However, local politics, despots, and opportunists continually create obstacles that impede their progress.

He sees Makhaya as a potential partner in realizing his vision and a fellow stranger to the land but one with a better shot at communicating to the village and integrating Gilbert’s radical ideas into the culture. Gilbert sees the village of Golema Mmidi as an opportunity to implement the latest farming techniques in order to create prosperity in his impoverished adopted home. Dinorego sees Makhaya as a potential husband for his daughter. Rapidly, Makhaya is taken under the wing of both a kind, old farmer named Dinorego and Dinorego’s adopted British son, Gilbert, who is an enthusiastic and much-learned agricultural specialist. However, even in a destitute backwater, like the village he will find himself in, life is not simple. His actions are a complete spiritual and existential rejection of his place in a dehumanizing political structure, and he fatalistically holds onto plans for the bombing he has carried out even as he awaits the right moment to attempt crossing the heavily guarded border. He is a murderer and a terrorist in South Africa, and it is not enough for him simply to escape physically from the imminent threat on his life. While Head fled death threats for her political writing, Makhaya is a dissident of a more extreme kind. His escape and subsequent journey in search of self-determination parallels Head’s own coerced migration from apartheid South Africa into the rural and isolated country of Botswana. When the novel opens, Makhaya is in flight for violent actions taken undermining the colonial system of 1960s South Africa. This is the late South African writer Bessie Head’s first novel, which was published in 1968.

Maru by bessie head audiobook