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Tsitsi Dangarembga (b. 1959) |
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Zimbabwean film-maker and feminist writer, whose novel Nervous Conditions (1988) has become a modern African classic. It was awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 1989. Tsitsi Dangarembga has dealt in her works with the oppressive nature of a patriarchal family structure and a woman's coming-of-age. "My soul is African," she once said, "it is from there that springs the fountain of my creative being." "This morning I received a letter from my husband, the first in twelve years. Can you imagine such a thing? As has been my custom during all this time that I have been waiting, I opened my eyes at four o'clock when the first cock crowed, and lay remembering the day that he left, without bitterness and without anger or sorrow, simply remembering what it was like to be with him one day and without him the next." (from 'The Letter,' Whispering Land: An Anthology of Stories by African Women, Stockholm: SIDA, 1985, p. 14) Tsitsi
Dangarembga was born in Mutoko, a small town in colonial Rhodesia, into
a family of educators. At the age of two she moved with her parents to
England, thereby
citing English as her first language – it was used all through her
education and she forgot most of the Shona that she had learnt. In 1965
she returned to Rhodesia, where she entered a mission school in Mutare
and learned Shona again. She then completed her secondary education at
an American convent school. In 1977 Dangarembga went to Cambridge intending to study medicine. After three years, homesick and feeling isolated, she abandoned her studies and returned to Rhodesia, just before the country gained independence and became known as Zimbabwe. She started to study psychology at the University of Harare, and for some time, she worked at an advertising agency. During these years she became involved with the Drama Club and
wrote and staged three plays, She No Longer Weeps (pub. 1987),
The Lost of the Soil, and The Third One. "The
writers in Zimbabwe were also basically men at the time," she said in an
interview. "And so I really didn't see that the situation would be
remedied unless some woman sat down and wrote something, so that's what
I did!" ('Tsitsi
Dangarembga,' in Talking
with African Writers: Interviews with African Poets, Playwrights and Novelists by Jane Wilkinson, London: James Currey, 1992, p. 196) Upon graduation she worked as a teacher, but finding it
difficult to combine an academic career and literature, then devoted
herself entirely to writing. 'The Letter' won a price in a writing competition arranged by SIDA, the Swedish International Development Authority, and was published in the anthology Whispering Land (1985). In it Dangarembga drew a parallel between broken family ties under South African apartheid with national disintegration. The narrator, a woman, receives the first letter from her husband – after twelve years. He had been considered a security risk but manages to escape before being arrested. Her mother tells her to destroy the letter, but she wants to save it. Soldiers raid her house and she is taken to a police station. The story ends with a brutal conclusion: "As for myself, well, I have already told you that I became a political person twelve years ago in the Township. Therefore I have been ample time to get used to the aberrations of people in the grip of totalitarian fervour. I do not know what is going to happen to me. I may be charged with an act of treason plotted in Pretoria, or they may hold me here to abuse me physically and mentally for a while before conceding that my desire to be with my husband is not grounds for indictment." As a novelist Dangarembga made her debut with Nervous
Conditions. This partially autobiographical work, the first novel
published in English by a black Zimbabwean woman, had been rejected by
a number
of Zimbabwean publishers on the grounds that it was unrepresetative of
African women and their interest. Moreover, fiction did not have a wide market in Zimbabwe. Eventually the novel came out in
Great Britain in 1988, and the next year in the
United States. Dangarembga had
already began to write in her childhood, and read mostly the English
classics, but the period following Zimbabwean independence inspired her
to read contemporary African literature and the writings of
Afro-American women. It was not cultural
tradition or oral history from which she drew inspiration for her work, but from what she knew and had heard. "I think it's just that if at the age of twenty-six somebody has a story to tell it's likely to be about growing up! Also I'm always conscious at the back of my mind that there is very little that a woman in Zimbabwe can pick up – in Zimbabwe today – and say yes, I know, that's me. And that is something that really is quite a strong motivation quite frankly. Because I know I felt that gap so dreadfully." ('Tsitsi Dangarembga,' in Talking with African Writers: Interviews with African Poets, Playwrights and Novelists, p. 197) The title of Nervous Conditions is borrowed from
Jean-Paul Sartre's introduction to Franz Fanon's Wretched of the
Earth. The "nervous condition" of the native is, according to
Sartre, a function of mutually reinforcing attitudes between colonizer
and colonized that condemn the colonized to what amounts to a
psychological disorder. Tambudzai Sigauke, the narrator, looks back on
her childhood in colonial Rhodesia of the sixties and seventies,
beginning her narration with the famous opening: "I was not sorry when
my brother died. Nor am I apologising for my callousness, as you may define it, my lack of feeling." (Ibid., p. 1) Tambu's brother is sent to a mission school, but the
family don't have money for her education. She grows maize to earn her
own school fees, only to have her brother steal her produce. Also her
father attempts to claim the money because he doesn't believe that the
education of women is important. When his brother dies Tambu enters the
school – the family does not have any other sons. She becomes friends
with her cousin, Nyasha, who has spent five years in England and who
refuses to conform to society's expectations for women. She suffers
from anorexia and bulimia. "Dangarembga presents the fighting, anorexic
body and the psychologically unstable mind as tropes to show that
subjectivity is renegotiated through a contestation of the patriarchal
and imperialist limits placed on the body and on femininity." (Suns
of the Mbira: A Critical Exploration of the Multiple Figurations of
Femininity in Selected Fiction by Tsitsi Dangarembga and Yvonne Vera by Tendai Marima, 2011, University of London, p. 115) Gradually Tambu
leaves behind those parts of her family, herself and her culture that
she cannot accept – an analogue of the independence process of
Zimbabwe. In addition, she rejects her highly educated uncle, Babamukuru, who
believes that Tambu's education will enable her to marry well.
Babamakuru's authority becomes increasingly irrational, and Tambu sees that
she must free herself from the dichotomy between tradition and
modernity: the struggles women face are similar, regardless of their
class. "Quietly, unobtrusively and extremely fitfully, something in my
mind began to assert itself, to question things and refuse to be
brainwashed, bringing me to this time when l can set down this story.
It was a long and painful process for me, that process of expansion. It
was a process whose events stretched over many years and would fill
another volume, but the story I have told here, is my own story, the
story of four women whom I loved, and our men, this is how it all
began." (Ibid., p. 204) The international recognition Nervous Conditions did not only demonstrate the validity of Dangarembga's
feminist approach in an African context but also encouraged other
Zimbabwean writers to tackle issues of gender inequality as well. Following her success as a novelist, Dangarembga turned her attention to film. After receiving a Commonwealth Writers' Award, she left for Berlin to continue her education at the Deutsche Film und Fernseh Akademie, where she studied film direction and produced a documentary for German television. Dangarembga continued her doctoral studies in the Department of African Studies at the Humboldt University Berlin. Dangarembga returned eventually to Zimbabwe with her two children, born in Germany. "Life is difficult in Zimbabwe at the moment, but my soul breathes more freely here," she said. In 1990 Dangarembga was commissioned to write the story for Neria (1992), which became the highest-grossing film in Zimbabwean history. The protagonist is a widowed woman, whose brother-in-law uses her difficult situation for his own advantage. Neria loses her material possessions and her child, but gets then help from her female friend against her former husband's family. In 1992 Dangarembga founded Nyeria Films, a film production
company in Harare. Her films have received several awards. Kare
Kare Zvako (2005) was the winner of the Golden Dhow in Zanzibar,
and won also the Short Film Award Cinemaafricano in Milano, and Short
Film Award ZIFF. Peretera Maneta (2006) received the UNESCO
Children’s and Human Rights Award and won the Zanzibar International
Film Festival (ZIFF). With Everyone's Child (1996), shot on location in
Harare and Domboshawa, Dangarembga made film history in her country. It
was the first full lenght feature movie directed by a black Zimbabwean
woman. The story follows the tragic fates of four siblings, Tamari and
Itai, after their parents die of AIDS. The soundtrack featured songs by
Zimbabwe's most popular musicians, including Thomas Mapfumo, Leonard
Zhakata and Andy "Tomato Sauce" Brown. Dangarembga herself has also
served on the board of the Zimbabwe College Of Music for five years,
two of them as chair. Nyaminyami and the Evil Eggs (2011), based on the legendary river god of the Zambezi valley, was the second in a trilogy of folktale musicals after Kare Kare Zvako. The Book of Not (2006), set against Zimbabwe's struggle for freedom from white rule, continued the semi-autobiographical story of Tambudzai or Tambu at the Sacred Heart academy. Tambu is not a traditional likeable heroine of a Bildungsroman: now her faults and failures overshadow her virtues and accomplishments. She even volunteers to contribute to the Rhodesian war effort by knitting for the white soldiers. At the end Tambu seems to have learned little from her experiences of injustice, except that selfishness and suppressing of rage have not helped her to achieve the greatness that is inside of her. Again Tambu's opposite character is her cousin Nyasha, whose reading of Ngugi's A Grain of Wheat only prompts Tambu to respond with a sarcastic comment from her warped perspective. Concerned
about the state of the nation, Dangarembga joined
the Movement For Democratic Change (MDC), led by Deputy Prime Minister
Arthur Mutambara, and was named in 2010 the secretary for education in
a portfolio reshuffle. She explained in an interview that she did not
join a political party in order to criticise. The MDC was formed to
challenge President Mugabe's government. In 2019, Dangarembga was appointed curator of the African Book Festival
in
Berlin. During an
anti-corruption demonstration in Harare in July 2020, she was arrested "It's a whole experience, something I've
never gone through," she said after being released on bail. Dangarembga was
charged with incitement to commit violence and breaching
anti-coronavirus health regulations. In 2021 Dangarembga
was awarded the PEN Pinter prize, established in 2009. Previous winners
include Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie (2018), Lemn Sissay (2019), and
Linton Kwesi Johnson (2020). For further reading: Talking with African Writers: Interviews with African Poets, Playwrights and Novelists by Jane Wilkinson (1992); 'An Interview with Tsitsi Dangarembga' by Rosemary Marangoly George and Helen Scott, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 26, No. 3, African Literature Issue (Spring, 1993); Postcolonial African Writers: A Bio-bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Pushpa Naidu Parekh and Siga Fatima Jagne (1998); Emerging Perspectives on Tstsi Dangarembga: Negotiating the Postcolonial by Ann Elizabeth Willey and Jeanette Treiber (2001); Tracing Personal Expansion: Reading Selected Novels as Modern African Bildungsroman by Walter P. Collins (2006); Of War and Women, Oppression and Opptimism: New Essays on the African Novel by Eustace Palmer (2008); African Women Playwrights, edited and with an introduction by Kathy A. Perkins; foreword by Amandina Lihamba (2009); Postnational Feminisms: Postcolonial Identities and Cosmopolitanism in the Works of Kamala Markandaya, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Ama Ata Aidoo, and Anita Desai by Hena Ahmad (2010); 'Tsitsi Dangarembga (1959-),' in Contemporary African Writers, edited by Tanure Ojaide (2011); Literary Identification from Charlotte Brontë to Tsitsi Dangarembga by Laura Green (2012); Trauma Novels in Postcolonial Literatures: Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions, and Tomson Highway, Kiss of the Fur Queen by Milena Bubenechik (2012); Some Kinds of Childhood: Images of History and Resistance in Zimbabwean Literature by Robert Muponde (2015); Complicity and Responsibility in Contemporary African Writing : The Postcolony Revisited by Minna Johanna Niemi (2021) Selected works:
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