1. Bessie Head, A Question of Power (1974)

2. Head: “I was born on the 6th July 1937 in the Pietermaritzburg Mental Hospital.... The reason for my peculiar birthplace was that my mother was white, and she had acquired me from a black man. She was judged insane, and committed to the mental hospital while pregnant.”
“A Question of Power... is totally autobiographical. Roughly, I would pin it down to this tremendous disturbance I began to experience from 1968 to Something is getting at you, and there's no way in which you can stop it or make it subside.... [The novel is] a kind of verbatim reportage. This happened to me.” (Interview in Between the Lines, 1989).

3. Isabel Balseiro: in A Question of Power “personal history is revisited by an exiled South African whose survival depends on the successful exhumation of her apartheid past. [The novel] evokes not the everyday South African reality, but the shadows of apartheid, the interstices where the mental damage such a system of life inflicted can be evidenced.” (“Exhuming the Past to Recover the Present”, Social Dynamics 23.2 (1997): 74)

4. Apartheid:
Apartheid = ‘apartness’ (Afrikaans)
Apartheid was a system of discriminatory racial segregation, implemented by the National Party government that came to power in 1948 and that continued to rule until 1994, when the system was finally abolished and a non-racial democracy, with universal suffrage, established.

7. ‘Of course it’s true. He looks like a monkey. He’s so ugly
‘Of course it’s true. He looks like a monkey. He’s so ugly. I’m not saying I’m not ugly myself. I shouldn’t mind if anyone told me I’m ugly because I know it’s true. Does it mean, if God looks ugly one ought not to say so without being dreadfully punished for saying so? Agh, I don’t really care if I look like the backside of a donkey…’ A hissing, insistent undertone accompanied her thoughts: ‘Yes, you think like that because you hate Africans. You don’t like the African hair. You don’t like the African nose…’ (48)

10. Dan: ‘leprosy-like fear of Coloureds or half-breeds
Dan: ‘leprosy-like fear of Coloureds or half-breeds [they might] contaminate his pure black skin’ (127)
‘extreme masculinity’ (105)
‘Your hair is not properly African You are inferior as a Coloured ... He thrust black hands in front of her, black legs and a huge, towering black penis’ ( )

11. Sello: "a spectacular array of personalities moved towards her, crowded with memories of the past" (24-25).
“It seemed almost incidental that he was African. So vast had his inner perceptions grown over the years that he preferred an identification with mankind to an identification with a particular environment” (11)
“prophet of mankind“
Nelson Mandela (1962): "I have fought against White domination, and I have fought against Black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony with equal opportunities. It is an ideal I hope to live for and achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die."

12. ‘There’s some such thing as black people’s suffering being a summary of everything the philosphers and prophets ever said,’ she said. ‘They said: “Never think along lines of I and mine. It is death.” But they said it prettily, under the shade of Bodhi trees. It made no impact on mankind in general. It was for an exclusive circle of followers. Black people learnt that lesson brutally because they were the living victims of the greed inspired by I and mine and to hell with you, dog. Where do you think their souls are, then, after centuris of suffering? They’re ahead of Buddha and Jesus and can dictate the terms for the future, not for any exclusive circle but for mankind in general’ (134)