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A review by ianpauljones
Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga
5.0
This edition of Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novel has an introduction by Kwame Anthony Appiah that was written twenty years ago and sixteen years after the novel was first published in the UK. In many ways not much has changed since 1988 or 2004 in terms of gender. And maybe not since the novel’s setting in the Sixties and early Seventies. In fact, maybe we’re going backwards. Kwame Appiah’s introduction begins with the first words of the novel proper: “I was not sorry when my brother died.” Those words are written by a woman of indeterminate age remembering the day her brother failed to come home for the holidays from his mission school. The narrator, Tambu, was around thirteen at the time, her brother Nhamo a year older. We learn that they lived in what was then Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. Theirs is a family of subsistence farmers who are not quite dirt poor as they have a reasonably sized house with some furniture. Two reasons they’re not on the breadline – despite the laziness of their feckless father Jeremiah – are the industriousness of Tambu’s mother and the benevolence of her uncle, Babamukuru. He is headmaster of the mission school in a nearby town and he and his wife Maiguru have had the good fortune to go to university in South Africa and England. He lives in a big house, has servants and two cars and he takes Nhamo under his wing. The plan is that the boy will benefit from a good education and raise his side of the family further up the social ladder.
Despite the value that many characters – including Tambu – place on education, there is a strong feeling that it is wasted on males and females in different ways. Babamukuru has had access to “western” ideas, having spent five years in England in the Swinging Sixties doing a Masters. However, he has still come home as a patriarch with traditional ideas about hierarchy and a “woman’s place”. His wife Maiguru is also a post-graduate but she has had little opportunity to use her education, apart from doing some teaching at the mission school. She is a submissive wife who humours her husband and rarely challenges his authority. Nhamo as a teenage boy appears to be following Babamukuru’s example. He has been doing well at school but he uses his male privilege to lord it over Tambu and remind her that as a girl she is his social and intellectual inferior. He is lazy and selfish and refuses to help on the farm when he comes home for the holidays. Meanwhile Tambu often has to miss classes at the local school to milk the cows or because there is no money to pay the fees. Being the resourceful type, at the age of about eight she starts growing maize to sell in the local town to pay the school fees. She gets not support from her family for this, including her mother, who is suspicious of education. Neither of her parents believe that girls need any education beyond cooking and chores around the farm.
Then Tambu’s brother dies suddenly of mumps. His death opens doors for Tambu because her uncle decides that she must replace Nhamo as her family’s hope for the future. This puts her in closer touch with her cousin Nyasha. You think this is going to be a wonderful, rich friendship but it’s problematic. Nyasha is about the same age as Tambu, but she has spent five years in England with her parents and has come back with a head full of western traits (we see her reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover) and a miniskirt. Tambu still shares her family’s traditional ideas so she finds Nyasha’s version of Sixties permissiveness (short skirts, smoking, hanging out with boys) rather shocking. However, they share a room and after some initial mutual suspicion, they do become friends. Nyasha can’t reconcile her experience of life in England and her intellectual curiosity with the straitjacket that traditional norms impose on her and she develops bulimia. This is her protest against paternal authority and the injunction for women to give men curves. Which reminds me that the novel has another admirable female character, her mother’s sister, Lucia. She likes having sex with men and although this has disadvantages for her – she gets pregnant by a deadbeat – she has enough spirit to flick the finger at anyone who sneers at her. She also has enough brains to get her way. She persuades Babamukuru to give her a cooking job at the mission school, which enables her to go to evening classes. A better future awaits her.
I won’t say what becomes of Tambu, but there is hope at the end of the novel that a better future awaits her too.
I will definitely read more books by Tsitsi Dangarembga.
Despite the value that many characters – including Tambu – place on education, there is a strong feeling that it is wasted on males and females in different ways. Babamukuru has had access to “western” ideas, having spent five years in England in the Swinging Sixties doing a Masters. However, he has still come home as a patriarch with traditional ideas about hierarchy and a “woman’s place”. His wife Maiguru is also a post-graduate but she has had little opportunity to use her education, apart from doing some teaching at the mission school. She is a submissive wife who humours her husband and rarely challenges his authority. Nhamo as a teenage boy appears to be following Babamukuru’s example. He has been doing well at school but he uses his male privilege to lord it over Tambu and remind her that as a girl she is his social and intellectual inferior. He is lazy and selfish and refuses to help on the farm when he comes home for the holidays. Meanwhile Tambu often has to miss classes at the local school to milk the cows or because there is no money to pay the fees. Being the resourceful type, at the age of about eight she starts growing maize to sell in the local town to pay the school fees. She gets not support from her family for this, including her mother, who is suspicious of education. Neither of her parents believe that girls need any education beyond cooking and chores around the farm.
Then Tambu’s brother dies suddenly of mumps. His death opens doors for Tambu because her uncle decides that she must replace Nhamo as her family’s hope for the future. This puts her in closer touch with her cousin Nyasha. You think this is going to be a wonderful, rich friendship but it’s problematic. Nyasha is about the same age as Tambu, but she has spent five years in England with her parents and has come back with a head full of western traits (we see her reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover) and a miniskirt. Tambu still shares her family’s traditional ideas so she finds Nyasha’s version of Sixties permissiveness (short skirts, smoking, hanging out with boys) rather shocking. However, they share a room and after some initial mutual suspicion, they do become friends. Nyasha can’t reconcile her experience of life in England and her intellectual curiosity with the straitjacket that traditional norms impose on her and she develops bulimia. This is her protest against paternal authority and the injunction for women to give men curves. Which reminds me that the novel has another admirable female character, her mother’s sister, Lucia. She likes having sex with men and although this has disadvantages for her – she gets pregnant by a deadbeat – she has enough spirit to flick the finger at anyone who sneers at her. She also has enough brains to get her way. She persuades Babamukuru to give her a cooking job at the mission school, which enables her to go to evening classes. A better future awaits her.
I won’t say what becomes of Tambu, but there is hope at the end of the novel that a better future awaits her too.
I will definitely read more books by Tsitsi Dangarembga.