A Question Of Power

Bessie Head's vision of the separation of the mentally sick, and her ability to give mind-suffering a kind of picture language, convey a positively medieval horror. She brilliantly develops ascending degrees of personal isolation and is very moving when she describes abating pain. Her novels – this is the third – have a way of soaring up from rock bottom to the stars, and are very ‘shaking.’

- Ranold Blythe in The Sunday Times

‘Your mother was insane. If you’re not careful you’ll get insane just like your mother. Your mother was a white woman. They had to lock her up, as she was having a child by the stable boy who was a native.’ It was never clear to Elizabeth whether the mission school principal’s cruel revelation of her origins is at the bottom of her mental breakdown. She has left South Africa with her son and is living in the village of Motabeng, the place of sand, in Botswana where there are no street lights at night. In the darkness of this country where people turn around and look at her with vague curiosity as an outsider, she establishes an entirely abnormal relationship with two men. A mind-bending book which takes the reader in and out of sanity.