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 Zimbabwean
writer, who's novel NERVOUS CONDITIONS (1988) has become a modern
African classic. It was awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize
in 1989. Dangarembga has dealt in her works the oppressive nature
of a patriarchal family structure and woman's coming-of-age.
Tsitsi Dangarembga was born in Mutoko in colonial Rhodesia, but
at the age of two she moved with her parents to England. In 1965
she returned to Rhodesia and entered a mission school in Mutare
and completed her secondary education at an American convent school.
In 1977 Dangarembga went to Cambridge to study medicine. After three
years she abandoned her studies and returned to Zimbabwe, where
she worked among others 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 (publ. 1987), The
Lost of the Soil, and The Third One. After graduation
she worked as a teacher, but found it difficult to combine academic
career and literature, devoting then herself entirely to writing.
As a novelist Dangarembga made her debut with Nervous Conditions,
which appeared in Great Britain in 1988 and 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. After her first success
Dangarembga turned her attention to film 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.
 Nervous
Conditions (1988) - the title is borrowed from Jean-Paul Sartre's
introduction to Franz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth. The
narrator of the story is Tambu, 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 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
friends with her cousin Nyasha, who has spent five years in England
and 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.
For further reading: Talking with African Writers, ed.
by Jane Wilkinson (1990); Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions
by Sally McWilliams (World Literature Today, 31.1.1991); An Interview
with Tsitsi Dangarembga (Novel, 26.3. 1993); Postcolonial African
Writers, ed by Pushpa Naidu Parekh and Siga Fatima Jagne (1998)
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