Bessie head biography and works

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.

Bessie Head: New Considerations, Continuing Questions - JSTOR

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 i Head, Bessie (1937–1986) - Encyclopedia.com JAC