Nervous Conditions
Nervous Conditions, semi-autobiographical novel by Zimbabwean author and filmmaker Tsitsi Dangarembga that was published in English in the United Kingdom in 1988. It won the Africa section of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 1989.
The novel begins in the late 1960s in what was then Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and is narrated by its protagonist, Tambu, a Shona girl in her early teens. Her family are subsistence farmers, and her early life on the homestead is marked by hard work and a deep sense of injustice. Earlier her father’s brother, Babamukuru, had gone to England to be educated and returned with his wife and family to open a mission school. He had taken Tambu’s brother, Nhamu, to his school to study. Tambu’s father deems that there is no point in sending Tambu to the village school, but, determined to get an education, she raises crops herself to sell at market so she can pay her own school fees. She is a canny observer of the Shona patriarchy in operation, but will not, like her mother, resign herself to the “poverty of blackness on the one side and the weight of womanhood on the other.” The novel opens when the family learns that Nhamu has died of mumps at the mission school, and that Tambu will now be educated there in his place.
At the mission school, Tambu lives with her uncle and his wife, Maiguru, and her cousins, Nyasha and Chido, in what seems to Tambu to be unimaginably great wealth. Tambu excels at her studies, as she observes troubles in the family. Maiguru is as educated as her husband but is not given control of the money she earns. Nyasha and her father have many arguments, and, after she is alone with a boy, he beats her. When the family returns to the homestead at the end of term, more drama takes place in the extended family, and eventually Babamukuru determines that Tambu’s parents must get married in the Western style in a church. Tambu feels that this is demeaning to her parents and refuses to attend, prompting her uncle to beat her and force her to do the maid’s chores.
" height="20" alt="HEW Logo">
Toward the end of the next term, some Roman Catholic nuns come to the mission school and administer a test, which results in Tambu gaining a scholarship to attend the convent school. Though Nyasha, who has herself nearly forgotten how to speak Shona, is afraid that Tambu will forget the ways of her home and of the mission if she leaves for the new school, and Babamukuru agrees, Maiguru persuades her husband that Tambu should take advantage of this opportunity, and he persuades her father to let her go. Her mother is afraid that she will die there, but she too is persuaded. In the weeks leading up to Tambu’s departure, Nyasha seems increasingly unwell.
Tambu thrives at her new boarding school. She becomes so busy that she stops writing letters to Nyasha, who continues writing to her. At the end of her term she returns to her uncle’s home and finds that Nyasha is clearly suffering from an eating disorder and other emotional difficulties. When at last Nyasha receives appropriate psychiatric care, Tambu and Nyasha see that it is the strain of trying to be both English and Shona that is tearing Nyasha apart. Realizing that her situation is similar, Tambu resolves to remain aware of and to question all the cultural influences bearing on her.
Nervous Conditions is a both a colorful personal memoir and a clear-eyed snapshot of colonial Rhodesia in the 1960s. The novel’s title is taken from its epigraph, itself a quotation from Jean-Paul Sartre’s introduction to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth: “The condition of native is a nervous condition.” Once at the mission school, Tambu enters a different world: the world of her successful uncle and his family, each member of whom has been marked by time spent in England. Tambu sees firsthand, in her cousin Nyasha’s eating disorder and in her uncle’s nervousness and excessive control, the tensions produced by the colonial condition, by being caught between two worlds. This is the minefield Tambu must negotiate in her formal education, but it is exacerbated by larger questions about African female identity articulated through the unique experience of the four women of her story. Dangarembga continued Tambu’s story in two sequels, The Book of Not (2006) and This Mournable Body (2018).