Margaret is proud to be a Masawra and declines to hide behind a different label. Margaret is a complicated woman, and I felt that Ms Head’s writing fails to completely explain her, although maybe it is as it should be. Yet, maybe a little like the orphaned Cinderella, Margaret learns by experience that her place in society is quite different from the white woman’s hopes, since the world only sees her as an “it”: a Masawra. The missionary’s wife adopted the infant girl and trained her to be a teacher and a leader, giving the orphan her own name and hoping to prove to the society that heredity is nothing, environment everything. Margaret’s Masawra mother had died on the outskirts of a town. The Masawra, or bushmen, were the lowest class of people, literally listed next to the zebras as inhabitants of the bush.Īfricans in Southern Africa could still smile-at least, they were not Bushmen.…There is no one can still turn round to and say “At least I am not a _”(page 11) Maru is at the outset about prejudice and the need to overcome it.

They’d not know where to look because they spend their lives judging each other by things of no consequence. His hope is that the rest of the town will learn from him: “it is to pull down the old structures and create the new” (page 68). “If I have a place,” he says to his sister. When the orphaned Masawra woman Margaret enters the town, proud of her upbringing and training from a white missionary, Maru immediately sees his opportunity to teach the community the wrongness of prejudice. Beyond that, he has the remarkable ability to see into people’s hearts, to view their dreams, and to give people the same dreams he has. Maru is the son of a chieftain, destined to become the next village chief, and is able to wield the power of his opinion in the town. The two of them have become outcasts in their small African society, and we know from the first pages that both suffer from their fates. Although the prince-like Maru marries the despised and hated woman of the town of Dilepe, Margaret is no Cinderella, especially since she loves someone else and considers Maru her equal, not her superior. My second read solidified my perception that Maru is a type of warped fairy tale, one especially with no happily ever after.

I have so struggled to put Maru (by Bessie Head, published 1971) into context that I even reread the short novel (130 pages) before I attempted to write my thoughts. I may receive compensation for any purchased items.

Posts written from review copies are labeled. Note: I occasionally accept review copies from the publisher.

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