The Cardinals

Bessie Head's posthumously-published first piece of long fiction, a quasi-autobiographical novella set in South Africa around 1960. The central character starts out as an inconvenient illegitimate child, dumped by her middle-class mother with "informal foster-parents" in the slums. She pulls herself out of the gutter by sheer stubbornness and eventually becomes a journalist. Matter-of-fact about poverty and apartheid in a way you can only afford to be if you've come up the hard way yourself, but rather oddly romantic about African men.

Along the way Head is - slightly tentatively - exploring her idea that when confronted with terrible injustices (like apartheid) we have an obligation to do more than simply adopt a radical stance and show more complain: she ties in the direct, visible injustices of pass-books and immorality laws with the long-term consequences that work out in the characters of people who grow up under such a system. The first part of the book is very good: the second half reads a bit too much like a first novel, with characters engaging in rather too many theoretical conversations about the world, their place in it as writers, etc. Still, a very interesting first-hand account of that particular period in South African history. This edition also includes seven short pieces - prose poems or "meditations" - from later in Head's career. show less