52 pages • 1 hour read
Tsitsi DangarembgaNervous Conditions
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1988A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Historical Context: Colonial Rhodesia
Nervous Conditions is set in the 1960s and 1970s in Rhodesia. British colonizers forcefully settled Rhodesia in 1889. Both the Ndebele and Shona peoples resisted the British colonizers, but the Ndebele entered into a peace treaty with Cecil Rhodes, a wealthy British politician, and the Shona fighters were defeated. Rhodesia became a settler-colony, which resulted in segregation, land seizures, and a governmental and social bias in favor of white settlers. While the colonizers forced many Africans into low-wage labor or enslavement, some subsisted on homesteads on reservations, meaning they had less direct contact with the colonizers. The settlers then voted in 1922 to become ruled by the British Empire. Resistance to British rule increased in the 1950s, with a war between Rhodesian and Zimbabwean forces erupting in 1966 and intensifying in the early 1970s. Zimbabwe won independence in 1980 (“Zimbabwe.” South African History Online).
Nervous Conditions depicts multiple impacts stemming from British colonization. Tambu’s family, who once lived on fertile ground, was forced to move onto a reservation because of land seizures by the colonizers. They were one of the small percentage of African families who lived primarily segregated from the colonizers as opposed to working for them or being enslaved by them. Babamukuru is the main connection between his family and the colonizers. The novel depicts him as supportive of colonizers through his close involvement with them and through his encouraging his family members to assimilate into the colonizers’ culture. The narrative illustrates segregation in colonial Rhodesia through both physical separation and linguistic separation, such as when Tambu goes to a predominantly white area to sell maize and encounters Doris. This discrimination is also demonstrated in the segregation of the African students from the white students at Sacred Heart. While the war for independence had begun during the period in which the novel is set, the war does not play a major role until the second book of the trilogy.
Authorial Context: Tsitsi Dangarembga
Tsitsi Dangarembga is an award-winning, internationally known author and filmmaker from Zimbabwe. She was born in 1959 in Rhodesia—now Zimbabwe. From ages two to six, she lived in England and she first attended a British school before returning to Rhodesia, where she attended a missionary school. Dangarembga returned to England to study medicine at Cambridge University and returned to her home country shortly before Zimbabwe won its independence. Upon returning to her home, she began studying psychology at the University of Harare while simultaneously working as a copywriter. Dangarembga also participated in a university-sponsored drama organization. Uniting her writing and drama knowledge, she began writing plays for the university. She expanded her career, moving from playwriting to writing prose, including Nervous Conditions, which was the first novel by a Black Zimbabwean woman to be published in English. After winning multiple awards with her prose, she returned to school to study film direction in Germany and created the film Everyone’s Child in 1996. She also continued writing prose, publishing the second two books in the Nervous Conditions trilogy in 2006 and in 2018, respectively (Grady, Rebecca. “Dangarembga, Tsitsi.” Scholar Blogs, May 1997).
Nervous Conditions is classed as a semi-autobiographical novel. Dangarembga sets the novel in her home country during the years of her childhood, and she includes experiences from her own life in the lives of her characters. Nyasha’s time and early education in Britain reflects Dangarembga’s time in the country, as do Tambu’s and Nyasha’s experiences attending the missionary school. Like Maiguru and Babamukuru, Dangarembga pursued higher education in Britain and returned home. The autobiographical elements enhance the novel’s authenticity and help support the novel as a work of literary fiction.
