ABSTRACT
Such familiarity as most older readers may have gained with Botswana through fiction will probably have been gleaned from the writings of the exiled South African writer Bessie head, who moved to the country in 1964, two years before it won its independence from Britain, and remained there for the rest of her life. head not only set novels like Maru (1971) and When Rain Clouds Gather (1969) and short stories such as those in The Collector of Treasures, and Other Botswana Village Tales (1977) in her country of exile, she also documented her commitment to her adopted country and its traditional way of life through important non-fictional texts such as her volume of social anthropology Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind (1981) and her historical study, A Bewitched Crossroad (1984a). As an exile, what head sought was an alternative to the South Africa of the apartheid era she had escaped, a place where she could, as she phrased it, ‘put down some roots in the African soil and & find a sense of peace about the future’ (Head 1984b: 280). She thought that in Botswana enough of African life and tradition had survived to make that possible. Accordingly the picture of life in Botswana that emerges from her published work is largely a positive one.
