NERVOUS CONDITIONS: Tsitsi Dangarembga (1959-)
Zimbabwean writer, whose novel Nervous Conditions
(1988) has become a modern African classic. It was
awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 1989. Tsitsi
Dangarembga has dealt in her works with the oppressive
nature of a patriarchal family structure and a woman's
coming-of-age. "My soul is African," she has said, "it is
from there that springs the fountain of my creative being."
Tsitsi Dangarembga was born in Mutoko in colonial
Rhodesia in 1959, but at the age of two she moved with her
parents to England. She has called her first language
English - it was used all through her education and she
forgot most of the Shona that she had learnt. In 1965 she
returned to Rhodesia and entered a mission school in
Mutare. She learned Shona again and completed her
secondary education at an American convent school. In
1977 Dangarembga went to Cambridge to study medicine.
After three years she became homesick and abandoned her studies, returning to Zimbabwe
as black-majority rule under Robert Mugabe began in 1980. She worked for some time at an
advertising agency, and started to study psychology at the University of Zimbabwe.
During these years she became involved with the Drama Club and wrote and staged three
plays, She No Longer Weeps (pub. 1987), The Lost of the Soil, and The Third One. "The
writers in Zimbabwe were basically men at the time," she said in an interview. "And so I
really didn't see that the situation would be remedied unless some woman sat down and
wrote something, so that's what I did!" After graduation she worked as a teacher, but finding
it difficult to combine an academic career and literature, then devoted herself entirely to
writing. Her short story, 'The Letter' won a price in a writing competition arranged by SIDA,
the Swedish International Development Authority, and was published in the anthology
Whispering Land (1985).
As a novelist Dangarembga made her debut with Nervous Conditions (the first novel in
English ever written by a black Zimbabwean woman), a partially autobiographical work
which appeared in Great Britain in 1988 and the next year in the United States. She had
already started to write in her childhood, and read mostly the English classics, but the period
following Zimbabwean independence inspired her to read contemporary African literature
and the writings of Afro-American women. "I personally do not have a fund of our cultural
tradition or oral history to draw from," she once confessed, "but I really did feel that if I am
able to put down the little I know then it's a start."
After her first success Dangarembga turned her attention to film. She studied at the
Deutsche Film und Fernseh Akademie and wrote the story for Neria, which became the
highest-grossing film in Zimbabwean history. The protagonist is a widowed woman, whose
brother-in-law uses her difficult situation for his own advantage. Neria loses her material
possessions and her child, but gets then help from her female friend against her former
husband's family.
With Everyone's Child (1996) Tsitsi Dangarembga made film history in her country. It was
the first feature film directed by a black Zimbabwean woman. The story followed the tragic
fates of four siblings, after their parents die of AIDS. The soundtrack featured songs by
Zimbabwe's most popular musicians, including Thomas Mapfumo, Leonard Zhakata and
Andy "Tomato Sauce" Brown.
The title of Nervous Conditions is borrowed from Jean-Paul Sartre's introduction to Franz
Fanon's Wretched of the Earth. The 'nervous condition' of the native is, according to Sartre,
a function of mutually reinforcing attitudes between colonizer and colonized that condemn
the colonized to what amounts to a psychological disorder. The narrator of the story is
Tambudzayi Sigauke, who looks back on her childhood in colonial Rhodesia of the sixties
and seventies. Her brother is sent to a mission school, but the family don't have money for
Tambu's education. Tambu grows friends with her cousin Nyasha, who has spent five years
in England and maize to earn her own school fees, only to have her brother steal her
produce. Also her father attempts to claim the money because he doesn't believe that the
education of women is important. When his brother dies Tambu enters the school - the
family does not have any other sons. She becomes who refuses to conform to society's
expectations for women. Gradually Tambu leaves behind those parts of her family, herself
and her culture that she cannot accept - an analogue of the independence process of
Zimbabwe. She also rejects her highly educated uncle, Babamukuru, who believes that
Tambu's education will enable her to marry well. When Babamakuru's authority becomes
increasingly irrational, Tambu sees that she must free herself from the dichotomy between
tradition and modernity: the struggles women face are similar, regardless of their class. "Quietly, unobtrusively and extremely fitfully, something in my mind began to assert itself,
to question things and refuse to be brainwashed, bringing me to this time when l can set
down this story. It was a long and painful process for me, that process of expansion. It was a
process whose events stretched over many years and would fill another volume, but the story
I have told here, is my own story, the story of four women whom I loved, and our men, this is
how it all began..." The Book of Not, a sequel to Nervous Conditions, was published in 2006.
Nervous Conditions
"The condition of native is a nervous condition."
Nervous Conditions is a partially autobiographical story of Tambu, a young girl who lives on
an impoverished Rhodesian farm during the late 1960's. The death of Tambu's brother forces
her to live with Babamukuru, her uncle who has been educated in the west, and become the
provider for her family. She quickly accepts this situation because it offers her the
opportunity of missionary schooling and the knowledge of a western educated family. Tambu
has great aspirations for her personal education despite the obstacles that stand in her way:
race, class and sex. The topics of education and its relation to gender are important facets of
this novel. Education is used as a type of power by many characters in the novel, most
importantly Babamukuru. The novel also follows the story of Tambu's cousin who has
anorexia, an illness not usually associated with African countries. This disease is used in the
novel as a form of control for Tambu's cousin who is torn between two cultures, that of her
home, Rhodesia and that of England. The story also discusses the many facets of poverty and
the effects that it has on people. Poverty effects each character in the novel creating in each
of them a type of nervous condition.