1. Tsitsi Dangarembga
Nervous Conditions
(1988)

2. Setting Set in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in the 1960s
Rhodesia: a white settler colony (land appropriated from Africans in the late 19th c by Cecil Rhodes, the British politician, mining magnate and proponent of British colonialism)
A first person account of coming of age in colonial, white-ruled Rhodesia

3. Rhodesia/Zimbabwe

4. Portrait of colonialism
Sartre’s Preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth
Michael Taussig in The Nervous System: "things such as the signs and symptoms of disease, as much as the technology of healing, are not 'things-in-themselves,' are not only biological and physical, but are also signs of social relations disguised as natural things”
Colonialism as epistemic violence—on language, culture, modes of being
Cf. Spivak

5. Cultural and social effects of colonialism
Mutliple jeopardy of race, gender and class (“the poverty of blackness on one side and the weight of womanhood on the other” (mother to Tambu, p. 16)
Transformation of the village, traditional life under pressure from colonialism (top of p. 4), extended family vs nuclear; changes in gender relations
Pre-existing social relations under pressure from new forces (pre-colonial not to be idealised)
Loss of language—Shona vs English (42) Culture as everyday acts and ways of being—clothes, eating, being (p. 48)

6. Material effects of colonialism
Conditions of colonial labour
Changes in structure of family
Relationship to land

7. Colonial education
Education: a double-edged sword—instrument for creating a docile, obedient class of colonised men; colonial education as a disciplining institution (p. 14)
P. 19: “They thought he was a good boy, cultivable, in the way that land is, to yield harvests that sustain the cultivator”
Education as alienation from family, labour, community—brother Nhamo’s distancing (pp. 6-7)
Education as aphasia “he had forgotten how to speak Shona” (52); “the more aphasic he became...the more my father convinced that he was being educated” (53)
Education as a male prerogative: “Nhamo would lift our branch of the family out of the squalor in which we were living” (4)
“in terms of cash my education was an investment, but then in terms of cattle, so was my conformity” (34)
Education as freedom

8. Feminist Narrative
“I was not sorry when my brother died…my story is after all not about death but about my escape and Lucia’s; about my mother’s and Maiguru’s entrapment; and about Nyasha’s rebellion…whose rebellion may not in the end have been successful” (p. 1)
3 models—escape, entrapment, rebliion
The novel invites us to evaluate each response

9. Tambudzai as narrator Ambitious, worldly, partial
Thinks of herself as wily, resourceful, wilful, headstrong “solid, utilitarian me” (40)
Her hero: Babamukuru: self-made man with power and money
Read top of p. 58
Discourse of liberal feminism—individualised solutions to social problems; individual consciousness and agency vs the collective experience of gendered subordination
Liberal narrative of hard work
P. 58 first para
Brother has to be killed off; mother as obstacle

10. Feminist consciousness
What is the source of her feminist consciousness?
“feeling the injustice of it” (12); “because you are a girl” (12)—against the naturalisation of roles
“these events coalesced formlessly in my mind to an incipient understanding of the burdens my mother had talked of…these were complex, dangerous thoughts that I was stirring up, not the kind you can ponder safely but the kind that become autonomous and malignant if you let them” (59)

11. Nyasha
Bahri: “Nyasha's diseased self suggests the textualized female body on whose abject person are writ large the imperial inscriptions of colonization, the intimate branding of patriarchy, and the battle between native culture, Western narrative, and her complex relationship with both.”
“it would be entirely too simple to attribute her disease to the ills of colonization alone: Nyasha responds not only as native and Other, she responds as woman to the ratification of socially en-gendered native categories which conspire with colonial narratives… …a simplistic oppositionality between colonizer/colonized meaningless. Her response to Western colonial narratives which enthrall as they distress at a time when she is also contending with her burgeoning sexuality in a repressed society, further complicate any efforts to understand and explain her pathology.”
Nyasha’s transformation in England: no longer “bold, ebullient” (51), “as though she were directing more and more of her energy inwards to commune with herself about issues that she alone had seen” (52)
Nyasha’s radicalism (p. 63, b)

12. The novel’s feminist discourse
Academically informed
Western and non-feminisms debated within the space of the novel

13. Solidarity
Feminist solidarity cut through by colonialism and patriarchy
Strong bonds, that reproduce gender oppression
Mother: “ferocious swing of her arms” (7), hard-working, alone (Tambu’s solidarity with her p. 10)
Mother works hard to send Nhamo to school; to Tambu she tells “what will help you, my child, is to learn to carry your burdens with strength” (16)