Bessie Head was born in Pietermaritzburg in 1937, the daughter of a white woman and a black man. To avoid the scandal of a mixed-race relationship in a racist community, her mother was sent to a mental asylum when it was discovered she was pregnant. Head was born there, raised by foster parents and in an orphanage. She was excluded from the privilege of her mother’s world. She trained as a teacher but in the late 1950s started to work as a journalist, writing for Drum and the Golden City Post. When the government cracked down on resistance, Head fled South Africa for Botswana in 1964 (the same year as Nat Nakasa, and also on a one-way exit permit). She struggled with poverty, alcoholism and depression while continuing to write until her death in 1986. Head is an important writer who emerged just before the Black Consciousness era. In this story she takes the theme of Apartheid repression and turns it on its head, by focusing on the intelligence and solidarity of some political prisoners who manage to outwit their prison warder.