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Transnationalism is not the exclusive province of globe-trotting authors, but also includes the practices of those who could not access the means of transatlantic mobility. This chapter begins by considering Bessie Head's exilic life and her quest for belonging that motivated the grounded transnationalism she expressed. It then investigates one of its most exemplary practices: her letter writing, with particular attention to the set of letters between Head and her four African American correspondents: Nikki Giovanni, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Michelle Cliff. Some of their epistolary exchanges and writing published around the same period feature repeated references to gardens, whose political and imaginative implications are considered at length. The chapter concludes by framing the practice of letter writing as a form of cultivation that re-centers our attention on the labor that transnational engagement requires, even as it yields a whole spectrum of outcomes.

This chapter focuses on Botswanan writer Bessie Head, and sub-Saharan Africa and narratives of voluntary cooperative labor and food production in the age of development. It examines A Question of Power, Head's best-known but also most challenging work, which constantly switches registers between ghost story, self-help talk therapy, and philosophical meditation on the ontology and subjectivity of everyday work. Head's critics focus exclusively on the surreal narratives of interiority and the symbolism of the unconscious as the key to understanding her paradoxical notions of universality and humanism. The chapter, however, delves into the narratives of agricultural projects that constantly interrupt the primary story line; arguing that these “outside” narratives supply the content for Head's critique of identity politics.

The Pan-Africanist dream of freedom as expressed in South African political writings and literature from the 1940s to 1970s is the focus of the final chapter. The Pan-Africanist dreams expressed in political discourse that are discussed include: the ANC Youth League’s Manifesto (1944); the ANC’s Programme of Action (1949); the political writings of Muziwakhe Anton Lembede, A. P. Mda and Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe; the PAC’s Manifesto of the Africanist Movement (1959); and the articles and reviews in PAC publications like The Africanist and Mafube. Pan-Africanist dreams of freedom expressed in literary terms are discussed in sections on Lembede’s thoughts on individual literary works; Mda’s prescriptions for literature; Sobukwe’s wide reading and eclectic literary tastes; Melikhaya Mbutumu’s praise poems; novels hostile to the PAC by Peter Abrahams, Richard Rive and Alex la Guma; and novels sympathetic to the PAC by Lauretta Ngcobo and Bessie Head. The popularity within the PAC of Howard Fast’s novels My Glorious Brothers (1948) and Spartacus (1951) is also assessed.

This chapter analyzes the writer Saul Bellow as an anthropological novelist, focusing on his African novel, Henderson the Rain King. Bellow incorporates ethnographic source material, including some from his erstwhile teacher Melville Herskovits, but Henderson is a bumbling caricature of the academic fieldworker. Nevertheless, the novel asks essential anthropological questions about how culture determines human behavior and thought and how cultural patterns change. I compare Bellow’s work with C. P. Snow’s The Two Cultures, which promoted the ideas of technical know-how and knowledge transfer from the West to the developing world that Bellow satirizes. The chapter ends with an analysis of the South African writer Bessie Head, whose story “The Woman from America” highlights the dangers of development projects that fail to pay attention to local conditions, just as Henderson does.