BESSIE HEAD’S
The Collector of Treasures Dikeledi Mokopi lived in the small village of Puleng. Everyone called her the woman-whosethatch-does-not-leak. She was a loving mother to her three sons, and a caring friend to her neighbours. But then, one night, something terrible happened. Now Dikeledi is in jail for life. What could have happened to make a woman like Dikeledi commit such a crime? The Collector of Treasures is a tragic story. Like many of Bessie Head’s stories it explores the suffering and emotional abuse experienced by many women in rural societies. But it is also a story about love, and friendship, and generosity. Before writing this story, and the other stories in the book of the same name, Bessie Head interviewed women in the rural village of Serowe, in Botswana, where she lived in exile. Many years later, during an interview
with students, she said, “I have known women to offer generosities ... to do things and not accept money. I have known magnificences in women here. The magnificences in women I drew on and I put them into Dikeledi Mokopi”. The Collector of Treasures is a story about the ‘magnificences’ of women, and about their pain. Bessie Head is one of South Africa’s best known writers - a national treasure in her own right. Permission to adapt this story was kindly granted by Heinemann International.