Surviving Apartheid: From Refugee to Resilient Voice of Change
Play & learn about Bessie Head's arty refugee experience 🎮
Click here to play & learn.
“Bessie Head: A Literary Journey allows players to craft a story that delves into the life and legacy of Bessie Head, one of Africa’s most celebrated writers. By piecing together her experiences and themes, players gain a deeper understanding of her powerful narratives. After completing their story, they can have a conversation with Bessie Head, exploring her thoughts and literary impact. This game beautifully combines storytelling and historical insight.”
- Amira Ismael
Back Story
As a mixed-race woman living in South Africa during the Apartheid, Bessie Head felt severe inner conflict. Interracial relationships were illegal and the c0lour of Bessie’s skin led to harsh treatment as a child from foster families and authorities. Bessie continued to notice stark societal divisions throughout her early career, too. When working in Cape Town, factors such as language, skin tone, and economic status separated people rigidly.
Bessie started to use her voice in the political sphere. Joining the Pan-African Congress in 1960, mass protest became a way to unite with others against the law requiring Black people to carry passes. However, violent political conflict and deprivation rendered South Africa a place where Bessie could not survive.
Hence, Bessie struggled to feel a sense of belonging long before becoming a refugee. She once wrote that she ‘survived precariously without a sense of roots, without a sense of history’. This vivid image of being disconnected from the soil of her home nation is one which Bessie explores throughout her novels. The natural landscape and its crop cycles of abundance and scarcity becomes an apt metaphor for the instability of displacement. Indeed, the grounds of your heritage can drastically affect what you will reap in life.
‘When Rain Clouds Gather’, for example, opens with the protagonist about to cross the border between South Africa and Botswana to escape racial discrimination. Many social institutions failed Bessie throughout her life, from mental health care to the asylum process. However, Bessie’s provoking literature is testament to her strong willpower to claim her own space where she could influence people. Undeniably, Bessie faced intersectional barriers of race, class, and gender. Yet in writing she felt power, claiming that ‘I write because I have authority from life to do so’.
In this article Isabelle highlights the arty refugee experience of Bessie Head. She is a student journalist with us on a placement organised with Oxford University Career Services. . The article was converted into a micro using Rosebud.ai by Eric. He is a front end developer placed by Virtual Internships to build his Ai & Gaming Dev experience.
Thank you for reading an A4R 🎨 Post. Don’t forget to visit our gift shop here. Every purchase scales our impact and pays our bills.