Nervous Conditions [Nervous Conditions #1]

The groundbreaking first novel in Tsitsi Dangarembga's award-winning trilogy, Nervous Conditions, won the Commonwealth Writers Prize & has been "hailed as one of the 20th century's most significant works of African literature" (NY Times). Two decades before Zimbabwe would win independence & ended white minority rule, 13-year-old Tambudzai Sigauke embarks on her education. On her shoulders rest the economic hopes of her parents, siblings, & extended family, & within her burns the desire for independence. She yearns to be free of the constraints of her rural village & thinks she's found her way out when her wealthy uncle offers to sponsor her schooling. But she soon learns that the education she receives at his mission school comes with a price.A distinguishing feature of this work is its courageous honesty & devastating understatement.A modern classic in the African literary canon & voted in the Top Ten Africa's 100 Best Books of the 20th Century, this novel brings to the politics of decolonization theory the energy of women's rights. An extraordinarily well-crafted work, this book is a work of vision. Through its deft negotiation of race, class, gender & cultural change, it dramatizes the 'nervousness' of the 'postcolonial' conditions that bedevil us still. In Tambu & the women of her family, we African women see ourselves, whether at home or displaced, doing daily battle with our changing world with a mixture of tenacity, bewilderment & grace.Tsitsi Dangarembga: author of 3 novels: Nervous Conditions, winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize; This Mournable Body, shortlisted for the Booker Prize & The Book of Not. She won the PEN Pinter Prize in 2021 & the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. Dangarembga is also a filmmaker, playwright, & the director of the Institute of Creative Arts for Progress in Africa Trust.

This stunning first novel, set in colonial Rhodesia during the 1960s, centers on the coming of age of a teenage girl, Tambu, and her relationship with her British-educated cousin Nyasha. Tambu, who yearns to be free of the constraints of her rural village, especially the circumscribed lives of the women, thinks her dreams have come true when her wealthy uncle offers to sponsor her education. But she soon learns that the education she receives at his mission school comes with a price. At the school she meets the worldly and rebellious Nyasha, who is chafing under her father's authority. Raised in England, Nyasha is so much a stranger among her own people that she can no longer speak her native language. Tambu can only watch as her cousin, caught between two cultures, pays the full cost of alienation.

Publishers Weekly

Tambu, an adolescent living in colonial Rhodesia of the '60s, seizes the opportunity to leave her rural community to study at the missionary school run by her wealthy, British-educated uncle. With an uncanny and often critical self-awareness, Tambu narrates this skillful first novel by a Zimbabwe native. Like many heroes of the bildungsroman, Tambu, in addition to excelling at her curriculum, slowly reaches some painful conclusions--about her family, her proscribed role as a woman, and the inherent evils of colonization. Tambu often thinks of her mother, ``who suffered from being female and poor and uneducated and black so stoically.'' Yet, she and her cousin, Nyasha, move increasingly farther away from their cultural heritage. At a funeral in her native village, Tambu admires the mourning of the women, ``shrill, sharp, shiny, needles of sound piercing cleanly and deeply to let the anguish in, not out.'' In many ways, this novel becomes Tambu's keening--a resonant, eloquent tribute to the women in her life, and to their losses. (Mar.)

Dangaremba s acclaimed first novel tells of the coming-of-age of Tambu, and through her, also offers a profound portrait of African society. In awarding Nervous Conditions the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Africa in 1989, the judges described the book as a beautiful and sensitive exploration of the plight and struggle of an African people.... A distinguishing feature of this work is its courageous honesty and devastating understatement. Tambudzai dreams of education, but her hopes only materialise after her brother's death, when she goes to live with her uncle. At his mission school, her critical faculties develop rapidly, bringing her face to face with a new set of conflicts involving her uncle, his education and his family. Tsitsi Dangarembga's quietly devastating first novel offers a portrait of Zimbabwe, where enlightenment brings its own profound dilemmas This is a book about the oppression of women by men.Men in a society have more rights than women and the women have to succumb to anything that men say.It also touches on religion and explains the roles of men and women.It also tells us about a young lady 'Nyasha" who left her home with her prents for England and went through a process called ASSIMILATION,which means that he suffered cultural schizophrenia. "Nervous Conditions brings to the politics of decolonization theory the energy of women's rights. By now a classic in African literature and Black women's literature internationally, Nervous Conditions is a must for anyone wanting to understand voice, memory, and coming of age for young Black women in Africa."--Page 4 of cover