Imagine one possibility of this future Bessie Head conjures. It is 1994. A young woman – me – designated ‘coloured’ by apartheid law, and about to come of age in the new, democratic South Africa, working as a trainee journalist at an alternative newspaper in Cape Town. I’m assigned a work of fiction to review, The Cardinals, with Meditations and Short Stories, by a writer unfamiliar to me: Bessie Head. Extremely conscious of her agency as a writer, and wishing to leave a legacy, Head had been writing into a future she could neither have predicted nor anticipated. Yet our meeting on the page was an encounter she must have foreseen; writing, as she did, across time and space. Meeting her like this knocked my world off its axis.

As a child who’d grown up during the last decade of formal apartheid, I’d received an education in accordance with my designated place in South Africa's racial hierarchy. An avid reader, my literary diet had consisted of books borrowed from a government library, and literature prescribed by apartheid bureaucrats for language instruction in school. Black writers of any gender were excluded from these works, since most of them – and their work – had been banned.

The political changes in South Africa leading to the first democratic election in 1994 unleashed a flood of previously banned literature. It was at this moment that I became acquainted with Head's first novella, The Cardinals, written in the early 1960s and published posthumously in 1993. It was her only published work of fiction set and written in Cape Town, before she was ‘endorsed out’ of South Africa in 1964 on an exit permit that would exile her to Botswana for the rest of her life, prohibiting her return to the land of her birth.