1. Tsitsi Dangarembga Nervous Conditions (1988)

2. Setting Set in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in the 1960s Rhodesia: a white settler colony (land appropriated from Africans in the late 19 th c by Cecil Rhodes, the British politician, mining magnate and proponent of British colonialism) A first person account of coming of age in colonial, white-ruled Rhodesia Mutliple jeopardy of race, gender and class (“the poverty of blackness on one side and the weight of womanhood on the other” (mother to Tambu, p. 16)

3. Portrait of colonialism Cf. Fanon’s epigraph Colonialism as epistemic violence—on language, culture, modes of being Cf. Spivak

4. Cultural and social effects of colonialism Transformation of the village, traditional life under pressure from colonialism (top of p. 4) Pre-existing social relations under pressure from new forces (pre-colonial not to be idealised) Loss of language—Shona vs English (42), extended family vs nuclear Culture as everyday acts and ways of being— clothes, eating, being (p. 48)

5. Colonial education Education: a double-edged sword—instrument for creating a docile, obedient class of colonised men; colonial education as a disciplining institution (p. 14) P. 19: “They thought he was a good boy, cultivable, in the way that land is, to yield harvests that sustain the cultivator” Education as alienation from family, labour, community—brother Nhamo’s distancing (pp. 6-7) Education as aphasia “he had forgotten how to speak Shona” (52); “the more aphasic he became...the more my father convinced that he was being educated” (53) Education as a male prerogative: “Nhamo would lift our branch of the family out of the squalor in which we were living” (4) “in terms of cash my education was an investment, but then in terms of cattle, so was my conformity” (34) Education as freedom

6. Material effects of colonialism Conditions of colonial labour Changes in structure of family Relationship to land

7. Feminist Narrative “I was not sorry when my brother died…my story is after all not about death but about my escape and Lucia’s; about my mother’s and Maiguru’s entrapment; and about Nyasha’s rebellion…whose rebellion may not in the end have been successful” (p. 1) 3 models—escape, entrapment, rebliion The novel invites us to evaluate each response

8. Tambudzai as narrator Ambitious, worldly, partial Thinks of herself as wily, resourceful, wilful, headstrong “solid, utilitarian me” (40) Her hero: Babamukuru: self-made man with power and money Read top of p. 58 Discourse of liberal feminism—individualised solutions to social problems; individual consciousness and agency vs the collective experience of gendered subordination Liberal narrative of hard work P. 58 first para Brother has to be killed off; mother as obstacle

9. Feminist consciousness What is the source of her feminist consciousness? “feeling the injustice of it” (12); “because you are a girl” (12)—against the naturalisation of roles “these events coalesced formlessly in my mind to an incipient understanding of the burdens my mother had talked of…these were complex, dangerous thoughts that I was stirring up, not the kind you can ponder safely but the kind that become autonomous and malignant if you let them” (59)

10. Nyasha Nyasha’s transformation in England: no longer “bold, ebullient” (51) “as though she were directing more and more of her energy inwards to commune with herself about issues that she alone had seen” (52) Nyasha’s radicalism (p. 63, b) A learned radicalism?

11. The novel’s feminist discourse Academically informed Western and non-feminisms debated within the space of the novel

12. Solidarity Feminist solidarity cut through by colonialism and patriarchy Strong bonds, that reproduce gender oppression Mother: “ferocious swing of her arms” (7), hard- working, alone (Tambu’s solidarity with her p. 10) Mother works hard to send Nhamo to school; to Tambu she tells “what will help you, my child, is to learn to carry your burdens with strength” (16)