Elizabeth, Head battled a nightmarish internal world that impacted her mental health. While Elizabeth acknowledges her mental health conditions, she doesn’t present her conflict as exclusively a product of mental health. Elizabeth makes the story about a spiritual quest instead. Head, too, privileges the self-discovery aspect of the novel when she describes her book as “an intensely personal and private dialogue […] a private philosophical journey to the sources of evil” (“Social and Political Pressures” 15). The book doesn’t aim to provide a scientific or healing-centered depiction of mental health but to portray a spiritual quest centered on power and evil.
In other writings, Head rejects the stigmatization of mental health conditions and of women who do not adhere to upper-class social conventions. In her autobiographical prose sketch, “A Personal View of the Survival of the Unfittest” (The Cardinals, with Meditations and Short Stories, Heinemann, 1994), Head declares, “I do not mind being a ‘crazy crank.’” She explains, “‘Crankhood’ and a quiet, private awareness of individual liberty are far preferable to the frantic hysteria and anxiety of keeping pace with the latest ideology of the VIPs” (127). Head sees her individualism as a badge of honor separating her from the masses. Elizabeth’s autonomy also distinguishes her, with Tom asking her, “Why do you have to go opposite to everyone else?” (133). Head’s references to “crankhood” reflect the ostracism faced by women who refuse to conform to cultural expectations.
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