ABSTRACT
Among the host of black South African authors exiled by apartheid, Bessie Head alone chose to situate the bulk of her oeuvre in her adopted locale. The work of most of the literary exiles-Bloke Modisane, Lewis Nkosi, Es’kia Mphahlele, Alex La Guma, Dennis Brutus et al.—reveals few attachments to the alien present, focusing obsessively on the imaginative recuperation of a South Africa that is past and elsewhere. Almost all of these exiles wrote at a great physical distance from South Africa, having put oceans and continents between themselves and apartheid. Head’s circumstances and approach proved wholly different.
