# Bessie Head

Bessie Amelia Emery Head (6 July 1937 – 17 April 1986) was a South African writer who, though born in South Africa, is usually considered Botswana's most influential writer. She wrote novels, short fiction and autobiographical works.

## Quotes
### When Rain Clouds Gather (1968)

* It's only education that turns a man away from his tribe.
** Page 3.
* I don’t care about people. I don’t care about anything, not even the white man. I want to feel what it is like to live in a free country and then maybe some of the evils in my life will correct themselves.
** Chapter 1, Page 4.
* He sat quite still, staring ahead with calm, empty eyes, and he looked so lordly for all his tattered coat and rough cowhide shoes that Makhaya smiled and walked up to him and greeted him.
** Chapter 1, Page 14
* The country presented overwhelming challenges, he said, not only because the rainfall was poor but because the majority of the people engaged in subsistence farming were using primitive techniques that ruined the land. All this had excited his interest.
** Chapter 2, Pages 17-18.
* But witch doctors were human, and nothing, however odd and perverse, need be feared if it was human.
** page 6
* Why should men be brought up with a false sense of superiority over women? People can respect me if they wish, but only if I earn it.
** page 10
* It was the mentality of the old hag that ruined a whole continent - some sort of clinging, ancestral, tribal belief that a man was nothing more than a grovelling sex organ, that there was no such thing as privacy of soul and body, and that no ordinary man would hesitate to jump on a mere child.
** Page 10.
* Well-educated men often come to the crossroad of life .. One road might lead to fame and importance, and another might lead to peace of mind. It's the road of peace of mind that I'm seeking. [
** Page 15
* In this country there is a great tolerance of evil. It is because of death that we tolerate evil. All meet death in the end, and because of death we make allowance for evil though we do not like it.
** Page 23.
* It was his belief that a witty answer turneth away wrath and that the oil of reason should always be poured on troubled waters.
** Page 48
* Tie a man's hands behind his back and then ask him if he's going to chop down a tree.
** Page 61.
* One might go so far as to say that it is strong, dominating personalities who might play a decisive role when things are changing. Somehow they always manage to speak with the voice of authority, and their innate strength of character drives them to take the lead in almost any situation. Allied to all this is their boundless optimism and faith in their fellow men.
** Page 76
* You find yourself throwing blows but weeping at the same time, because of all the people who sit and wail in the darkness, and because of all the fat smug persecutors to whom this wailing is like sweet music, and some inner voice keeps on telling you that your way is right for you, that the process of rising up from the darkness is an intensely personal and private one, and that if you can find a society that leaves the individual to develop freely you ought to choose that society as your home.
** Page 82.
* Most men want to achieve great victories ... But I am only looking for a woman.
** Page 99
* There seemed to be ancient, ancestral lines drawn around the African man which defined his loyalties, responsibilities, and even the duration of his smile.
** Page 129
* Things wouldn’t have been so bad if black men as a whole had not accepted their oppression and added to it with their own taboos and traditions.
** page 130.
* Prostitutes, he was to decide, were the best type of women you'd find among all black women, unless a man wanted to be trapped for life by a dead thing. A prostitute laughed. She established her own kind of equality with men. She picked up a wide, vicarious experience that made her charter in a lively way, and she was so used to the sex organs of men that she was inclined to regard him as a bit more than a sex organ. Not so the dead thing most men married. Someone told that dead thing that a man was only his sex organs and functioned as such. Someone told her that she was inferior in every way to a man, and she had been inferior for so long that even if a door opened somewhere, she could not wear this freedom gracefully. There was no balance between herself and a man. There was nothing but this quiet, contemptuous, know-all silence between herself, the man and his functioning organs. And everyone called this married life, even the filthy unwashed children, the filthy unwashed floors, and piles of unwashed dishes.
** Page 130-1.
* I don't know these people but my search for a faith has taught me that life is a fire in which each burns until it is time to close the shop.
** Page 134-5.
* People could do without religions and Gods who died for the sins of the world and thereby left men without any feeling of self-responsibility for the crimes they committed. ... It meant that a white man could forever go on slaughtering black men simply because Jesus Christ would save him from his sins. Africa could do without a religion a like that.
** Page 140.
* He had grown up in an atmosphere where the most important thing in the world was the stronger whose shadow darkened the doorstep. People were the central part of the universe of Africa, and the world stood still because of this.
** Page 141.
* Poor people are poor because they don't know how to get rich.
** Page 149.
* Dinorego was saying, ‘We can progress too, even though we are uneducated men. The mind of an uneducated man works like this: he is a listener and a believer. Most of all he is a believer.’
** page 161.
* There was always something on this earth man was forced to love and worship by reason of its absence. People in cloudy, misty climates worshiped the sun, and people in semi-desert countries worshipped the rain.
** Page 178
* Most men were waiting for the politicians to sort out their private agonies.
** Page 174
* Being an African man he ought to have known that nothing happened on the continent of Africa without all Africans getting to know of it.
** Page 176
* Even the trees were dying, from roots upwards,' he said. 'Does everything die like this?' 'No,' she said. 'You may see no rivers on the ground but we keep the rivers inside us. That is why all good things and all good people are called rain. Sometimes we see the rain clouds gather even though not a cloud appears in the sky. It is all in our heart.'
** Page 177.
* There was always something on this earth man was forced to love and worship by reason of its absence. People in cloudy, misty climates worshipped the sun, and people in semi-desert countries worshipped the rain.
** Page 177-8.
* No words, however wise, could explain the awfulness of the death, not while the living were firmly attached to love, child-bearing, child-rearing, hunger, struggle, and the sunrise of tomorrow. Life had to flow all the time, for the living, like water in a stream.
** Page 178-9
* If you said no, no, no, and kept your claws in a people's heart, what else did you want but that they should all die?
** Page 185.
* Was he crying now because, for the first time in his life, he was feeling what it must be like to face a tomorrow without any future?
** Page 186.
* Sometimes a man's God was like Solomon and he decked himself up in gold and he built a house that was a hundred cubits in length and fifty cubits in breadth and thirty cubits in height. Gold candlesticks, cherubims, and pomegranates adorned his house, which had forty bathrooms. And there are bowls and snuffers and spoons and censers and door hinges of pure gold. And all that the followers of Solomon could do was to gape and marvel and chronicle these wonders in minute detail. Even Solomon's wisdom took secondary place to his material possessions and dazzling raiment. Then came a God who was greater than Solomon, but he walked around with no shoes, in rough cloth, wandering up and down the dusty footpath in the hot sun, with no bed on which to rest his head. And all that the followers of this God could do was to chronicle, in minute detail, the wonder and marvel of his wisdom.
** Page 194-5
* Therefore the Good God cast one last look at Makhaya, whom he intended revenging almightily for his silent threat to knock him down. He would so much entangle this stupid young man with marriage and babies and children that he would always have to think, not twice but several hundred times, before he came to knocking anyone down.
** Page 198.

### Maru (1971)

* Before the white man became universally disliked for his mental outlook it was there.
** p. 5
* You just have to look different ... then seemingly anything can be said and done to you as your outer appearance reduces you to the status of a non-human being.
** p. 5
* The rhythm of sunrise, the rhythm of sunset, filled her life.
* ...a door silently opened on the small, dark airless room in which their souls had been shut for a long time. The wind of freedom, which was blowing throughout the world for all people, turned and flowed into the room.

### "The Prisoner Who Wore Glasses" (1973)

* He was a thin little fellow with a hollowed-out chest and comic knobbly knees.
** Paragraph 2
* Perhaps they want me to send a message to the children,’ he thought tenderly, noting that the clouds were drifting in the direction of his home some hundred miles away. But before he could frame the message, the warder in charge of his work span shouted:‘Hey, what you tink you’re doing, Brille?’
** Paragraphs 3-4
* The prisoner swung round, blinking rapidly, yet at the same time sizing up the enemy. He was a new warder, named Jacobus Stephanus Hannetjie. His eyes were the color of the sky but they were frightening. A simple, primitive, brutal soul gazed out of them.
** Paragraph 5
* They were grouped together for convenience, as it was one of the prison regulations that no black warder should be in charge of a political prisoner lest this prisoner convert him to his views. It never seemed to occur to the authorities that this very reasoning was the strength of Span One and a clue to the strange terror they aroused in the warders.
** Paragraph 9
* Be good comrades, my children. Cooperate, then life will run smoothly.
** Paragraph 28
* Hannetjie is just a child and stupidly truthful.
** Paragraph 41
* The man really [is] a child.
** Paragraph 55
* Scarcely a breath of wind disturbed the stillness of the day, and the long rows of cabbages were bright green in the sunlight. Large white clouds drifted slowly across the deep blue sky. Now and then they obscured the sun and caused a chill on the backs of the prisoners who had to work all day long in the cabbage field.This trick the clouds were playing with the sun eventually caused one of the prisoners who wore glasses to stop work, straighten up and peer shortsightedly at them. He was a thin little fellow with a hollowed-out chest and comic knobbly knees. He also had a lot of fanciful ideas because he smiled at the clouds.
* The prisoner swung round, blinking rapidly, yet at the same time sizing up the enemy. He was a new warder, named Jacobus Stephanus Hannetjie. His eyes were the color of the sky but they were frightening. A simple, primitive, brutal soul gazed out of them.
* Up until the arrival of Warder Hannetjie, no warder had dared beat any member of Span One and no warder had lasted more than a week with them. The battle was entirely psychological. Span One was assertive and it was beyond the scope of white warders to handle assertive black men. Thus, Span One had got out of control. They were the best thieves and liars in the camp. They chatted and smoked tobacco. And since they moved, thought and acted as one, they had perfected every technique of group concealment.
* he said, “I don’t take orders from a kaffir. I don’t know what kind of kaffir you tink you are. Why don’t you say Baas. I’m your Baas. Why don’t you say Baas, hey?” Brille blinked his eyes rapidly but by contrast his voice was strangely calm.“I’m twenty years older than you,” he said. It was the first thing that came to mind, but the comrades seemed to think it a huge joke. A titter swept up the line. The next thing Warder Hannetjie whipped out a knobkerrie and gave Brille several blows about the head.
* You know, comrades,” he said, “I’ve got Hannetjie. I’ll betray him tomorrow.”

### A Question of Power (1973)

* It was in Botswana where, mentally, the normal and the abnormal blended completely in Elizabeth’s mind.”
** Part 1, Page 15
* Be the same as others in heart; just be a person.”
** Part 1, Page 26
* It is when you cry, in the blackest hour of despair, that you stumble on a source of goodness.”
** Part 1, Page 34
* When someone says 'my people' with a specific stress on the blackness of those people, they are after kingdoms and permanently child-like slaves. 'The people' are never going to rise above the status of 'the people'. They are going to be told what is good for them by the 'mother' and the 'father'.
** Page 63
* 'Life is such a gentle, treasured thing. I learn about it every minute. I think about it so deeply.'
** p81
* When people stumble upon magic they study it very closely, because all living people are, at heart, amateur scientists and inventors. Why must racialists make an exemption of the black man? Why must she come here and help the black man with a special approach: ha, ha, ha, you're never going to come up to our level of civilisation?
** Page 83
* The victim is really the most flexible, the most free person on earth. He doesn't have to think up endless laws and endless falsehoods. His jailer does that. His jailer creates the chains and the oppression. He is merely presented with it. He is presented with a thousand and one hells to live through, and he usually lives through them all.
** Page 84
* Who is the greater man - the man who cries, broken by anguish, or his scoffing, mocking, jeering oppressor?
** Page 84
* 'God isn't a magical formula for me,' ... 'God isn't a switched-on, mysterious, unknown current. I can turn to and, by doing so, feel secure in my own nobility.
** Page 85
* Love is so powerful, it's like unseen flowers under your feet as you walk.
** Page 86
* The year ended in a roar of pain.
** p87
* You don't realize the point at which you become evil.
** Page 96
* The loud, pounding rhythm of his drama drummed in her ears day and night.
** p159

### Interview (September 25, 1976)

in conversations with african writers by Lee Nichols (1981)
* I did a lot of reading on my own because I loved that particular world. You open up a book and you learn about something that's much more exciting than your everyday grind, a world of magic beyond your own. And I feel that the beginnings of writing really start whereby you know that when you open a book there's a magical world there.
* I think that my whole life has been shaped by my South African experience and I would never really fall into the category of a writer who produces light entertainment for people. My whole force and direction comes from having something to say. What we are mainly very bothered about has been the dehumanizing of black people. And if we can resolve these situations-and I work both within the present and the future-if we can resolve our difficulties it is because we want a future which is defined for our children. So then you can't sort of say that you have ended any specific thing or that you have changed the world. You have merely offered your view of a grander world, of a world that's much grander than the one we've had already.
* when there is a tragedy, detail and a picture of the country emerges because people discuss it so much.
* You could really say that my writing experience began in Botswana. Everything about the society was magical to me and the reason I began writing is that I wanted to communicate that fascination I felt for the ways of life of the people of this country. It is almost impossible for a writer to evoke a similar feeling of magic and wonder about South Africa. It's too despairing.
* In my novel, A Question of Power, I was extremely bothered to define evil. I was looking for answers all along to questions of exploitation. And I was looking for balances; that is, if we have to live with good and evil we ought to present them as they really are.

### A Woman Alone: Autobiographical Writings (1990)

* I was born on the sixty of July, 1937, in the Pietermaritzburg Mental Hospital, in South Africa. The reason for my peculiar birthplaces was that my mother was white, and she had acquired me from a black man. She was judged insane, and committed to the mental hospital while pregnant. Her name was Bessie Emery and I consider it the only honor South African officials ever did me—naming me after this unknown, lovely, and unpredictable woman."
** Chapter 1, 1
* I have always been just me, with no frame of reference to anything beyond myself."
** Chapter 1, 3)
* Whatever my manifold disorders are, I hope to get them sorted out pretty soon, because I've just got to tell a story."
** Chapter 1, 8.
* In a cold and loveless country like South Africa his warmth of heart and genuine friendliness is like a great roaring fire on the white icy wastes of the Antarctic.
** Chapter...
* TELL THEM HOW NATURAL, SENSIBLE, NORMAL IS HUMAN KINDNESS. TELL THEM, THOSE WHO JUDGE MY COUNTRY, AFRICA, BY GAIN AND GREED, THAT THE GODS WALK ABOUT HER BAREFOOT WITH NO ERMINE AND GOLD-STUDDED CLOAKS
** Page 61.
* I feel in my heart that our Pharaoh has already been born. It may be that I shall not live to see Pharaoh's day but I want all those who now live in anguish to be comforted. For one day, due to the length of his roots and the depth of his wisdom, all nations shall dwell under his shadow.
** Page 71.

### The Cardinals. With Meditations and Short Stories (1993)

* You have a beautiful soul that was nurtured on a dung heap.
** Page 22.
* I was thinking a while ago, Johnny, that half the trouble in the world is caused by the difficulty we have in communicating with each other. It's practically impossible to say what you really mean and to be sure that the other person is understanding you. Word communication is dependent on reason and logic but there are many things in life that are not reasonable or logical. A jazz musician can say something to me in his music but it would be quite beyond me to translate into words what he is communicating through music. What he has to say touches the most vital part of my life but I can only acknowledge his message silently.
** Page 24.
* Do you think life will care about you if you do not show that you care about it?
** Page 37.
* They pursued their love with a wild abandon, unprotected against the treachery of the insecure foundation on which it was based and too young to bridge the gap that would suddenly and unexpectedly fling them miles apart.
The greatest crime in this world is to be a moral coward. [
** Page 49.
* People don't fall in love these days. The movies have made that kind of thing stale. They have robbed us of our capacity to feel through feeding us with cheap sensation. Ask any man and he will tell you that he can't kiss his wife because she wants him to kiss her the way Richard Widmark kisses.
** Page 56
A human life is limited so it has to identify itself with a small corner of this earth. Only then is it able to shape its destiny and present its contribution. This need of a country is basic and instinctive in every living being.
** Page 62.
* The whole principle of living and learning is dependent on what is going on in the mind. The mind is like a huge, living tapestry. Everything we see, hear, learn and experience gets being imprinted on it. As we grow we begin to see that we can correlate those impressions into a definite pattern and so we call that our life.
** Page 65
* Life's one hell of a joke. It dresses us up with insatiable yearnings and high-flying ambitions and then flings the fact of our insignificance in our faces. Half of us fall for the joke and start the mad rush after the big prizes. Some, like you and me can't fall for the joke. We've been hit too hard at too early an age.
** Page 73.
Half of humanity is running like hell away from slavery while the other half is chasing behind, figuring out ways and means of maintaining the slave system.
** Page 75-6.
* Above all the necessities of life, human beings need love and it is often the one thing most denied to them.
** Page 79.
* You are young and might prefer to believe that love is moonlight and rosy sunsets. It is not. It is brutal, violent, ugly, possessive and dictatorial. It makes no allowances for the freedom and individuality of the loved one. Lovers become one closely knit unit in thought and feeling. Should you eventually find that this love is beyond your capacity or that you cannot rise to its demands, you may leave but please make sure that you go to some place where I will never be able to find you.
** Page 89.
* Once a man involves himself with women there's always some kind of retribution. They're the most vengeful creatures on this earth.
** Page 99.
* There's only one way to make yourself shock-proof. Do not be impressed by evil and do not be impressed by good.
** Page 100.
* The task of the writer is to serve humanity and not party politicians and their temporary fixations. But it's a hard path to follow. I'm having headaches over it because I'm too intensely aware of the pressures and issues and yet at the same time wish to retain my right to think for myself.
** Page 100.
* She was hardly conscious of her agonised cry as his hard kisses ravaged her mouth. For her it was like a dissolution of body and bones; with only a heart left; a pulsing heart awash in an ocean of rushing tornadic darkness; helpless at its own forward rushing...
** Page 115.
* Life is not in bits and pieces. It is a magnificent, rhythmic, pulsating symphony.
** Page 116.
* Life is a treacherous quicksand with no guarantee of safety anywhere. We can only try to grab what happiness we can before we are swept off into oblivion.
** Page 118.
* Not now, not ever, shall I be complete; and though the road to find you has been desolate with loneliness, still more desolate is the road that leads away from you. It is as though pain piles on pain in an endless, unbroken stream, until it is the only reality. What do they do, those who love?
*** Africa, Page 121.
* The only reason why I always admit pain is that it seems the only constructive emotion.
** Africa, Page 122.
* A basically timid and cowardly person dare not presume to speak for others. He can only speak for himself. [A Personal View of the Survival of the Unfittest,
** Page 125.
* There were once highway robbers, who said: 'Your money or your life!' Today, they say: 'Your politics or your life!' [A Personal View of the Survival of the Unfittest,
** Page 126.
* Who am I? What am I? In past and present, the answer lies in Africa; in part it lies within the whole timeless, limitless, eternal universe. How can I discover the meaning and purpose of my country if I do not first discover the meaning and purpose of my own life? Today there are a thousand labels. One of them is 'crazy crank'. I do not mind being a 'crazy crank', as long as I am sure that I am a crank of my own making, as long as I resist environmental, societal, and political attempts to control and suppress my mind. [A Personal View of the Survival of the Unfittest,
** Page 127.
* All life flows continuously like water in the stream and I am only some of the water in the stream, never able to gauge my depth. The hours, the years, the eternities slip by too quickly, moving, changing, never the same thing. I move with this current to the ocean only to be flung back again to the stream. The cycle seems unending, repetitive. [Where is the Hour of the Beautiful Dancing of Birds in the Sun-wind?,
** Page 128.
* The holy order of doing the right thing is incompatible with love, which does all the wrong things. Love can never learn to choose the woman who has the highest price, or whose father possesses the greatest number of cattle. Love strikes the outcast, the beggar, the stranger, and leaves the dull, dead, complacent conformer to his safety. [Where is the Hour of the Beautiful Dancing of Birds in the Sun-wind?,
** Page 129.
* The body is a positive thing, and love without a body is negative, useless, purposeless. [Where is the Hour of the Beautiful Dancing of Birds in the Sun-wind?,
** Page 132.
* A woman is a maker of pottery, feeling life with her hands, keeping it whole, moulding it from the depths upwards. Her vision is constant, unchanging. [Where is the Hour of the Beautiful Dancing of Birds in the Sun-wind?,
** Page 135.

### When Rain Clouds Gather (1968)

* "The philosophy of love and peace strangely overlooked who was in possession of the guns…The contradictions were apparent to Makhaya, and perhaps there was no greater crime as yet than all the lies Western civilization had told in the name of Jesus Christ. It seemed to Makhaya far preferable for Africa if it did without Christianity and Christian double-talk, fat priests, golden images, and looked around at all the thin naked old men who sat under trees weaving baskets with shaking hands. People could do without religions and Gods who died for the sins of the world and thereby left men without any feeling of self-responsibility for the crimes they committed. This seemed to Makhaya the greatest irony of Christianity. It meant that a white man could forever go on slaughtering black men simply because Jesus Christ would save him from his sins. Africa could do without a religion like that.”
** AWS Classics, 2008; Page 140
* MakhayaMaseko’s quest is to find inner peace of mind by a constructive engagement with the social world and in the world of GolemaMmidi, these desires are offered fulfilment
** Page 22
* “It’s Zulu … I am a Zulu. And he laughed sarcastically at the thought of calling himself a Zulu
** Page 9
* “the poverty and tribalism of Africa [are] a blessing if people [can] develop, sharing everythingwith each other
** The realization of Makhaya about poverty and tribalism. Page 156
* …the Tswana language [like] the bush, [belongs] to all Batswana people
** Page 160
* Head’s contention is that socially ascribed identities arefalse, misleading and degrading to the true inner person
** Page 27
* “they cannot exist unless they can live in the village insuch a way that the changes that they bring about are necessary … in determining who they are
** Page 281
* it would seem to suggest that Africanness is not a natural state of existence, [but that] it must be performed
** Page 70

## Quotes about Bessie Head

* I think there's something very special about women writers, black women writers in America and those that I know of in any real sense in Africa-Bessie Head, for example, in Africa or Gloria Naylor here. There's a gaze that women writers seem to have that is quite fascinating to me because they tend not to be interested in confrontations with white men-the confrontation between black women and white men is not very important, it doesn't center the text. There are more important ones for them and their look, their gaze of the text is unblinking and wide and very steady. It's not narrow, it's very probing and it does not flinch. And it doesn't have these funny little axes to grind. There's something really marvelous about that.
** 1986 interview in Conversations with Toni Morrison edited by Danille K. Taylor-Guthrie (1994)
* I asked Bessie Head why a writer of such renown as she chose to remain in an isolated village, with no telephone, few modern conveniences, remote from the culture of cities. She told me Serowe suited her literary themes. She came from a humble background, she said, and preferred ordinary people. Powerful people, she went on, tended to be domineering; they don't pay their bills. The village people, she said, pay their bills "meticulously." "I have the courtesies, and love, of the people," she said. "What other life can I live?"
** Lee Nichols, conversations with african writers (1981)
* Bessie Head: I found her novels very, very gripping, fascinating, challenging, really intellectually intriguing.
** Wole Soyinka in Talking with African Writers by Jane Wilkinson (1992)
* “I once sat down on a bench at Cape Town railway station where the notice "Whites Only" was obscured. A few moments later a white man approached and shouted: 'Get off!' It never occurred to him that he was achieving the opposite of his dreams of superiority and had become a living object of contempt, that human beings, when they are human, dare not conduct themselves in such ways.”
* “Life is such a gentle, treasured thing. I learn about it every minute. I think about it so deeply.”
* “It seemed to be a makeshift replacement for love, absenting oneself from stifling atmospheres, because love basically was a torrential storm of feeling; it thrived only in partnership with laughing generosity and truthfulness.”
* “The whole village was involved. There was no longer buzz, buzz, buzz. Something they liked as Africans to pretend themselves incapable of-- being oppressive and prejudiced-- was being exposed. They always knew it was there but no oppressor believes in his oppression.”
* “A discipline I have observed is an attitude of love and reverence to people.”
* “And if the white man thought that Asians were a low, filthy nation, Asians could still smile with relief – at least, they were not Africans. And if the white man thought Africans were a low, filthy nation, Africans in Southern Africa could still smile – at least, they were not Bushmen.”
* “Love is mutually feeding each other, not one living on another like a ghoul.”
* “…This seemed to Makhaya the greatest irony of Christianity. It meant that a white man could forever go on slaughtering black men simply because Jesus Christ would save him from his sins. Africa could do without a religion like that.”
* I am building a stairway to the stars. I have the authority to take the whole of mankind up there with me. That is why I write.”
* “Poverty has a home in Africalike a quiet second skin.It may be the only place on earth where it is worn with unconscious dignity.”
* “The rhythm of sunrise, the rhythm of sunset, filled her life.”
* “Before the white man became universally disliked for his mental outlook, it was there. The white man found only too many people who looked different. That was all that outraged the receivers of his discrimination, that he applied the technique of the wild jiggling dance and the rattling tin cans to anyone who was not a white man.”
* “When no one wanted to bury a dead body, they called the missionaries; not that the missionaries really liked to be involved with mankind, but that they had been known to go into queer places because of their occupation. They would do that but they did not often like you to walk into their yard. They preferred to talk to you outside the fence.”
* “There was something Dikeledi called sham. It made people believe they were more important than the normal image of humankind. She had grown up surrounded by sham.”
* “At such times he would think, "What will I do if she does not love me as much as I love her?" A terrible reply came from his heart, 'Kill her.”
* “The man who slowly walked away from them was a king in their society. A day had come when he had decided that he did not need any kingship other than the kind of wife everybody would loathe from the bottom of their hearts.”
* “The contradictions were apparent to Makhaya, and perhaps there was no greater crime as yet than all the lies Western civilization had told in the name of Jesus Christ. It seemed to Makhaya far preferable for Africa if it did without Christianity and Christian double-talk, fat priests, golden images, and looked around at all the thin naked old men who sat under trees weaving baskets with shaking hands. People could do without religions and Gods who died for the sins of the world and thereby left men without any feeling of self-responsibility for the crimes they committed. This seemed to Makhaya the greatest irony of Christianity. It meant that a white man could forever go on slaughtering black men simply because Jesus Christ would save him from his sins. Africa could do without a religion like that. 135”
* “That is, adoration was patient and waiting while love or, if you liked, plain sexual passion banged everything about. It either shouted or thought it knew too much, and it had always left him cold and had not involved his heart. Therefore, if he wanted to get involved now it would be on his own terms and at his own pace.”
* “Dikeledi could make no secret of the fact that, in relation to men, she often suffered from high blood pressure, except that the trouble with the bloodstream had eventually boiled down to one, unattainable man.”
* once you make yourself a freak and special any bastard starts to use you. That's half of the fierce fight in Africa'
* “The whole village was involved. There was no longer buzz, buzz, buzz. Something they liked as Africans to pretend themselves incapable of-- being oppressive and prejudiced-- was being exposed. They always knew it was there but no oppressor believes in his oppression.”
* “Maybe he concentrated on his immediate situation. It was African. It was horrible. But wherever mankind had gathered itself into a social order, the same things were happening. There was a mass of people with no humnaity to whom another mass referred: Why, they are naturally like that. They like to live in such filth. They have been doing it for centuries”
* “The wind of freedom, which was blowing throughout the world for all people, turned and flowed into the room. As they breathed in the fresh, clear air their humanity awakened. They examined their condition. There was the foetid air, the excreta and the horror of being an oddity of the human race, with half the head of a man and half the body of a donkey. They laughed in an embarrassed way, scratching their heads. How had they fallen into this condition when, indeed, they were as human as everyone else? They started to run out into the sunlight, then they turned and looked at the dark, small room. They said: "We are not going back there.”
* “At such times he would think, "What will I do if she does not love me as much as I love her?" A terrible reply came from his heart, 'Kill her.”

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