Bessie Head’s Absorbent Literature

In this week’s episode, Anneke Rautenbach discusses how, when the writer Bessie Head escaped apartheid South Africa and settled in the rural village of Serowe, Botswana, she remained haunted by the violence of her past. In her work on experimental development farms, alongside locals and foreign volunteers, she discovered not only a source of healing, but a subterranean moral philosophy.

Anneke Rautenbach spent time in residence at WiSER in 2022, participated in The WiSER Podcast group and travelled from there to Botswana to conduct archival research at the Bessie Head Papers in Serowe. She is currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at New York University, where she is completing a dissertation on the role of the public intellectual in southern Africa. The PhD focuses on flashpoint moments in recent history when language played a particularly dynamic role -- from anticolonial prophecy to nationalist sloganeering to the metaphors of the HIV/AIDS crisis.

The WiSER Podcast Team this year is convened by Sarah Nuttall, sound editing by Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh and designs by Bronwyn Kotzen.