Life & Wisdom Quote by Bessie Head

A “stairway to the stars” sounds like private ambition until Head snaps it into a collective project: she’s not climbing alone, she’s building infrastructure. That word choice matters. A stairway is workmanlike, incremental, and shareable; it implies craft, patience, and the humility of steps rather than the ego of a rocket. The “stars” are a deliberately grand destination - not fame, not success, but a higher register of possibility. Head’s intent is to frame writing as construction: language as a set of steps that can move readers from the cramped immediacy of survival toward imagination, dignity, and moral altitude.

Then comes the audacious turn: “I have the authority.” Head is not begging permission from publishers, states, or literary gatekeepers. She’s claiming a different jurisdiction, the writer’s strange mandate to name reality and reorganize it. In the context of her life - a South African-born, Botswana-based writer marked by apartheid’s bureaucratic cruelty, exile, and psychological strain - that assertion reads as defiance. When the world is organized to tell you you’re illegitimate, “authority” becomes a reclaimed weapon.

The subtext is both utopian and slightly dangerous, in the way all utopias are. To “take the whole of mankind” is expansive to the point of impossible; it risks messianic overreach. But Head uses that hyperbole strategically: it dramatizes her refusal to write merely as testimony or therapy. She writes to expand the human perimeter, insisting literature can be a ladder out of imposed smallness - for her, and for anyone willing to climb.