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Summary - ENG2603 - Colonial And Postcolonial African Literatures
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Hazell 1Katerina Hazell
Anand Prahlad
Honors Senior Thesis
5 May 2011
The Nature of Nervous Conditions in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions
Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions is, primarily, a novel about nervous
conditions. It’s about many other things, too. It’s about power. It’s about women. About men
and poverty and riches. It’s about education and missions and colonial Zimbabwe. It’s about
black and white. But at the end of all of these themes lies the nervous conditions of the novel’s
characters and how they formed, how they are rooted, and how they express themselves.
In this paper, I will examine the nervous conditions of three characters in particular:
Babamukuru, Nyasha, and Tambu. By identifying each of their conditions and examining them
closely, I hope to identify the causes of their condition, both the stimuli and the character’s
reactions to them. By comparing the way that each character develops their condition, I will
discuss the complexity that Dangarembga allows her characters and the actual humanity that they
are meant to reflect. She does not give us a condition that results from a colonized position, but
a variety of nervous conditions that result from varied positions in relation to varied issues.
While outside forces form the characters and their conditions, it is the struggle within the
characters of the novel that creates conflict.
Nervous Conditions is the story of Tambudzai, the narrator, and her family. Her family is
very poor, and all she knows as a child is work. She dreams of leaving like her brother Nhamo
to live with her uncle Babamukuru and go to school at the mission in Umtali. When her brother
, Hazell 2
becomes ill and dies, she takes his place in her uncle’s house and gets the chance to get an
education, which she believes is the key to an escape from the poverty and the subjection of her
mother to her father. As Tambu becomes accustomed to living in a house built for a white
family and all of the excitement of going to the mission school, she realizes that world she
idolized from afar is not as ideal as it seemed. Her uncle is not rich compared to what she sees
on TV. Her aunt Maiguru is no less subjugated than her mother, even with a Master’s degree
from England. And her cousin Nyasha does not seem to think that she is the luckiest of all girls.
The struggle between Nyasha and her father becomes the center of the novel. Nyasha
spent much of her childhood in England when her parents went to school there. While she is
very aware of the plight of her people under the colonial system, she does not fit in with the
Shona culture around her and her domineering father is afraid that her improper behavior reflects
poorly upon him. She is outspoken and unafraid to challenge his authority, and they are in
constant conflict. Tambu observes them, reflecting on her own views in relation to theirs. Near
the end of the book, while Tambu is at Sacred Heart, a Catholic school where she earned a
prestigious scholarship, Nyasha is finally taken to get help for the eating disorder that she has
developed in defiance of her father.
The novel’s characters are not islands, but are interconnected, complicated, and affect
each other as they search for their identity in a world of varying expectations. What the mission
wants is different than what Shona culture wants is yet different from what Babamukuru, the
ultimate authority of the family, wants. It is these varied expectations that is at the root of their
nervous conditions. The title of the novel comes from Paul Sartre’s preface to Frantz Fanon’s
Wretched of the Earth, a discussion of colonized Africans:
, Hazell 3
Two worlds: that makes two bewitchings; they dance all night and at dawn they
crowd into the churches to hear mass; each day the split widens. Our enemy
betrays his brothers and becomes our accomplice; his brothers do the same thing.
The status of “native” is a nervous condition introduced and maintained by the
settler among colonized people with their consent. (17)
Sartre’s native struggles with cultural identity—is he African or is he European? He is
suspended between two worlds, constantly renegotiating his identity according to his place in
time and space. Dangarembga expands on this native in Nervous Conditions, making him more
specific, real, complex, and possibly female.
While Sartre’s native is a vague generalization, Dangarembga’s has a real time and place,
though we must look closely in order to notice. The characters are caught in a specific historical
and social framework, one that is useful to know when looking at their lives. Nervous
Conditions is set in Southern Rhodesia, a British colony largely inhabited by a people called the
Shona. The bulk of the story is in the sixties, a time of political tension and change. Southern
Rhodesia became a British colony following the Berlin Conference in 1885. The purpose of the
conference was to split Africa amongst the European powers—not exactly who received the
land, but who had a right to pursue it.
The man who orchestrated the British colonial project in Africa was Cecil Rhodes. In
order to acquire the area later called Rhodesia, he sent Charles Rudd to negotiate a treaty with
King Khumalo Lobengula. The terms of the agreement, known as the Rudd Concession, was that
British prospectors could have access to Lobengula’s land for a short period of time in exchange
for a thousand rifles and a monthly payment of a hundred pounds. Lobengula was expected to
simply sign the document without a fight, but he turned out to be much more intelligent and wily
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