A Question of Power
By Bessie Head
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'.
Life is such a gentle, treasured thing. I learn about it every minute. I think about it so deeply.
Who is the greater man - the man who cries, broken by anguish, or his scoffing, mocking, jeering oppressor?
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.
Love is so powerful, it's like unseen flowers under your feet as you walk.
The year ended in a roar of pain.
You don't realize the point at which you become evil.
It was in Botswana where, mentally, the normal and the abnormal blended completely in Elizabeth’s mind.
Be the same as others in heart; just be a person.
It is when you cry, in the blackest hour of despair, that you stumble on a source of goodness.
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?
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.
By Bessie Head
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.
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 go