Snapshots of the Botswana Nation: Bessie Head's The Collector of Treasures & Other Botswana Village Tales as a National Project

Summary

My work was always tentative because it was always so completely new (…) it brought all kinds of people, both literate and semi-literate, together, and it did not really qualify who was who — everyone had a place in my world.

(Head 1977, 45)

Bessie Head's collection of short stories, The Collector of Treasures, signalled a shift in her writing which became, in her own words, ‘more social and outward-looking’ (Head 2007: 102). Head has described her earlier works as ‘stating personal choices’ expressed through the construction of ‘[m]anipulated characters [who] talk anxiously for the author’. The anxieties that Head alludes to are well documented in her biographical and epistolary writings; a product of an interracial relationship born into a prominent white family in apartheid South Africa, as well as the breakdown of her marriage and her life in exile in Botswana. She initially wrote literature as a cathartic expression of her troubles. Her characterization stemmed from an inward-looking anguish. The process of writing The Collector of Treasures was distinct from her previous writings as the stories were ‘undoubtedly written over a longer period than her novels’ (Ibrahim 1996: 171). The collection came to represent a ‘resumé of 13 years of living entirely in village life’ (Beard 1986: 45) rather than a specific chapter in Head's life. The movement into a more ‘outward-looking’ literature signified that ‘the stories were written after she had found a home in Botswana’ (Ibrahim 1996: 171).