Title: A Question of Power Author: Bessie Head Creation Date: 1973 Location: Botswana
Summary
A Question of Power follows Elizabeth, a mixed-race South African woman living in exile in rural Botswana, as she descends into a prolonged psychological and spiritual breakdown. The novel plunges the reader into Elizabeth's interior world, where two male figures — Sello and Dan — appear as hallucinated presences who torment, seduce, and philosophically challenge her. Sello represents a severe, monastic spiritual authority; Dan embodies uninhibited sexual power and cruelty. Through increasingly terrifying visions, Elizabeth is subjected to psychological torture, sexual humiliation, and cosmic confrontations between good and evil.
Yet the novel is not only about madness. Interwoven with the hallucinatory sequences are scenes of Elizabeth's daily life in the village of Motabeng — her work in a communal garden, her interactions with neighbours, her relationship with her young son. The garden becomes the novel's counterweight to the chaos of the mind: patient, collective labour on the earth as the path back from the abyss. Elizabeth survives, and the novel ends with a hard-won affirmation of human goodness.
Why This Book Matters
A Question of Power is the most radically interior novel in African literature, and one of the most extraordinary depictions of mental illness in any literary tradition. Bessie Head — born of a white mother and a Black father in apartheid South Africa, classified as "Coloured," raised in foster care, and living as a stateless exile in Botswana — wrote from a position of total marginality. Her novel transforms that marginality into a universal exploration of what it means to be human when every category of identity has been stripped away.
The novel matters because it insists that the damage wrought by racism, exile, and patriarchy is not only political but psychological and spiritual. It takes the interior life of a mixed-race African woman seriously as the site of cosmic drama. In a literary tradition sometimes dominated by public, political themes, Head opened a space for the private, the mystical, and the psychologically extreme.
Historical Context
Bessie Head fled South Africa in 1964, shortly after the Sharpeville massacre and the banning of the ANC and PAC, settling in the village of Serowe in Botswana on a fragile exit permit that left her effectively stateless for fifteen years. A Question of Power draws directly on her own experiences of mental breakdown during her early years in Botswana. The novel's setting in a communal agricultural project reflects Head's actual involvement in such projects in Serowe. The Botswana of the novel is a place of refuge but also of loneliness, where Elizabeth's South African identity marks her as an outsider even among fellow Africans.
Literary Significance
Head's literary achievement in A Question of Power is to render the experience of psychosis from the inside without ever losing narrative control. The hallucinatory sequences are not stream-of-consciousness chaos but carefully structured confrontations with philosophical and moral problems — the nature of evil, the relationship between sexual and political power, the possibility of transcendence. The novel's two narrative registers — the visionary and the quotidian — create a formal tension that mirrors Elizabeth's struggle to hold her life together. The gardening scenes are among the most quietly powerful passages in African literature, asserting the dignity of manual labour and communal cooperation against the grandiosity of the visions. The novel has influenced writers including Tsitsi Dangarembga, Yvonne Vera, and NoViolet Bulawayo.
Research Notes
The Heinemann African Writers Series edition is standard. Head's personal papers and letters, housed at the Khama III Memorial Museum in Serowe, provide extensive biographical context. Critical reception was initially muted — the novel was too strange and too interior for a literary establishment focused on social realism — but it has been steadily reappraised as one of the masterworks of African literature. It is essential for this collection as a representation of Southern African literature, women's writing, and the psychological dimensions of African experience.
The Reading
Elizabeth cannot sleep. The night presses in on her small house in the village of Motabeng, Botswana, and in the darkness the figures appear: Sello and Dan, two men who exist in her mind with a reality more vivid and more terrifying than anything in the waking world. They have come to torment her, to instruct her, to destroy her, to remake her. She does not know which. She does not know if there is a difference.
Bessie Head's novel begins inside a consciousness already under siege. There is no gentle introduction, no establishing of normalcy before the crisis. Elizabeth is in the crisis from the first page. She is a mixed-race South African woman — born of a white mother and a Black father, classified as "Coloured" under apartheid, raised in foster care, stateless — who has fled to Botswana with her young son. She is a refugee, an exile, a woman without a country, without a racial category that any society will honour, without a past she can claim or a future she can see.
And she is going mad. Or she is having a spiritual experience. Or she is both — the novel refuses to separate these possibilities, insisting that the breakdown of Elizabeth's mind is simultaneously a psychological catastrophe and a cosmic confrontation with the fundamental forces of good and evil.
Sello appears first. He is a man of the village, a real person Elizabeth knows, but in her visions he becomes something larger: a monk, an ascetic, a figure of spiritual authority who sits in her mind like a judge on a throne. Sello speaks to Elizabeth of goodness, of the inner life, of the soul's struggle toward purity. His presence is austere, demanding, purifying. He strips away Elizabeth's defences, forces her to confront her own failures — her pride, her anger, her incapacity to love — with a severity that is both illuminating and cruel.
But Sello is not alone. He is accompanied by a woman — a figure Elizabeth sometimes calls "the African woman" — who embodies everything Elizabeth is not: confident, sexually powerful, rooted in her identity, contemptuous of Elizabeth's mixed-race uncertainty. This woman torments Elizabeth with visions of sexual ecstasy from which Elizabeth is excluded, forcing her to watch, to know that she is unwanted, undesirable, a nothing.
Then Dan arrives, and the novel descends into its darkest territory. Dan is the opposite of Sello: where Sello is austere, Dan is carnal; where Sello offers spiritual suffering, Dan offers sexual degradation. Dan appears in Elizabeth's mind as a figure of overwhelming masculinity and cruelty. He parades women before her — an endless succession of beautiful, willing women — and forces Elizabeth to witness their sexual encounters, mocking her frigidity, her loneliness, her inability to participate in the world of the body. Dan's cruelty is systematic and pornographic, designed to annihilate Elizabeth's sense of worth as a woman, as a body, as a being capable of giving or receiving pleasure.
Head renders these hallucinatory sequences with a directness that is shocking. The visions are not dreamy or metaphorical. They are graphic, violent, and detailed. Elizabeth lies in her bed while Dan's women perform above her, beside her, through her. She feels their contempt as a physical force. She is reduced to nothing — a spectator at the sexual carnival of a world that has no place for her.
And yet Head maintains narrative control throughout. The hallucinations are structured, organised around recurring themes and images: power, sex, evil, the nature of God, the possibility of goodness. They are not random eruptions of a disordered mind but a sustained philosophical argument conducted through visions. Head is using the machinery of psychosis to explore questions that philosophy addresses in abstractions: What is evil? Is it a force outside us or inside us? Can good survive in a world where power expresses itself through domination and humiliation? Is there a form of love that does not require the submission of one party to another?
Between the hallucinatory episodes, Elizabeth's daily life continues. She wakes each morning, exhausted and shattered by the night's visions, and goes to work in the communal garden. The garden is the novel's counterweight, its anchor, its salvation. Head describes the work of gardening with a loving attention to physical detail that stands in stark contrast to the abstraction of the visions: the feel of soil between the fingers, the weight of a watering can, the green unfurling of a seedling, the satisfaction of a row properly weeded. The garden is real in a way that Sello and Dan are not, and its reality holds Elizabeth to the earth when the visions threaten to pull her away entirely.
The garden is also a community. Elizabeth works alongside other women from the village and volunteers from abroad — Danish, American, British aid workers who have come to help with Botswana's agricultural development. Head draws these characters with warmth and specificity: Tom, the gentle American who teaches irrigation techniques; Kenosi, the Motswana woman whose quiet competence anchors the project; the Danish volunteers with their earnest idealism and their confusion about African realities. These people do not understand Elizabeth's inner torment, but their presence — their solidity, their ordinariness, their commitment to the simple, practical work of growing food — provides the scaffolding that keeps Elizabeth's life from collapsing.
Elizabeth's son is a small, persistent presence in the novel: a child who needs breakfast, who goes to school, who comes home and wants to play. His needs are simple and non-negotiable, and they tether Elizabeth to the concrete world more effectively than any philosophical argument. When the visions are at their worst, when Dan's cruelty threatens to extinguish her entirely, it is the sound of her son's voice that calls her back.
The novel's middle section deepens the philosophical confrontation. Sello and Dan become more explicitly symbolic — Sello representing a form of power that operates through spiritual authority and renunciation, Dan representing a form of power that operates through sexual domination and display. Elizabeth is caught between them, the object of competing claims on her soul. She begins to understand that both forms of power are dangerous, that the monk's austerity and the satyr's excess are twin faces of the same impulse to control.
Head also weaves in the question of race. Elizabeth is mixed-race in a continent where racial identity is the primary social fact. In South Africa, she was classified as Coloured — too dark for the whites, too light for the Blacks, belonging nowhere. In Botswana, she is an outsider — a South African refugee in a country that, while welcoming in principle, marks her as different. The villagers are kind but wary. She is not one of them. She never will be. The loneliness of this position — the absolute marginality of a woman who belongs to no race, no nation, no community — is the novel's biographical ground, the soil from which the visions grow.
Dan taunts Elizabeth with her racial identity. He tells her she is nothing — not Black enough, not white enough, not African enough. He tells her that her mother was a madwoman (this is true: Head's white mother was institutionalised after giving birth to a mixed-race child) and that madness is her inheritance. He tells her she will never escape the categories that the world has imposed on her: half-caste, illegitimate, crazy. The cruelty of these taunts is that they echo what the real world has told Elizabeth throughout her life. Dan does not need to invent his torture; he merely amplifies what apartheid and exile have already done.
The breakdown intensifies. Elizabeth stops eating. She stops washing. She lies in bed for days while the visions consume her. The villagers and her colleagues grow alarmed. She is taken to a hospital, sedated, returned. The cycle repeats. Head describes this spiral with unflinching honesty, never prettifying the madness, never granting it the glamour of artistic sensitivity. Elizabeth is ill. Her illness is ugly, frightening, and profoundly isolating. The people who care about her — Tom, Kenosi, her son's teachers — can do nothing but wait and hope.
And then, gradually, something shifts. The shift does not come through a dramatic revelation or a therapeutic breakthrough. It comes through the garden. Elizabeth returns to the soil. She puts her hands in the earth. She plants seeds. She waters them. She watches them grow. The simple, patient work of cultivation — of participating in the cycle of growth rather than the cycle of destruction — begins to restore something that the visions had nearly extinguished.
Head does not sentimentalise this recovery. Elizabeth does not "get better" in any clinical sense. The visions do not disappear; they recede. The philosophical questions they raised are not answered; they are set aside in favour of the immediate, practical demands of living. The garden does not cure Elizabeth. It gives her a reason to keep going, and in the economy of this novel, that is enough.
The novel's final pages achieve a hard-won affirmation that is all the more powerful for being so tentative. Elizabeth sits in her garden and feels, for the first time, a sense of connection — to the soil, to the village, to the human project of growing food and feeding people. She formulates an understanding of goodness that is neither Sello's austere spirituality nor Dan's carnal power but something simpler and more durable: goodness as cooperative labour, as the willingness to work alongside others for a shared purpose, as the commitment to the earth and its seasons.
"As she fell asleep, she placed one soft hand over her land. It was a gesture of belonging."
This final sentence is one of the most moving in African literature. Elizabeth — the woman without a country, without a race, without a category — finds belonging not in identity but in labour, not in being but in doing, not in the grand abstractions of Sello and Dan but in the feel of soil under her hand. The question of power that the novel's title poses is answered not with a theory but with a gesture: the hand placed on the land, the body returning to the earth, the exile finding home not in a nation but in a garden.
Bessie Head wrote A Question of Power from her own experience of mental breakdown during her early years in Botswana. She was, like Elizabeth, a mixed-race South African exile, stateless, alone, marginalised. She was hospitalised more than once. She worked in communal gardens in Serowe. She raised her son alone. The novel is the most directly autobiographical of her three major works, and its rawness — its refusal to distance itself from the experience it describes — is what gives it its extraordinary power.
Head died in Serowe in 1986, at the age of forty-eight, of hepatitis. She had published three novels, a collection of stories, and two works of social history. She never returned to South Africa. She was buried in Botswana, in the country that had given her refuge but never quite given her home. A Question of Power is her testament — the record of a mind that went to the edge of dissolution and came back carrying, in its broken hands, a handful of earth.
This post is part of Civilisations, a 149-book chronological journey through world literature. See the full collection →
The standard edition is the Heinemann African Writers Series paperback, which has been reprinted by several publishers. The novel was originally written in English and requires no translation.
Heinemann African Writers Series. The standard available edition.
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