Tsitsi Dangarembga Biography and List of Works

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)

NERVOUS CONDITIONS, (1988)
NERIA, (1992)