Nervous Conditions

WARNING: THOUGH THIS REVIEW DEALS WITH ONLY A PART OF THE BOOK, SOME READERS WILL FEEL IT GIVES TOO MUCH AWAY.This is quite a difficult book to get into. As Kwame Anthony Appiah says in his Introduction, Dangarembga makes no concessions to the Western reader. The beginning of the story is set in what was then, in the 1960s, still Rhodesia (to become Zimbabwe in 1980), and there is no glossary to explain the Shona words that occur in the book for plants, food, or the relationships expressed in names. It also takes some time to find out who the various people named in the first chapter are, what are their relationships to each other and, in the case of the narrator, Tambu (born 1955), that she is a year younger than her brother, Nhomo.Their father, Jeremiah, had an elder brother, the revered head of the family referred to as Babamukuru. (The word means “elder paternal uncle” – his actual name is never given.) The missionaries had sent him to study in England for five years, and on his return, he had been appointed headmaster of a missionary school, some 20 miles way from the homestead on which Jeremiah’s family toiled in the fields and was not well off. Babamukuru took his role as head of the family very seriously and laid down the law to them. He gave some financial support to Jeremiah, and, because Nhomo had shown some promise at his elementary school, organized for the boy to become a boarder at the missionary school, where he would get a proper western-style education.Nhomo exercised his privileges as a boy in domineering over and occasionally beating his three younger sisters. Nhomo now gave himself airs for having been chosen to be educated, and he looked down on his siblings and even on his uneducated father. He rarely came home even during the holidays, and, when he did, did not share in the work in the fields. (Nor, for that matter did his father: the women did all the hard work.)Tambu’s own primary schooling had been interrupted because there had not been enough money. She had loved school, but had been told by her parents – and, nastily, by Nhomo - to accept that women did not need education and that the sooner she realized that, the better. Now her jealousy of Nhomo intensified her dislike of him. But then Nhomo died, and Babamukuru, still intent that someone in his brother’s family should be educated, persuaded Tambu’s father, to the distress of her mother Shingayi, to let her attend the mission school. She was then fourteen.How she rejoiced at leaving behind the primitive peasant aspects of her life and how she looked forward to the cleanliness, comforts and pleasures that lay ahead! And she was initially duly overwhelmed by the bourgeois splendour and abundant food in her uncle’s home. She had to learn a lot – how to use a knife and fork, a light-switch, a bath, a toilet. She was given nice new clothes, and, having at home slept on the kitchen floor, she now shared a proper bedroom with her cousin Nyasha, of the same age as she was, an independent and rebellious girl whose education while she had been abroad made her resent her father wanting her to behave with the deference towards them that was normal in Shona families. The two girls became close friends. Babamukuru was quite tyrannical towards her, and his wife Maiguru (a wonderful and complex character) was unable to stop him, for he lorded it over her as well. When Tambu witnesses a violent physical attack on Nyasha by Babamukuru because she had been out late with boy-friends, she saw it as male victimization of women and related it to her own experiences with her late brother at home.Tambu had adored her uncle and had always obeyed him without question; but, in the end, she, too, rebelled against him. In a rather tedious chapter when twenty-four members of the family had gathered at the homestead for Christmas, Babamukuru had ordained that Tambu’s parents, Jeremiah and Shingayi, should marry. Tambu hated the idea: it would make her parents seem ridiculous, and she refused to attend the wedding. This enraged Babamukuru, and his punishment of Tambu finally made her hate him.But at the school she did very well, was soon fluent in English and a voracious reader. She came top in an exam which, though she did not know it at the time, was designed to select students for a full scholarship to a convent. She was thrilled at the prospect; but Babamukuru was torn for a while whether or not to allow her to take it up: he feared that further education by white people would turn her into the kind of rebel that his daughter Nyasha had become; but in the end he decided to let her go. Nyasha, for her part, warned her against going: Tambu would be brainwashed into becoming assimilated and would forget all about her family.She was very happy at the convent; but a seed of worry had been planted in her when, during the holidays, she witnessed the alarming sickness of Nyasha at the mission, and when, at the homestead she heard her mother Shingayi say what calamities “Englishness” had already brought to Nyasha and the other members of the family who had been damaged by it and that one day “it will kill them all, if they aren’t careful”. On this ominous note the novel ends – and it cries out for the sequel, “The Book of NOT”, for which I can hardly wait.

After such a striking first paragraph, I had high hopes for Nervous Conditions and I wasn't disappointed. First published in the 1980s, I was interested - and somewhat disappointed - to realise that a lot of the issues Dangarembga's characters face are still being written about as present day problems in novels thirty years later. Young Tambudzai is a child at the beginning of our story. She doesn't understand her mother's warning advice about her fate as a woman and instead strives to equal her spiteful brother, Nhamo. Nhamo is selected to follow in his uncle's footsteps and be educated at the Mission School. Uncle Babamukuru is the shining light of the extended family. Educated away from his family by white missionaries, he later was even able to study for five years in 1960s England, as did his wife Maiguru, and their children were partially brought up there. Babamukuru has a beautiful house, a good car and the job of Headmaster at the school. Everyone wants their children to emulate his success, but Dangarembga slowly pulls back a curtain to reveal what such Westernised success has destroyed.Dangarembga illustrates how the culture clash of colonialism was to the extreme financial detriment of many black people unless they were the 'lucky' few chosen to live within while educational programmes and the like. In order to benefit however, those people had to forgo their traditional culture and replicate the restrictive white examples set them. What I found difficult to reconcile in my mind though was that the portrayal of black life is one of grinding poverty and constant labour, especially for the women. I often felt like yelling at the female characters to walk away and stand up for themselves, but of course - and as a couple of them discover - there is rarely anywhere to walk away to. Maiguru cannot use her academic brilliance in employment and having university degrees casts her as a loose woman. Obviously! Tambudzai might strive to equal and even surpass her brother, but what will she actually gain by that in a country where both black and white see excessive education as wasted on women.I liked that Dangarembga doesn't attempt to offer easy solutions to her characters' predicaments. As a reader, I sometimes thought I saw an obvious solution, but I would soon realise I hadn't taken everything about a particular situation into account. I strongly felt for the women trapped in a certain traditionally proscribed existence and especially for those who had a glimpse of genuine alternatives (the niece partly raised in the UK for example) I couldn't begin to truly understand what they went (and are still going) through.

A large extended family of African tribespeople are to be driven by a progressive patriarch towards a more affluent existence. Their future should be full of hope and yet the young people at the cutting edge of this transformation -- born in one world but destined to mature in another -- are falling apart. The only way to truly succeed in their new lives is to move away from the culture into which they were born and, in effect, to embrace the values of the colonialists who are driving their country's progress. For the individual, this means killing off one identity in order to become another, often unrecognisable, person: a form of suicide. This is a phenomenon often experienced in less obvious ways, such as the working class kid who becomes the first from their family to attend university and so the themes of this novel resonate still.

A woman's point of view of the emergence of Zimbabwe from colonialism. Very interesting and written in fresh, clear prose. Written 20 years later than Things Fall Apart, which is so much better known, but the (necessary) female perspective makes Achebe's account seem neglectful, in this respect. Very good book, and - to me - infinitely superior to the second in the trilogy, The Book of Not.

Set in colonial Rhodesia, Tsitsi Dangarembga's novel chronicles the beginning of Tambudzai's new life after her brother's untimely death leaves the way open for her to acquire an education.Coming from poverty, Tambudzai's shot at gaining a much-desired education relies on chance and the benevolence of her greatly revered, educated uncle, who believes that someone in every branch of his family should have an education to help allieviate the poverty endured by the rest. However, Tambudzai's initial desire to expand her horizons brings its own challenges and contradictions with it, best illustrated through the person of her cousin Nyasha, whose Westernised behaviour is increasingly regarded as unbecoming of a girl.Although this is at times quite a heavy read, desribing in some detail the lives of rural African women around their often incompetent but ever superior men-folk, and despite the fact that it has a very unsatisfactory ending, this remains a very thoughtful and insightful book. There are so few African novels about women, that it is refreshing to read about often unseen characters. Although you are constantly aware of their second-class status within their families, schools and society at large, this is engaging and quietly gripping and I'm left feelng that there should be more to come of Tambudzai's story.