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... her name often appeared in the local papers in connection with the school she founded, or with her articles and speeches on social matters, including the education of African girls and Christian marriage. Excerpts from her memoirs were published in the now defunct West African Review in the early 1950s, and she also published two short stories of which the better known 'Mista Courifer' appeared in a well known American anthology.

... the Honourable Joseph Ephraim Casely Hayford, of the Gold Coast, a member of the colony’s Legislative Council, a political activist philosopher, nationalist and pan-Africanist, successful barrister, journalist, newspaper editor and one of the first black Africans to write a novel in English.  

The Prospect of Fort St Anthony, at Axim [Gold Coast]

... because of financial difficulties. As usual, her lack of discrimination prompted her to join a coloured jazz troupe with headquarters in Berlin. She bitterly regretted her decision in after years.

Meanwhile, her considerable literary talents continued to develop by leaps and bounds. She expressed herself chiefly in poems. Knowing that Cambridge, a suburb of Boston, was the supreme educational centre of the States as it sheltered Harvard University, with its Female section, Radcliffe College, I took some of her poems to a friend there. She was so impressed that she sent them to the editor of the 'Atlanta Monthly'. To our great surprise, three of them were accepted and immediately appeared in this very literary American publication. Their appearance resulted in an offer for Gladys to enter Radcliffe College at once, but through my dear daughter's own action, another splendid opportunity was lost.

Gladys Casely-Hayford – although she was educated, like her mother, largely in the British tradition, and was a member of the privileged creole élite, her work is noteworthy for its demonstration of the beauty and dignity of the black race. Some of her English poems appeared under the pen-name Acquah Laluah in African and American journals from the thirties on; yet they had never been collected and did not gain any sort of fame until they were included, more than ten years after her death, in several anthologies of the sixties. One of her best known is Rejoice in which she calls rousingly to her fellow Africans to rejoice in their blackness … perhaps her most remarkable poem from the point of view of African consciousness is Nativity, which is about the birth of Christ. The author sets the Christmas story in a purely African setting: the babe himself is a black child born in a native hut to a black mother and father, he is wrapped in blue lappah and laid on his father’s ‘deerskin’ hide.  

Gladys also has a unique distinction of being perhaps the first Sierra Leonean to write poetry in Krio. Many of these poems are not only charming and meaningful, but also demonstrate a remarkable artistic control. It is another index of her determination, in spite of her British-type upbringing and education, to identify with Africa.

...  she reports on the proceedings of the 2^nd Achimota Conference of the Congress of British West Africa in the issue of July 14, 1927, writes book reviews in the issues of August 2 1927 and September 19 1928, and publishes a poem dedicated to the late Dr. Aggrey in the issue of October 21, 1928. 

Pre-colonial Freetown

Her mother also obtained Gladys admission to Radcliffe College, which she declined, and then Ruskin College in Oxford, which she accepted. Gladys Casely-Hayford's poetic talents were admired at Ruskin, but the stress of her failed affair and her difficult relationship with her mother brought a mental breakdown in 1932. Gladys was hospitalized in Oxford. When Adelaide appeared at her bedside, a doctor advised them to have a less competitive relationship. They returned to Freetown. Gladys resumed teaching at ITTS but increasingly withdrew from Adelaide, first moving to Accra, where her father's family lived, then marrying Arthur Hunter, whom her mother had not met. Hunter was, in turn, sweet natured, abusive and adulterous. Adelaide paid for him to go to England to learn the printing business. On his return, he eschewed work as a printer. Gladys' son Kobina Hunter was born in 1940. From age ten on, he would live alternately with his grandmother or his half-uncle.

I cannot pretend to be a student of South African literature; I cannot assess its evolution or lack of evolution. I only feel that the main function of the writer is to make life magical and to communicate a sense of wonder … Literature is very functional in southern African and bound inextricably to human suffering; the death of South African literature is that it is almost blinded by pain; people hardly exist beside the pain … My work has covered the whole spectrum of southern African preoccupations – refugeeism, racialism, patterns of evil and the ancient southern historical dialogue.  

The quote above is from Bessie Head whose works explored the effects of racial and social oppression, as well as exile – drawing a lot from her own experiences of discrimination both in her birthplace of South Africa and in her adopted land of Botswana. While her novels and short stories emphasised a lot of these experiences from a female perspective, Head always emphasised that her outlook was a universal one – refusing to be seen as a feminist, as she abhorred all oppression - racial, sexual, and political, but also refusing to be called an African writer, a black writer, or a revolutionary writer.  Bessie Head passed away in 1986 in Serowe, Botswana, and is buried in the old cemetery, on the hillside behind Botalaote ward, amidst trees and flowers. in 2003 - seventeen years after her death - Bessie Head was honoured with The Order of Ikhamanga.

Rare Bessie Head Photo from 1960

This is probably one of the longer posts I've written for this series - and I haven't even captured it all. It's also one that took me a while to put together, as I really wanted to do it justice. One thing for sure is that Bessie Head (as with the other women in this series) led a rather rich life - although hers was also tumultuous.  When asked how one becomes a writer, Bessie responded by saying that ‘writing first begins with the love of reading and a love of books, a feeling for all the magic and wonder that can be communicated through books.’ Bessie Head is said to have begun seriously writing in late 1965, often at night by candlelight.  She was also often described as a ‘brilliant yet troubled writer’, but first her entry into this world.

Bessie Amelia Emery was born in 1937 in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa to a white mother and a black father – whose name was unknown. Her mother was a patient at Fort Napier Mental Hospital – where Bessie was born - as under South Africa’s Immorality Act of 1927 sexual relations between people of different races was forbidden. Cared for by foster parents until she was thirteen, Head then attended a missionary boarding school earning  a high school diploma. Head went on to train to be a teacher - becoming a certified teacher in 1957 and teaching in Clairwood, Durban until 1958. 

Bessie Amelia Emery would then move to Cape Town - living and working in District Six, and go on to write for Drum Magazine and Golden City Post  as a freelance reporter – was said to be the only woman reporter - and also wrote for the weekend magazine Home Post. Around the same time, she started her own little homemade newspaper, The Citizen, which expressed her strong pan-African views, questioning the justice of laws and highlighting the absurdities of the apartheid system. In the late 1950s, Bessie Amelia Emery became a court reporter, witnessed the political unrest and resistance in South Africa and was aware of the trials political activists faced.