The Collector of Treasures
Dikeledi Mokopi is driven under police escort to the women's prison at Gaborone, where four inmates serving life for the same crime make room for her on the floor and ask what she did. Her account runs back into a Botswana village after independence - a husband, Garesego, who left her with three sons and paid nothing toward them, the neighbor Kenalepe who lent her friendship and a sewing trade, and Kenalepe's husband Paul Thebolo, the second kind of man in a country the narration says mostly produces the first. Bessie Head, born in a South African mental hospital to a white mother and stateless for fifteen years in Serowe, made this the title story of the collection that established her as the founding figure of Botswana letters.
Open The Collector of Treasures in the archive — filters, lineage graph and full facet browsing.
Attributes
Closest analogues
- 68% · 11 shared
- 61% · 10 shared
- 54% · 10 shared
- 53% · 8 shared
- 53% · 7 shared
- 51% · 10 shared