Bessie Emery Head

Being an African man he ought to have known that nothing happened on the continent of Africa without all Africans getting to know of it.

I was born on the sixty of July, 1937, in the Pietermaritzburg Mental Hospital, in South Africa. The reason for my peculiar birthplaces 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. Her name was Bessie Emery and I consider it the only honor South African officials ever did me—naming me after this unknown, lovely, and unpredictable woman."

Before the white man became universally disliked for his mental outlook it was there.

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?

There's only one way to make yourself shock-proof. Do not be impressed by evil and do not be impressed by good.

She was hardly conscious of her agonised cry as his hard kisses ravaged her mouth. For her it was like a dissolution of body and bones; with only a heart left; a pulsing heart awash in an ocean of rushing tornadic darkness; helpless at its own forward rushing...

People could do without religions and Gods who died for the sins of the world and thereby left men without any feeling of self-responsibility for the crimes they committed. ... It meant that a white man could forever go on slaughtering black men simply because Jesus Christ would save him from his sins. Africa could do without a religion a like that.

when there is a tragedy, detail and a picture of the country emerges because people discuss it so much.

I think that my whole life has been shaped by my South African experience and I would never really fall into the category of a writer who produces light entertainment for people. My whole force and direction comes from having something to say. What we are mainly very bothered about has been the dehumanizing of black people. And if we can resolve these situations-and I work both within the present and the future-if we can resolve our difficulties it is because we want a future which is defined for our children. So then you can't sort of say that you have ended any specific thing or that you have changed the world. You have merely offered your view of a grander world, of a world that's much grander than the one we've had already.

Therefore the Good God cast one last look at Makhaya, whom he intended revenging almightily for his silent threat to knock him down. He would so much entangle this stupid young man with marriage and babies and children that he would always have to think, not twice but several hundred times, before he came to knocking anyone down.

MakhayaMaseko’s quest is to find inner peace of mind by a constructive engagement with the social world and in the world of GolemaMmidi, these desires are offered fulfilment

There seemed to be ancient, ancestral lines drawn around the African man which defined his loyalties, responsibilities, and even the duration of his smile.

In this country there is a great tolerance of evil. It is because of death that we tolerate evil. All meet death in the end, and because of death we make allowance for evil though we do not like it.

You are young and might prefer to believe that love is moonlight and rosy sunsets. It is not. It is brutal, violent, ugly, possessive and dictatorial. It makes no allowances for the freedom and individuality of the loved one. Lovers become one closely knit unit in thought and feeling. Should you eventually find that this love is beyond your capacity or that you cannot rise to its demands, you may leave but please make sure that you go to some place where I will never be able to find you.

Life's one hell of a joke. It dresses us up with insatiable yearnings and high-flying ambitions and then flings the fact of our insignificance in our faces. Half of us fall for the joke and start the mad rush after the big prizes. Some, like you and me can't fall for the joke. We've been hit too hard at too early an age.