Nervous Conditions
Tsitsi Dangarembga (1988)
“The first novel in English by a Black Zimbabwean woman — a devastating anatomy of how colonial education liberates the mind and colonizes it simultaneously.”
Short Summary
Tambudzai Sigauke, a girl in 1960s colonial Rhodesia, fights for education after her brother Nhamo dies. She wins a place at her uncle Babamukuru's mission school, escaping rural poverty but entering a world where Western education demands the erasure of her African identity. Her cousin Nyasha, raised in England, embodies the psychic toll of existing between two cultures — developing an eating disorder that manifests the impossibility of being both African and Western. Tambu narrates her own gradual, ambivalent assimilation, recognizing too late that the liberation she sought has its own chains.
Detailed Summary
Tambudzai — Tambu — grows up in grinding poverty on a Shona homestead in 1960s Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Her father Jeremiah is shiftless and defeated; her mother is bitter and suspicious of education, which she sees as a tool of colonial theft. Tambu's brother Nhamo, the family's golden boy, attends...