Tsitsi Dangarembga
Nervous Conditions
(1988)
Setting
• Set in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in the 1960s
• Rhodesia: a white settler colony (land
appropriated from Africans in the late 19th c by
Cecil Rhodes, the British politician, mining
magnate and proponent of British colonialism)
• A first person account of coming of age in
colonial, white-ruled Rhodesia
• Mutliple jeopardy of race, gender and class (“the
poverty of blackness on one side and the weight
of womanhood on the other” (mother to Tambu,
p. 16)
Portrait of colonialism
• Cf. Fanon’s epigraph
• Colonialism as epistemic violence—on
language, culture, modes of being
• Cf. Spivak
Cultural and social effects of
colonialism
• Transformation of the village, traditional life
under pressure from colonialism (top of p. 4)
• Pre-existing social relations under pressure
from new forces (pre-colonial not to be
idealised)
• Loss of language—Shona vs English (42),
extended family vs nuclear
• Culture as everyday acts and ways of being—
clothes, eating, being (p. 48)
Colonial education
• Education: a double-edged sword—instrument for creating a docile,
obedient class of colonised men; colonial education as a disciplining
institution (p. 14)
• P. 19: “They thought he was a good boy, cultivable, in the way that
land is, to yield harvests that sustain the cultivator”
• Education as alienation from family, labour, community—brother
Nhamo’s distancing (pp. 6-7)
• Education as aphasia “he had forgotten how to speak Shona” (52);
“the more aphasic he became...the more my father convinced that
he was being educated” (53)
• Education as a male prerogative: “Nhamo would lift our branch of
the family out of the squalor in which we were living” (4)
• “in terms of cash my education was an investment, but then in
terms of cattle, so was my conformity” (34)
• Education as freedom
Material effects of colonialism
• Conditions of colonial labour
• Changes in structure of family
• Relationship to land
Feminist Narrative
• “I was not sorry when my brother died…my
story is after all not about death but about my
escape and Lucia’s; about my mother’s and
Maiguru’s entrapment; and about Nyasha’s
rebellion…whose rebellion may not in the end
have been successful” (p. 1)
• 3 models—escape, entrapment, rebliion
• The novel invites us to evaluate each response
Tambudzai as narrator
• Ambitious, worldly, partial
• Thinks of herself as wily, resourceful, wilful, headstrong
“solid, utilitarian me” (40)
• Her hero: Babamukuru: self-made man with power and
money
• Read top of p. 58
• Discourse of liberal feminism—individualised solutions to
social problems; individual consciousness and agency vs the
collective experience of gendered subordination
• Liberal narrative of hard work
• P. 58 first para
• Brother has to be killed off; mother as obstacle
Feminist consciousness
• What is the source of her feminist consciousness?
• “feeling the injustice of it” (12); “because you are
a girl” (12)—against the naturalisation of roles
• “these events coalesced formlessly in my mind to
an incipient understanding of the burdens my
mother had talked of…these were complex,
dangerous thoughts that I was stirring up, not the
kind you can ponder safely but the kind that
become autonomous and malignant if you let
them” (59)
Nyasha
• Nyasha’s transformation in England: no longer
“bold, ebullient” (51)
• “as though she were directing more and more
of her energy inwards to commune with
herself about issues that she alone had seen”
(52)
• Nyasha’s radicalism (p. 63, b)
• A learned radicalism?
The novel’s feminist discourse
• Academically informed
• Western and non-feminisms debated within
the space of the novel
Solidarity
• Feminist solidarity cut through by colonialism and
patriarchy
• Strong bonds, that reproduce gender oppression
• Mother: “ferocious swing of her arms” (7), hardworking, alone (Tambu’s solidarity with her p. 10)
• Mother works hard to send Nhamo to school; to
Tambu she tells “what will help you, my child, is
to learn to carry your burdens with strength” (16)