she was awarded a provisional teaching certificate; and she accepted a job as a teacher in a coloured primary school in Durban. During this time she developed close friendships with several of the white staff of St. Monica's, as well as several members of the "Indian" community, and her interest in non-Christian religions flourished, especially Hinduism. On the other hand, she had only a passing contact with the "black" African majority in Natal, who were overwhelmingly Zulu. In mid-1958, tired of her daily routines and dreaming of bigger things, Head resigned her job. She had a twenty-first birthday party with old friends, then took a train for Cape Town, where she intended to become a journalist. Cape Town and Johannesburg South Africa's urbanised non-whites were beginning to stir under the ever-more-restrictive laws of apartheid. Several mass-market newspapers and magazines already catered to their tastes, of which the weekly Drum was the most famous. Head sought employment instead with Drum's sister publication, the weekly Golden City Post. She worked there for almost a year, filing courtroom stories and other small tasks given to rookies in the newsroom. She wrote under her real name, Bessie Amelia Emery. Although Cape Town was then of a similar size to Durban, it was vastly more diverse and sophisticated, with a much longer history. It was and is the country's political capital, being the home to its Parliament. In Pietermaritzburg and Durban, Bessie had been a member of a small minority group, English-speaking Coloureds (mixed-race). In Cape Town she was suddenly a member of the largest local racial group — Coloured — but one that spoke Afrikaans in its daily life. Although she never became comfortable in this language derived from Cape Town's early Dutch settlers, she was soon able to get by. What she found more difficult to accept were the divisions in this community by skin tone and economic status. She was too dark to join the elite, so she preferred to associate with the workers and underclass in District Six, the large Coloured community that lived on the west side of Table Mountain, not far from the centre. Between her work and her lodgings in District Six, the young provincial newcomer quickly adopted to the style and pace of the big city. She also became more acutely aware of South Africa's many internal conflicts. In 1959 Head moved to Johannesburg to work on