Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga

Members gave this novel a general nod of approval. We had plenty to discuss at our meeting which is always a good sign that a book has interested and engaged readers.

The book is set in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in the 1960s and 1970s at a time when the country was a colony of Britain’s.

We thought the writing was good: unemotional and matter of fact. A number of themes are explored throughout the plot including: poverty, colonisation, culture, the status of women, religion, racism, education, domestic violence and mental health.

The story opens in an interesting way. The main character and narrator, Tambu, a young black African girl, states that she is not upset when her older brother, Nhamo, dies.

The story goes on to reveal why and our sympathy is with Tambu.

Tambu and her siblings are growing up in rural Rhodesia on the family farm which is barely supporting their own food needs, let alone provide any extra income for education. Nevertheless Tambu is determined to improve herself by going to school.

The stumbling block is that girls are not considered worth educating since their traditional rural role is to work on the farm, cook, clean, marry and raise children. Tambu’s mother, Mainini, while she is prepared to grow and sell vegetables to pay for the oldest son, Nhamo, to go to school, tries to persuade Tambo to accept “a woman’s burdens” and forget the idea of school.

Nevertheless, thanks to a helpful teacher at the local primary school, Tambu is able to take the maize she has grown herself to town to sell in the street in order to raise money for her school fees. An elderly white couple passing by are initially outraged at the teacher whom they see as putting a child to work. However, they give Tambu money to pay her school fees after hearing her story. On the advice of the teacher, Tambu gives the money to the school administration to manage because, sure enough, Tambu’s father, Jeremiah, demands that the money Tambu has earned should be given to him.

Enter Tambu’s uncle, Babamukuru, who congratulates Jeremiah for paying his daughter's school fees. The patriarchal head of the family, Babamukuru has just returned to Rhodesia after studying in England, sponsored by the missionaries in the region. He is married to Tambu’s aunt, Maiguru, who is also well educated, but who has taken a backseat to support her husband’s career and run his household. They have two children, Nyasha and Chido, who have gone to school in London, despite the family worrying about the bad influence on them of the white culture.

Tambu is shy at the festivities on the farm to welcome home the Babamukuru (it means 'your elder paternal uncle') and his family. Her cousins can no longer speak the Shona language and are unwilling to join in the family activities. Tambu thinks they are rude, inappropriately dressed and she no longer feels their equal.

For his part, Babamukuru feels responsible for his extended family and is generous to them, even though he admonishes some members such as Tambu’s father, Jeremiah, for not working hard enough. The family members, in response, treat Babamukuru as a god and are totally subservient to him. (Maiguru, although treated with respect, still has to help cook the food her husband has brought with him for his many relatives.)

As headmaster at the missionary school, living in a grand house painted entirely white (thought to provide a cooling effect), Babamukuru offers to pay for Tambu's brother, Nhamo, to live with his family and attend the superior mission school. Sadly, Nhamo becomes ill and dies a short time after living with the family, but not before he has visited his home on the farm and boasted to his sister about how much better his life is than hers.

Babamukuru, when he can remember Tambu’s name, subsequently offers to educate her in Nhamo’s place as the next oldest child. This causes Tambu’s mother grave consternation since she is convinced Tambu will die in the same way as Nhamo. She also believes spirits are at work in causing Babamukuru’s children to forget their Shona language and culture. Despite her mother’s severe depression, Tambu is determined to take up her uncle’s offer to better herself and she moves to his house to live with him and his family. Mainini’s sister, Lucia, eventually offers to come and look after Mainini who is pregnant and remains unwell.

Living in Babamukuru’s house, Tambu becomes very close to her cousin, Nyasha, and through her she understands the contradictions that exist between the white culture which Nyasha and her brother have embraced and the norms of her own culture. She realises the stresses on Babamukuru who apparently has a foot in each camp.

For Nyasha, her desire for independence leads to escalating arguments with her conservative father and mother. Tambu, while grateful for her new life and to be going to the mission school, rejects the expense and effort made by Babamukuru to have her parents marry in church, concerned as to what this says about her own and her siblings’ status. She refuses to attend the ceremony.

Meanwhile, Babamukuru’s attempts to order the life of Mainini’s ‘wayward’ sister, Lucia, is similarly rejected by that feisty lady herself. Lucia refuses to be put down by the patriarchy in the family and rejects accusations she has seduced Tambu’s father and other men. With the help of Babamukuru she takes a job in town in order to pay for her own education at night school. (Members loved the character of Lucia.) Even Maiguru eventually develops some spunk by the end of the book, which was also welcomed by members.

Despite disruptions and distractions creating a series of ‘nervous conditions’ for more than one character, Tambu remains focused on her studies and eventually is offered a scholarship to attend an expensive Catholic girls’ boarding school. It is immediately obvious when Tambu arrives at the school that although she and the small handful of other black African students are very bright they will be treated differently by the administrators to the white students.

The title of the book comes from a quote (“The status of ‘native’ is a nervous condition introduced and maintained by the settler among colonised people by their consent”) by Jean-Paul Sartre in introducing Frantz Fanon’s book, The Wretched of the Earth (1961).

Who is Tsitsi Dangarembga?

Tsitsi Dangarembga was born in Mutoko, Southern Rhodesia in 1959 and is a Zimbabwean novelist, playwright and filmmaker.

As a child, Dangarembga's parents taught at the nearby mission school. Her mother, Susan, was the first black woman in Southern Rhodesia to obtain a bachelor’s degree and her father, Amon, would later become a school headmaster.

Dangarembga lived in England from ages two to six while her parents pursued higher education. She and her brother began to speak English and forgot most of the Shona they had learnt.

Dangarembga returned to Rhodesia with her family in 1965, the year of the colony’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence. She reacquired Shona but considers English her first language.

After completing her secondary education at an elite, predominantly white, girls’ school in the capital Salisbury (now Harare) she went to Cambridge University to study medicine. However, she abandoned her degree after three years, returning in 1980 to Zimbabwe several months before the country’s independence.

She later studied psychology at the University of Zimbabwe and joined the university drama club where she wrote and directed several plays with roles for black women which were rare at the time.

Nervous Conditions was her debut novel. It was published in 1988 and was the first to be published in English by a black woman from Zimbabwe. It received the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in the African section in 1989 and was included in the BBC’s 2018 list of top 100 books that have shaped the world.

By 1989, Dangarembga had moved to Germany to study film direction and produced a number of films in Berlin.

In 1992 she founded Nyerai Films, a production company based in Harare to produce films and documentaries.

In 2002, she founded the International Images Film Festival and continued to win awards for her films. She is the Executive Director of the organisation, Women Filmmakers of Zimbabwe, and founding director of the Women’s Film Festival of Harare.

In 2006 she published her second novel, The Book of Not, a sequel to Nervous Conditions. Her third novel, This Mournable Body, the third part of the trilogy, was published in 2018. It was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize.

This year she won the PEN International Award for Freedom of Expression which honours writers who continue working despite being persecuted for their writing. She was also chosen by PEN as winner of the 2021 PEN Pinter Prize awarded to a writer who casts an “unflinching, unnerving gaze upon the world” and who “shows a fierce intellectual determination to define the real truth of our lives and our societies.”

She is married with three children.