Nervous Conditions

Nervous Conditions is a novel by the Zimbabwean writer Tsitsi Dangarembga, published in 1988, narrated by Tambudzai, called Tambu, a young girl growing up in 1960s colonial Rhodesia whose path to a mission-school education opens only after her elder brother's death, made possible by the intervention of her educated, relatively prosperous uncle Babamukuru. Tambu's move into her uncle's household and then to the mission school brings her into close contact with her cousin Nyasha, who has been partly raised in England and whose fierce resistance to both colonial and patriarchal authority develops into a severe eating disorder and breakdown, dramatizing the psychological costs of the very education and Westernization Tambu herself is pursuing. Dangarembga drew her title from Jean-Paul Sartre's description, in his preface to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, of colonialism producing nervous conditions in the colonized, framing the novel's exploration of gender and colonial oppression as intertwined rather than separate struggles. The first novel published in English by a Black Zimbabwean woman, Nervous Conditions won the 1989 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Africa and was named by the BBC in 2018 as one of the 100 most influential novels.