Tsitsi Dangarembga was born in 1959 in Mutoko, a rural district of granite hills and small farms in northeastern Zimbabwe, near the border with Mozambique. At the time, it was Southern Rhodesia, a British colony ruled by a white settler minority. Power lay in the hands of a few thousand Europeans who controlled the land, the schools, and the vote, while millions of Africans lived under laws that confined them to reserves and labour compounds.
Dangarembga’s parents were teachers who believed that education could offer a way through this system. Her mother, Susan, was the first Black woman in Rhodesia to take a university degree; her father, Amon, became a headmaster, a man who believed education could lift a people from subjection. The household was built around the promise of schooling, yet the schools themselves carried the manners and disciplines of the coloniser.
As a small child, Dangarembga lived for several years in England while her parents studied, learning English speech and English weather, the measured politeness of another world. When she returned to Rhodesia in 1965, she came home as an outsider. The country was entering a long spell of white-minority rule, and she was a child with an English accent and an African face. In Harare, Dangarembga boarded at mission schools run by priests and nuns who taught obedience alongside arithmetic. She excelled in her studies, though excellence only made her difference more visible.
At 18, Dangarembga won a place at Cambridge to study medicine. It was the highest recognition her education could offer, yet in the grey courtyards of that old university, she felt the distance between privilege and belonging. She understood the language and customs of the place but sensed she would never belong. The unease of those years would stay with her: the feeling of being both witness and stranger, moving through institutions that claimed universality while excluding her.
When Dangarembga abandoned medicine and returned to Zimbabwe, she turned to writing as a form of coherence, to find pattern in dislocation. Storytelling became the means she used to examine minds shaped by colonial schooling. In her fiction, the voice of the colonised child meets the adult consciousness that understands what happened to her. Out of that meeting came her first book, Nervous Conditions, and the long project of her life: to make sense of what education and exile had done to the African self.
Nervous Conditions (1988) won the 1989 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Africa region). The novel tells the story of Tambudzai, a girl from rural poverty who claws her way into education against her family’s expectations.
“Quietly, unobtrusively and extremely fitfully, something in my mind began to assert itself, to question things and refuse to be brainwashed. But each time I questioned or attempted to question, my conclusions would collapse in confusion. I was young and my thinking was limited. Still, I could not help noticing that life at the mission was very different from the life we lived at home. I could not help noticing that the Whites at the mission were always giving orders and the Blacks were always carrying them out. It did not make sense, but I saw it all the same.”—Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions (London: The Women’s Press, 1988), p. 91.
This is one of the defining moments in Nervous Conditions. It is the sound of inward consciousness witnessing cruelty and power before it has the language to question or resist it.
Critics abroad praised Nervous Conditions for its clarity. The New York Times described it as “one of the most important novels of the twentieth century”. In 2018, the BBC named it one of the 100 books that shaped the world. In Zimbabwe, however, the book circulated more slowly. Readers recognised themselves in its conflicts but were less comfortable with how directly it questioned the costs of education, gender roles, and family loyalty.
Two decades later, Dangarembga returned to the story. The Book of Not (2006) follows Tambudzai Sigauke—the bright village girl from Nervous Conditions—into a Catholic convent school during the years of the liberation war.
Zimbabwe in the 1970s was in conflict; at the convent, Tambudzai is educated among white girls, the daughters of colonial families. She works hard, hoping her success will make her visible, but every mark of excellence deepens her isolation.
“I did not mind that they laughed,” she says. “I only wanted them to stop seeing me as nothing, to look at me and see a person.” Her need to be seen becomes the quiet tragedy of the book—the way a clever, ambitious girl begins to measure her worth through the eyes of those who will never accept her.
Critics were divided: some complained that it lacked the freshness of Nervous Conditions, but others understood that its brokenness was deliberate.
Dangarembga refused to offer a redemptive narrative of independence. Instead, she showed how liberation bred new humiliations.
Dangarembga’s third novel, This Mournable Body (2018), completed the trilogy. Tambudzai is now middle-aged, unemployed, and adrift in Harare. She suffers breakdowns, failed ventures, and the slow humiliation of survival. “You feel the tears racing hotly down your cheeks and wish you could rub them away, but you are too tired,” reads one passage. Elsewhere, she observes the emptiness that follows endurance: “You have spent a lifetime trying to lift yourself, but you are still here, at the bottom, watching others rise.”
The language mirrors her collapse—taut, fractured, moving between second and third person. The book was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, bringing Dangarembga to global attention thirty years after her debut.
Between novels, Dangarembga turned to theatre and film. In the early 1990s, she found no roles for Black women in Zimbabwean drama. In 1996, Dangarembga directed Everyone’s Child, the first feature film by a Black Zimbabwean woman, telling the story of children orphaned by AIDS. She established Nyerai Films and later the International Images Film Festival for Women in Harare, creating spaces where Black women could see themselves on screen.
In 2020, as Zimbabwe’s economy collapsed and corruption intensified, Dangarembga joined a small protest in Harare. Carrying a placard that read “We want better. Reform our institutions,” she was arrested. Images of her being pushed into a police truck circulated widely. She was charged with inciting public violence. In 2022, a court convicted her, but the conviction was overturned on appeal. International organisations rallied in her defence. PEN International awarded her its 2021 Award for Freedom of Expression; in 2022, she received the Windham-Campbell Prize, one of the world’s richest literary awards.
Dangarembga’s trilogy is personal and political. Tambudzai’s struggles parallel the nation’s: the promise of independence, the compromises of survival, the erosion of dignity.
Dangarembga’s work is now taught across the world. Nervous Conditions is on university syllabi from Cape Town to Cambridge.
This Mournable Body has been read as one of the defining novels of Zimbabwe’s post-independence collapse.
Yet in Harare, Dangarembga continues to live under suspicion, her protests monitored, her passport under surveillance.
“Quietly, unobtrusively and extremely fitfully something in my mind began to assert itself,” Tambudzai says in Nervous Conditions. The line could stand for Dangarembga herself, for a voice that could have easily been buried, but thankfully, spoke up.
Part Three, on women writers out of Africa, next week, will feature Ghanaian novelist Ama Ata Aidoo.
Ira Mathur is a Guardian Media columnist and winner of the 2023 OCM Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction.
