A Question of Power by Bessie Head

First published: 1973

Type of work: Magical realism

Time of work: The late 1960’s and the early 1970’s

Locale: Motabeng, Botswana

Principal Characters:

• Elizabeth, the protagonist, a schoolteacher in Botswana in exile from South Africa
• Sello, a farmer and cattle breeder in Motabeng who appears frequently in Elizabeth’s hallucinations
• Dan Molomo, a cattle millionaire in Botswana, also a chief character in Elizabeth’s hallucinations
• Shorty, Elizabeth’s son
• Tom, a twenty-two-year-old, white Peace Corps volunteer from the United States, a friend of Elizabeth
• Eugene, an Afrikaner also in exile from South Africa, the principal of the Motabeng Secondary School and the leading force in projects to raise the standard of living of the Batswana
• Kenosi, Elizabeth’s coworker on the cooperative gardening venture and eventually her friend

The Novel

Bessie Head’s A Question of Power is a novel on two levels: On the literal level, it is the story of the woman Elizabeth, who has come to Botswana with her small son as an exile from South Africa. Elizabeth first teaches school and later becomes involved in a cooperative farming venture designed to boost the economy of the village of Motabeng and to instill some pride in the Batswana. On this level, the story has little action and few emotional hills and valleys. On another level, however, the novel is a record of Elizabeth’s mental breakdown and of her wavering in and out of the terrifying world of insanity. The daytime world of Elizabeth’s mundane chores and her routine work at the school and later in the gardens contrasts sharply with the nighttime world that eventually takes over and leads to her total mental collapse.

Reared in South Africa by a foster mother, whom she believes is her true mother, Elizabeth is shocked, on being sent to a mission school, to learn that her mother is white and that she is living in a nearby mental hospital. Elizabeth’s teachers are warned to be on guard against any signs that the child is afflicted with the mother’s illness. Only after Elizabeth leaves South Africa to answer an advertisement for teachers in Botswana, walking out on a cheating husband and taking with her a small son, does she indeed start to show signs of insanity. Within three months of her arrival in Botswana, the normal and the abnormal start to blur for Elizabeth. She starts to hallucinate, and in the fantasy world created by her disturbed mind, she is obsessed with questions about the soul and the nature of good and evil. Good and evil take human shape in her fantasies, starting when she awakens one night to imagine a man sitting in the chair by her bed.

For three years, Sello, the man beside her bed, inhabits her fantasy world. The real Sello is a prominent farmer of Motabeng, but the Sello of Elizabeth’s nightmare world has little in common with his flesh-and-blood counterpart. The shadowy Sello of Elizabeth’s nightmares is a godlike entity who seems to have existed in all places and in all ages since the beginning of time. He is associated in her distorted thoughts with the prophets of the world, and he seems linked to Elizabeth herself by their mutual concern for things of the soul. He is threatened, however, in Elizabeth’s fantasies in the first part of the novel, by a Medusa-like adversary and, in the second part, by the satanic Dan Molomo, a character also based on a living man from the village but represented in Elizabeth’s madness as the epitome of evil.

After Elizabeth loses control of herself and shouts obscenities at a store clerk, she is told to produce a certificate of sanity or lose her teaching position. She chooses to turn her back on the job. She seeks help from Eugene, a fellow exile, who gives her work to do in the garden of the cooperative farm that he has helped establish in order to develop home industry among the Batswana and to take advantage of the region’s natural resources. Elizabeth’s life, on the surface, again takes on a semblance of order, but inside, the battle between good and evil still rages. She breaks down once again and this time finds herself, like her mother, in a mental institution. Elizabeth, however, is not destined to die there by her own hand, as did her mother under similar circumstances. Once Elizabeth is released from the hospital, suicide does appear a pleasant alternative to the life of mental torture that she has undergone for three years. Dan drives her to the edge by actually predicting the day and hour of her death, but Elizabeth loses herself in watching her young son play and, realizing what she has learned through her suffering, she throws away her bottle of pills and chooses life.

The Characters

Elizabeth is in more than one sense the only character of substance in the novel. There are minor characters who play a part in the real-world portion of Elizabeth’s years of suffering, and these characters help her on her way back to sanity, but the vast majority of the novel’s drama is played out in a world of hallucination and symbolism.

The characters of Elizabeth’s fantasy world represent good and evil. At times, they seem to represent pure forms of these two polar opposites, but Elizabeth realizes that good and evil do not exist in pure form.

Sello seems to represent the good and also to offer Elizabeth a haven from the terrifying world of her dreams. He warns her, however, not to become too complacent in her belief in his goodness:

What was presented to Elizabeth as goodness remained consistently so, to the extent that she too rapidly accepted Sello as a comfortable prop against which to lean. He turned to her once and warned her to retain her own mental independence: ‘You have an analytical mind. You must analyze everything you see.’ She failed to heed the warning, and the day he abruptly pulled away the prop of goodness she floundered badly in stormy and dangerous seas.

Sello cannot free himself from the evil power of a woman—the Medusa. Elizabeth’s prop fails because she realizes that, even in the case of the god-like Sello, there is both a good side to human nature and an evil side. Each nation has its gods and its myths to explain the existence of good and evil.

Elizabeth does not die a death of the soul, but she is tested, like Job, so severely that she loses her sanity in the face of the evil that the Medusa and Dan represent. In the statement from which the title of the novel comes, Sello tells her, “If the things of the souls are really a question of power, then anyone in possession of the power of the spirit could be Lucifer.” Once Dan saw his power, Sello continues, “he wanted to be God on the strength of his power irrespective of the fact that his heart is filth.... I gave him a free hand because I wanted to study, completely, his image. And 1 thought you needed the insight into absolute evil. I’m sorry it was so painful.”

Critical Context

The two novels by Bessie Head that preceded A Question of Power, When Rain Clouds Gather (1969) and Maru (1971), are also set in Botswana, where Head herself was a primary-school teacher. All three deal with color barriers, and all three illustrate an inner struggle even more intense than the characters’ outward struggle against discrimination. Margaret in Maru is an outcast in her own country because she is of the Bushman tribe. Makhaya in When Rain Clouds Gather and Elizabeth in A Question of Power are both exiles from South Africa. These last two novels are both excursions into the nature of man’s spiritual resources. The reader of A Question of Power, however, must endure a much more tortuous journey to reach, with Elizabeth, insight into the nature of the soul and how the natural equality of the soul should break down the unnatural racial barriers set up by man. Elizabeth does not advocate a display of power as the way to shape the future of Africa. Instead, she encourages her people to be ordinary, not great, for in power-worship lies the roots of destruction.

Head’s works also include a compilation of oral African folktales, The Collector of Treasures and Other Botswana Village Tales (1977), and A Bewitched Crossroad: An African Saga (1984).

Bibliography

Brown, Lloyd Wellesley. Women Writers in Black Africa, 1981.

Cima, Richard. Review in Library Journal. XCIX (March 15, 1974), p. 775.

Kitchen, Paddy. Review in New Statesman. LXXXVI (November 2, 1973), p.657.

Ravenscroft, Arthur. “The Novels of Bessie Head,” in Aspects of South African Literature, 1976. Edited by Christopher Heywood.

Rubenstein, Roberta. Review in The New Republic. CLXX (April 27, 1974), p. 30.