Racial Science and the Effects of Culture Discrimination in Bessie Head's Maru

Abstract

Bessie Emery Head is an African writer who has written in response to the sufferings, discriminations and cravings of the African people. She not only attempts to express the racial values of the society but also criticized the same if there is an immoral touch. In her novel, Maru, she resists and protests against all forms of discriminations, which are in the form of a society oppressing and alienating an individual, one gender suppressing the other, or a group denying the basic human rights to another group. Maru registers the discriminations experienced by a group of people who are estranged and brutalized only on the basis of differences in appearance, the Botswana people towards Masarwa people. The novelist aims at resisting the dehumanization of the Masarwa through the female protagonist, Margaret. This paper seeks to examine Bessie Head’s Maru in an offer to expose the unfair treatment meted out to the Masarwa people because of ethnic discriminations. It is also an assessment of the contemporary African society, where the people are in the fetters the ethnic, communal, political, racial and gender discriminations.