Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga

There she enrolled for a psychology degree at Harare University, writing Nervous Conditions while still a student, and paying for it to be typed up out of her earnings as an advertising copywriter. I need to have some good scripts when things open up for black women like me making films about the lives of black women – I think it will happenĭangarembga took her A-levels at an elite, mainly white, girls’ school and won a place to study medicine at Cambridge, but was unable to settle, and quit after three homesick years to return to a Zimbabwe on the brink of independence. They took their two children to England for four years when Dangarembga was a toddler, returning in 1965 to take up jobs on a Methodist mission near the eastern border town of Umtali (now Mutare), which is also Tambu’s home. Her parents were both schoolteachers (her mother is something of a Zimbabwean feminist hero as the first black woman to graduate in Rhodesia in 1953). Like Tambu, Dangaremgba, born in 1959, was convent educated, though her exposure to rural life was through family visits rather than having to scratch a living from the land. “How, with all your education, do you come to be more needy than your mother?” she berates herself. Her sister has lost a leg in the war for independence and “now fends for two liberation struggle babies”, while her uncle is in a wheelchair after being hit by a stray bullet from a 21-gun salute to celebrate the birth of the new nation. It wasn’t until 18 years later that The Book of Not followed Tambu through her teenage years at the Young Ladies College of the Sacred Heart, and now This Mournable Body finds her bereft in her 30s, struggling to squeeze her feet into Lady Di pumps and make a life in the postcolonial Zimbabwe of the 1990s.

The novel won the Commonwealth Writers’ prize, was widely translated and became a key text in postcolonial literature. The first instalment, Nervous Conditions, was published in 1988 and charted Tambu’s early childhood in 60s and 70s Rhodesia, where a kindly uncle gives her a chance to better herself by taking her away to his mission to be educated. This Mournable Body is the third part of a trilogy, published over a period of more than 30 years, which reflects sickness in the body politic of an earlier era through the life story of a village girl called Tambudzai (“Tambu”). Photograph: Zinyange Auntony/AFP/Getty Images Dangarembga being arrested during an anti-corruption protest march on 31 July in Harare. ‘I’m also a responsible citizen of Zimbabwe‘.

Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga