Looking for a Rain God by Bessie Head: Summary, Themes and Questions
Quick answer: Looking for a Rain God by Bessie Head: full summary with the ending, the Mokgobja family, Neo and Boseyong, the 1958 drought, themes of despair and belief, exam questions.
In the seventh year of a drought a family goes out to its lands to plough, the rain fails again, and an old man remembers a ritual from before the missionaries that promised rain in exchange for the lives of children. Bessie Head published Looking for a Rain God in The Collector of Treasures and Other Botswana Village Tales (1977). It is very short, under 2,000 words, and is widely anthologised for the terrible calm with which it reports what the family does.
The story in brief, ending included
The story opens with the drought of 1958, which followed six dry years and emptied the country of hope. When a little rain falls, the Mokgobja family sets out for their fields: the old man Mokgobja, his son Ramadi, the women, and two small girls, Neo and Boseyong, who play at motherhood with their dolls, scolding them in the exact voices of their own mothers. The family ploughs, and the rain stops. The sky stays white and the seed dies in the ground. The women begin to weep at night with a wailing that unsettles everyone.
In this despair the old man recalls a rain-making ritual from the time before Christianity, which required the sacrifice of children. The men take the two girls, kill them, and perform the rite. No rain falls. The family goes back to the village without the children, and when neighbours ask, the women's uncontrollable grief gives them away. The police come, the two men confess and are tried, and they are sentenced to death. The story ends with the village's silent recognition that every family in that drought had felt the same despair, and could imagine having done the same.
Who is who
A family, and behind it a whole country in the same weather.
Themes and meaning
Exam readings: despair as the root of atrocity, the collision of ancient belief with Christian law, and the community's complicity in understanding the crime.
The sharper observation is the story's tone. It is told like a report, with no scene of the killing and almost no interior life, and that restraint is the point: the drought has flattened everyone, and the prose is as dry as the fields.
The craft: the paragraph that does the killing
The turn is the moment the old man remembers, but the story's real weapon is the earlier paragraph in which the girls scold their dolls in their mothers' voices. That single scene of play is the only time the children are individuals. The technique to steal is the small, living detail planted before a loss and never mentioned again. Judges reading for Emotional Impact in Writory's monthly Short Story Contest notice writers who trust one such detail to do the mourning for them.
For class and essays
Questions with two-line answers, then terms and one misreading.
What writers can take from this
- Begin an essay with the drought as character; Head gives it the first paragraphs and the story's mood.
- Quote the doll play in your own words as the story's emotional centre.
- Address the final communal verdict; it turns a crime story into a social one.
- For writers, plant one scene of ordinary life before the disaster and never refer to it again.
- Keep the worst act offstage and reported; a single plain sentence can be heavier than any description.
Try it yourself
Write a story in which a family under a slow disaster, told without scenes of violence, reaches for a remedy from a discarded past. Give the youngest characters one short scene of play in the first half, and let the ending be the community's response rather than the family's.
Questions
What happens at the end of Looking for a Rain God?
The men kill the two girls in a rain ritual; no rain comes. Back in the village the women's grief exposes the crime, the men are tried and sentenced to death, and the village recognises that every family had felt the same despair.
What is the theme of Looking for a Rain God?
Despair as the source of atrocity, the return of ancient belief when modern faith fails, and a community's shared understanding of a crime the law must still punish.
Why does Bessie Head include the scene with the dolls?
To make Neo and Boseyong real for one paragraph, mimicking their mothers' voices, so that the report of their deaths carries the weight the plain prose otherwise withholds.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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