
































Traditional Laws and Feminist Trajectory in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions

Orji Eze

Abstract

Indeed, the need for development in post covid-19 calls for deliberate promotion of gender
equality and enabling laws within African societies. In recent times, there has been growing
awareness in the development sector of the crucial significance of gender questions and laws for
both understanding and promotion of egalitarian society. Issues surrounding gender and law are
therefore not peripheral but central for all round achievement and development in Africa.
Therefore, there should be a paradigm shift in all approaches to harness the potentialities of
women. This should serve as a gauge towards achieving complete social transformation,
independence, equality, freedom and dignity of the African woman in a highly inhibitive
patriarchal legal system. A feministic approach is used as a discursive and interpretive slate for
understanding the paradigm shift as regards the nature of women’s oppression and domination
on the one hand and total freedom from subordination and marginalization on the other from
inhibitive cultural laws. A panoply of factors and forces (laws) have been noted, if not
understood by most feminists in their multifarious feminism discourses to be responsible for
gender inequalities, oppression and subjugation between opposite sexes around the globe. It
follows that, in the absence of a holistic, stable, well-grounded, and coordinated strategic
paradigm of thought and action to approach and settle womanbeings emancipatory agenda in the
post covid-19 era, the success of women’s collective or individual determination to initiate
radical social change and a total transformation of the conditions of their lives from
traditional/cultural practices remain low in the face of restrictive and inhibitive laws even in our
modern era. Consequently, this paper makes an attempt to discover and uncover what some of
these practices are and the different ways, in which they militate against, constrain male/female
relationships in the African society and the world at large as could be seen in Shona traditional
society as portrayed in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions. This article advances the
argument against the antagonistic reception of post covid-19 feminist trajectory against
obnoxious norms in an African milieu occasioned by colonialism. To this end, such determinism
for radical social change and law transformation by womanbeings is within the ambit of paper.

Keywords: Feminist trajectory, traditional society, Freedom, Equality, Colonialism

Introduction



Is being a woman actually a burden? As the Shona traditional law requires, why would one not
feel sorry for one’s brother’s death? In Nervous Conditions, the story is not after all about death,
but about escapism from adverse societal restrictions; about entrapment; and about
rebelliousness - far-minded and isolated, women/daughters, whose rebellion may not in the end
have been successful if not for their revisionist mind set against the burden of inhibitive cultural
norms.

Feminists see society as patriarchal, that is, a society ruled and dominated by men. In this
assumption, men “are the ruling class” and promulgate laws that favour them while women “the
subject class” bear the brunt and burden of the unfavourable laws (Sibanda 2016). They see the
family in modern African societies as the key institution in oppressing women. They believe that
women have always been oppressed and exploited and therefore revolutionary social change and
transformation can present the possibility of their emancipation, equality, dignity and freedom.
Freedom from inglorious cultural practices for the African woman would require autonomy,
responsibility and rejection of dependency and marginalization enshrined in the obnoxious
traditional laws. For the radical African feminist, “freedom is acquired by conquest of the
abrogative patriarchal domination, not by gift” (Sibanda 2016). To ensure total freedom for
women from some societal rules and regulations that keep them down, it must be pursued
consistently, constantly, and responsibly.

Liberty and equality are not ideas located outside of man; or are they ideas which become myth.
They are rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion. In this vein
therefore, this study looks at the process of contesting the (Shona) patriarchal and male-centered
cultural traditional laws and assumptions that have become gender discriminatory, derogatorily
inhibitive in approach and deteriorating in application. This paper is purposed to discover and
uncover impediments, contradictions and challenges which forestall the triumph of women in
achieving their liberation and emancipation in Africa as projected by Tsitsi Dangarembga in
Nervous Conditions. It follows that to secure freedom for the African womanbeings, the African
black women’s emancipatory agenda and reclamation in post covid-19 must assume a collective
struggle within their families which form a critical landmark toward human harmony and
survival.

Therefore, the spectrum of modern African feminist thought is given a wider dimension in
Nervous Conditions. This is a most welcome development primarily because it has filled the
nostalgic problematic gender gap between male and female in unwarranted laws within the
African milieu.

Patriarchal Norms (Laws) and Gender Inequality in Nervous Conditions

The different social profiles and statuses of men and women in any society provide a window
through which we establish the different challenges which women face and the limitations they
encounter in dealing with and coming to terms with such challenges obtainable in that



environment as the Shona patriarchal society and traditional laws portray. Damlegue Lare
describes a patriarchal society as:

a society which lays too much emphasis on the social functions of men as public decision
makers, heirs of family properties, community leaders and wisdom keepers, relegating
women (to) secondary positions as home-keepers, child-bearers, housewives…the
appendages of men. (Lare 108)

This conception clearly showcases the asymmetrical power relations between men and women
and the different privileges the opposite sexes have in terms of access to opportunities. This is
the case in most African patriarchal societies where power and socio-economic privileges are
enjoyed by men more than women. Again, it is all about the needs and sensibilities of women in
a typically stereotyped African society (family) where they are not being considered a priority, or
even legitimate. It is not about those days women felt the injustice of the society they were
actually part of but what is also obtainable in present African society. Feminism as Orji Eze
opines, decries oppression and marginalization of women as upheld by the societal norms as well
as the subjugation of womanhood in the world of men (34). But then, the situation every time is
about women being thought and seen as an insignificant other in a society that belongs to both
sexes. Tsitsi Dangarembga asserts through Tambu that thinking about and feeling the injustice of
it all, this is how one comes to dislike her own brother, father, mother and in fact, everybody.

Talcott Parsons sees the role of women within the context of the family. According to him, a
woman has an expressive role, while a man has instrumental role in the family (1959). A
woman’s expressive role provides warmth, security and emotional support which are necessary
ingredients for socialization. The man’s instrumental roles lead him to stress and anxiety. The
expressive female according to Ityavyar (12), heals the tension of the instrumental male by
providing the latter with love, kindness and friendly understanding. Today, the rural, back-house,
timid, subservient, lack-lustre woman has been replaced according to Helen Chukwuma by “her
modern counterpart, a full rounded human being, rational, individualistic and assertive, fighting
for, claiming and keeping her own” (2). Formerly, African female folks trained ambition
revolved round marriage and procreation, with no individualism, no assertiveness as could be
said of Tambu’s mother, Mainini. Her female obligations according to traditional legal codes,
ranged further to cooking the family meals, honouring her husband’s bed on invitation, and other
times merging with the home environment peacefully. On the contrary, time has gone when
woman’s individualism and freedom are asserted only through such positions. Unexpectedly,
prostitution appears to be the only way of bursting the legal system of male domination within
the marriage institution as Maiguru, Tambu’s aunty does. In a show of defiance, she runs away
from her husband's home for a brief interval - but only to her brother’s house thereby substituting
one male authority for another.



On gender inequality, the traditional Marxists argue that socialism is the more fundamental
answer to female oppression. Equality between the sexes can only be achieved in a socialist
society where the forces of production are commonly owned. The wives cease to be merely
producers of heirs to the husbands’ wealth, because there will be no private property to be
inherited. With the transformation of means of production into social property, wage-labour will
disappear as well as the proletariat (Ityavyar 21). Based on the biological inequality thought,
socialist feminists in the work of Shulamith Firestone had argued that historically, women have
borne the greater burden for the perpetuation of the species (1970). It is the biological inequality
of the sexes that gave rise to case-like system in which men receive “ego gratification” and enjoy
creature comfort from their domination of women. Biological inequality has been extended to
socio-economic inequality. Feminists believe that sex inequality stems from these facts of
biological inequalities and not from the mode of production or existence of private property as
Marx and Engels claimed. They advise that women must go beyond nature to ensure liberation.
Even though they may have explained why men dominate women, they have not provided a
plausible explanation of how women’s and men’s roles are socially constructed. Consequently,
the natural act of procreation even conspires against women in that without a man’s orgasm
conception cannot take place. Nowadays, it is a different story because that law and the game
have long been changed in favour of the womanbeings.

The capitalist mode of production and the ideological mode of patriarchy must be analyzed
separately. Roberta Hamilton suggests that both Marxist and feminist accounts must be used in
the analysis of women in society (1978). Feminism is then concerned with the study of how
biological inequalities and differences are transformed into their social meanings and
institutionalized. The first, requires a socialist revolution, the second, working on the
preconditions of developing technology requires an overturning of that which has been
considered natural (Hamilton 91-2). There should be a blend between Marxism and feminism
such that while Marxism deals with the social relations of women and men within a given mode
of production, feminism will concentrate on forms of patriarchal ideology within a given mode
of production.

In furtherance, Social Biologists (Robin Fox, Lionel Tiger and Murdock) – a group of early
functionalists have explained gender differences. They argue that the biological differences
between the sexes are the necessary and effective causes of the division of labour by sex in all
societies; they believe that women are naturally inferior to men and this is inherited from our
primate ancestors (1972). This according to them informs how tasks are assigned to men and
women in society. Tiger and Fox evoke the concept of bio-grammar and project it as the most
important determinant of sexual division of labour in society (qtd in Ityavyar 1992).

The bio-grammar programmes men for politics and economic activities outside the homestead,
while it assigns women only reproductive and domestic responsibilities (Ityavyar 1992). This is



an inhibitive model for an egalitarian personality like Tambu. She dismantles this view as she
later on moves to the Mission and ends up struggling to find herself and to keep a connection
with the land she loves. Tambu never opposed the core culture that supported her perspective and
pursuit in life rather she metamorphosed through cultural contact and rebirth. This is seen in how
she gradually blends when she is unaware of how to eat with a knife and fork due to the fact that
the body, more specifically the hand, is used in her Shona tradition to consume food. She
undergoes an out of body experience which mirrors that sort of African rebirth when she states,
“but I was slipping further and further away from her, until in the end I appeared to have slipped
out of my body and was standing somewhere near the foot of the bed” (168). This occurs when
her domineering uncle, Babamakuru, tries to force her to attend the Christian wedding of her
parents. This resistance signals the death of the passive Tambu and the birth of a young woman
who knows what she needs to do to fight back. The interactions between her own culture and
colonial culture induce within her a cultural schizophrenia characteristic of what Elleke Boehmer
describes as “a process of both ‘reincarnation’ and self-splitting, in which Tambu - is forced to
inhabit borderlines, at one and the same time losing, and yet retaining loyalty to, the traditions of
the Shona home” (qtd in Giarola 228).

One must understand that access to resources does not necessarily imply the power to control
them because to control a resource is to impose one’s own definition upon the others resources.
Access can be determined by others, but control implies that one is the determining force. Access
and control over use is different from access and benefits derived from the mobilization of
resources. Women may always access the use of resources but may not always realize the gains
from their use based on prevalent traditional laws and legislations. For example, in most of sub-
Saharan Africa, particularly in South-Eastern Nigeria, men own palm trees, but women process
the palm oil and sometimes, the income goes to their husbands and at other times is used for
subsistence in the family. Women’s access to and control over natural resources have received
considerable international and local attention as witnessed in the Beijing Declaration and
Platform for Action in 1995, The Nairobi Forward Looking Strategies for the Advancement of
Women in 1985 and the Twenty-Third Special Session of the General Assembly of Women in
2000, according to Bashaw (2016). She believes that access to and control over natural resources
have been characterized by a mix of rhetorical and political dimension which are far from the
critical questions of locating where power really lies. She argues that it is only when access to
and control over resources is problematized, that disparities in who has real control over the
produce of the land stand out. Against this backdrop, Marvin Harris believes that
“women…control the nursery, and because they control the nursery, they can potentially modify
any life style that threatens them” (qtd in Chinweizu 26).

The above assertion informs the observation of restricted female power seen in Zimbabwe which
is based on past African inhibitive socio-cultural law experiences that prevailed in that part of
Africa Dangarembga hails from; there is a welcome diversion from the canon. Her female
characters have emerged strongly from their cultural cocoon, basking free from such inhibitive



laws to a mixed reception of surprise and wonder from the African inhibitive paradigm that have
kept them bound over the years. This generates important questions: where were they all the
while when their mates were sold away to domestic slavery, when they were given away as
child-brides to aged husbands of parental choice when they were denied the opportunity of
school or any exposure? When they were deemed outcasts because they were not virgin brides
and when after marriage they were victimized for infertility and derided for fecundity of the
wrong sex? The answer according to Helen Chukwuma is very simple; the fire brand
emancipated woman had not been born then (3). In Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, the
potential African modern assertive female character, the egalitarian and essential female, Tambu
has just emerged to challenge the status quo.

Drawing from the theory of the dysfunctional family, Al Gore posits that, environmental
problems go beyond the way individuals relate with nature, but that equally has to do with the
way we collectively determine our mutual relationship to the earth and one another (2007). In the
family, before the scientific era, children easily locate their place in the world because they could
define themselves in relation both to their parents and to a god who was clearly present in nature.
But during the scientific era God is presented as having receded from the natural world to an
abstract place, the patriarchal figure (the father) effectively becomes god’s viceroy, entitled to
exercise godlike authority when enforcing the family’s rules. Children and even women started
getting confused about their own roles in the family system. The fathers were accorded godlike
authority to enforce rules and along the line the strongest rule that emerged was that the rules
cannot be questioned. The way these rules were enforced was through teaching the separation
between mind and body and suppressing the feelings and emotions that might otherwise
undermine the rules. As could be inferred from the novel, the most important unit in society is
the patrilineage, or family line descending from a common “male” ancestor. At the time of the
novel, adult males and their wives and unmarried children according their cultural law and
practice often lived in the same homestead or cluster of homesteads. The extended family was a
tightly knit unit; in the novel Tambu’s uncle and aunt call her “daughter” and plainly regard her
as such. Her uncle, Babamukuru, the school headmaster patriarch of the extended family exerts
godlike authority over his relatives according to the traditional laws.

As a stringent rule in Tambu’s nuclear family, her mother, siblings, and any property they have
belong to her father, a shiftless man who fawns over Babamukuru for the handouts he gets from
his more successful brother. Yet Tambu’s father wields authority in his own nuclear household.
It is worthy of mention that according to Shona traditional norms, at marriage a man gives to his
prospective wife's family a roora, or bride-wealth, usually a mix of cash and cattle. The roora
legitimizes the husband's right to his wife’s labour and to sexual access to her body. He also
gains authority over her reproductive powers - the right to possess all children born by her.



According to traditional regulations, the wife's subordinate status manifested itself in daily
stereotyped inhibitive customs. As the narrator portrays, the center of the traditional homestead
is the hearth, three stones that supported cooking pots, above which sat a horizontal bar on which
fish, meat, and maize cobs are dried. This is meant for the women to keep. It is their duty post.
Again, if there is a gathering, the women would sit on the ground, perhaps on reed mats, while
men sat above them on a mud ledge.

These customs had begun to change by the time of the novel, as reflected in the chairs and
couches with which Babamukuru’s home is furnished. Despite this fact, it is questionable
according to Hyginus Chibuike Ezebuilo “whether the constitutional protection of gender
equality is making a difference to women living in communities with strong commitment to
traditional norms and practices” (252). He argues that these compromises on women’s right to
equality can thus be interpreted to mean that “women, as opposed to men, do not have inherent
rights” (253). Despite the sexist customs and laws, women appeared to have exerted some
leverage even in the traditional household. Consequently, Tambu, the narrator fights to hold on
to her womanbeing instinct as she tears down the cultural veil and law while gaining access and
control of her own resources. This is typical of modern African society where women undergo
metamorphosis in unveiling inhibitive patriarchal laws and colonial entrapments for the gaining
and regaining as well as asserting of their Africanness, individualism and womanhood. The
novel depicts characters whose roles are pivotal in the maintenance of folk culture where a
synchronicity of body and cultural landscape are created for a common goal: the transcending of
the African feminist trajectory.

Colonialism and Stifling Traditions against Female Emancipation in Nervous Conditions

Ngugi wa Thiong'o in Decolonizing the Mind opines that the way in which colonial education
estranged African children from their own families and cultures begs for reassessment. He
explains that imposing English as the language of communication caused African children to
suppress their authentic selves and assimilate into a colonial identity. He decries the fact that
“Language and literature were taking us further and further from ourselves to other selves, from
our worlds to other worlds” (28). Ngugi stresses the fact that colonial education begins with a
deliberate disassociation of the language of conceptualization, of thinking, of formal education,
of mental development, from the language of daily interaction in the home and in the community.
To him, it is like separating the mind from the body so that they are occupying two unrelated
linguistic spheres in the same person. On a large social scale, it is like “producing a society of
bodiless heads and headless bodies” (Ngugi 28). Of course, our modern African woman
assertive personality does not swallow everything there is in colonial education. This explains
why the novel ends with the assertive Tambu reassuring herself that she is capable of refusing to



be brainwashed as she makes efforts to advance herself because she can no longer “accept
Sacred Heart and what it represented as a sunrise on her horizon” (Nervous Conditions 203).
Babamukuru's homecoming with his wife and children from England, and the extended family’s
reception of them at the ancestral Siguake homestead is instructive here. Tambu captures not
only the excitement of the family at the arrival of their head, but also her disappointment with
her cousins, Nyasha and Chido, who speak only English and have forgotten the Shona language.
Babamukuru, together with the rest of the Siguake patriarchy, decides to send Nhamo to the
mission school, to help improve the miserable economic conditions on the homestead. Tambu is
jealous, but concludes that Babamukuru knows better; his decision must be wise and justifiable.

Tambu’s recognition of the invasion of her community by the upper echelon of her society does
not sit well with her. This connection with and the recognition of her landscape as an integral
part of her Shona tradition influences her to radically criticize her brother, Nhamo, for not liking
to walk the countryside or to come home on holidays from the Mission where he attends school.
She also chastises Nyasha and Chido for forgetting their Shona after going to England. A
metamorphosed modern African woman, Tambu’s growing and selling of her mealies
demonstrates her freedom as well as connection between body and land, “The year I grew older,
stronger and sturdier than any eight-year-old can usefully grow” (Nervous Conditions 20). This
strikes a chord in the maintenance of the traditions which the Shona people embrace.
Consequently, the landscape in Dangarembga’s novel serves as a socio-cultural umbilical cord
for Tambu where the words of her grandmother enlighten her more by giving her a “history that
could not be found in textbooks” (Nervous Conditions 17). This is also the same role the land
plays in every black enclave, whether Afro-American or the Caribbean. One’s ancestral core
values are seen as a symbol of identity and essentially a passage which connects the African
woman to her ancestral heritage and existence. In Nervous Conditions, Dangarembga through the
character of Mainini, acknowledges that “this business of womanhood is a heavy burden”
(Nervous Conditions 16) due to some inhuman treatments from her husband as a result of
colonialism and twist of societal values in favour of men. Certainly, Mainini is a victim of Shona
belief system and sexist laws and practices introduced by colonialism and infused in Shona’s
traditional way of life via white supremacist ideology and agenda. To this end, Nervous
Conditions is a first-hand account of colonial experience under the governance of the British
Empire of the second half of the twentieth century. It brings up the voices of the formerly
silenced African women as part of pioneer account of their perception of Western intrusion. The
narrative portrays the upsetting experiences of the era of colonisation and explores its insidious
consequences on women living in such society. Consequently, the narrator speaks back to the
canon and exposes the suffering of its subjects (women), thereby depicting the grim atmosphere
of the colonial project and shows the effects of the domination, oppression and discrimination
suffered by native women. The novel as a life narrative reveals facts not recorded in history
books. It raises the bar of resistance in the context of colonisation and it queries traditional



notions of identity formation and common practices inhibiting women emancipatory agenda.
With unique means for resistance and survival, the novelist offers a challenge to the existing
beliefs.

Dangarembga also illustrates that irrespective of one’s gender and civilization, there is need for
the male actors to maintain culture, values, and norms when she highlights Babamakuru in his
struggles between a Western lifestyle and an African consciousness. This becomes evident when
he forces Tambu’s parents to engage in a Western wedding which goes against the Shona
tradition and customary law, yet he beats Nyasha into submission for not conforming to a
traditional African woman’s demeanour. He curses Nyasha and condemns her to whoredom thus
proving that the body is as important to Babamakuru in preserving morality as it is essential in
the maintenance of cultural norms.

Colonially informed patriarchal laws (norms) and attitudes are also found in Christianity and
these have strengthened the traditional customs which men use to control women’s sexuality.
Tambu’s mother, Mainini is a product of Christian religious indoctrination, brainwashing, mental
and psychological conditioning which prepare the ground for the creation of a model woman
whose response to patriarchal repression is passive, hesitant, fragmented and fragmentary,
devitalized and exhausted. She believes that it is the natural responsibility and duty of the woman
to take care of the man and more importantly, that a woman ought to be unquestioning,
obsequious and silent in order to effectively protect her man. Tambu recounts more of her
brother’s behavioural changes during his three-year residence at the mission (Christian colonial
school); to the pain of his mother but the delight of his father, he forgets the Shona language and
becomes estranged from his nuclear family. The family expects Nhamo at the homestead, but he
never appears. Late that evening, Babamukuru drives up and announces that Nhamo has died
after catching the mumps. Babamukuru laments the fact that there is no other male child in the
family to assume Nhamo's duty, but suggests that Tambu, now 13, “be given the opportunity to
do what she can for the family before she goes into her husband’s home” (Nervous Conditions
56). After some resistance from her mother, Mainini, Tambu is allowed to attend school at the
mission and live in Babamukuru’s modern home with her cousin Nyasha. Less obvious but also
embedded in the novel is the idea that African tradition and European colonialism were complicit
in the subordination of women. Tambu recalls the time before her uncle’s return from England,
and relates how her relationship with her brother deteriorated when he tried to stop her from
attending the local school. Tambu’s family wanted to send Nhamo and Tambu to school;
however, the family was poor and could not afford tuition fees for both children. When Tambu
complains that she loves school, her patriarchal father assures her that since a woman cannot
cook books and feed them to her husband, she is much better off staying home and learning to
cook and clean. This is an ideology patriarchal African African colonial society infused in
Tambu’s culture to suit and favour the male folk. The colonial system renders Tambu and other
native women doubly burdened. In the colonial context, female subordination is maintained by
cultural consensus that regards women as second-class citizens. The narrator reveals the system



of double oppression; the British colonial authority oppresses the indigenous men and in turn, the
indigenous men themselves oppress their women. Tambu explains that “the needs and
sensibilities of the women in my family were not considered a priority, or even legitimate” (12).
This informs Tambu’s father, Jeremiah siding with the oppressive system and operates as an
antagonist to Tambu’s educational prospect by saying “can you cook books and feed them to
your husband?” (15). This he says in solidarity with the oppressive patriarchal colonial ideology
as portrayed by Ketu Katrak assertion that “in general, female education, governed by Victorian
ideology and Christian missionary zeal, was aimed at producing women as good wives and
mothers” (50). This notion poses a direct threat to Tambu’s highly desired education.
Dangarembga’s through her different female characters in the novel outlines the consequences of
this British colonial thought as it affects women in Zimbabwe. She further illustrates through her
narrator the nuisances of the colonial rule that extended from 1890 to 1979 in Rhodesia during
which according to Laurie Vickroy “the white minority dominated and oppressed the native
population and divested them” (22). Again, Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth decries
colonial system and ideology as he sees the colonial world as “a Manichaean world, in which the
world of the native is the negation of the world of the settler” (v). As a result, Dangarembga goes
beyond the limits of Fanon’s canonical master narrative of post-colonial perception and literary
criticism and presents patriarchal and colonial domineering and debilitating attitudes from
women’s point of view. She explores more realistically the role of gender in the colonial context
while underlining how the sexualities of native women are contained and mortified by
colonialism, Shona and Western patriarchy respectively. She seems to imply that the condition of
the female native has additional burdens as a result of the African colonially impacted patriarchal
practices. The author illustrates this in Nyasha’s desperate attempt to free herself from the
patriarchal oppression. Her struggle for emancipation within Zimbabwe is a precarious matter,
because her sexuality is a contested term. Her uprootedness makes it increasingly difficult for her
to belong within the constraints of traditional patriarchal norms embodied in and enforced by her
father, Babamukuru. Nyasha cannot fulfil the traditional expectations (laws) of female obedience
and silence. Consequently, her father’s attempts to have a traditional daughter, obedient to his
will, backfires in the terrible dramas around food. Her European influenced view of women is at
odds with the African concept of female subordination. Nyasha’s struggle to free herself from
the traditional expectations of her father ends tragically in her ailment when she attempts to take
control over her life.

In addition, the issue of patriarch society and colonial exploitations of women leads Babamukuru
and his family to drive Tambu to the multiracial convent in Salisbury, where she is to sleep in a
segregated African section. After they left, Tambu becomes so overwhelmed with her studies
that she does not have time to see Miss Nyasha and the rest of her family. Consequently, Nyasha
writes, complaining that she has become isolated from the girls at school, who consider her a
snob and an unauthentic Shona female. This is possible based on the colonial ideology of law of
separate development, colour bar and divide and rule mentality entrenched in African by the
British colonial masters. At this point, Nyasha feels that she needs Tambu badly which the



colonial oppressional ideology in African milieu (school) could not permit them to fulfil their
natural obligations to each other at school as she asserts that “In many ways you are very
essential to me in bridging some of the gaps in my life” (Nervous Conditions 196). By the time
they meet again, Nyasha has grown overly thin, the result of a problem that began before Tambu
left for the convent. When Nyasha’s father, a typical African patriarch, forced her to finish her
food, she complied, then went into the bathroom and made herself throw up in order to free
herself. This is a deviant approach and a way of rejecting the colonial infused patriarchal laws
against the African woman. Three months later, when Tambu comes home on another visit,
Nyasha is looking skeletal. She grows weaker by the day, losing weight steadily, and studying
herself into frenzy. Her health deteriorates until she has a nervous breakdown.

The autobiographical novel centres around two main female characters, Tambudzai (Tambu) and
her anglicised cousin Nyasha growing up in colonial Rhodesia. It is a first-person narrative told
from Tambudzai’s point of view. Dangarembga provides a sophisticated insight into the
consciousness of a native coming-of-age character, Tambu, in her colonial environment, who has
to endure colonialism and patriarchal traditional norms (laws) and attended practices. Tambu’s
highly self-reflexive analysis of her predicament as a young African woman growing up in a
colonial world arises to a great extent from her accurate observation of her same-age cousin
Nyasha, who suffers much more under the colonial situation in Rhodesia. Dangarembga’s novel
outlines the consequences of the British colonisation of Rhodesia in 1980. She illustrates the
nuisances of colonialism and colonial ideologies that are not favourable to African women. This
is portrayed in the prologue of Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth by Jean-Paul Sartre’s
assertion which depicts “The condition of native is a nervous condition” (v). As could be inferred
in Jean-Paul’s preface to Frantz, there are striking similarities between Dangarembga’s book and
Fanon’s writings. It could be said here that colonial education of the heroines and the ethical
choices they make in the face of colonial ideologies and inhibitive traditional norms and
practices while growing up in changing societies are the preoccupation of many Africans coming
of age feminist writers like Gloria Ernest, Chimamanda Adichie, Nawal EL Saadawi etc. In a
number of their novels like Dear Kelechi, Purple Hibiscus, and Woman at Point Zero
respectively, the protagonists struggle with the alienation and patriarchal segregation which they
experience from their different African cultures a result of their colonial education and their
quest for emancipation. Such novels point out scholars’ concern more than the individual
experience. Again, such authors bring to limelight the postcolonial cultural laws and practices
that are not favourable to women while affirming the African female identity and individualism
as they struggle to achieve independence and a sense of self-worth in the face of such obnoxious
cultural norms. The novel illustrates how colonial patriarchy works on African men as
representatives of colonial hegemony. In the epigraph to the novel, Dangarembga omits the
ensuing clause of Fanon’s sentence, “The status of a ‘native’ is a nervous condition introduced
and maintained by the settler among colonized people with their consent” (40). The three most
colonially implicated male characters of the novel, Babamukuru (Jeremiah’s elder brother),
Nhamo and Chido (Babamukuru’s son), “give a sort of coerced consent to their status as agents



of colonial hegemony” (Fanon 41). The colonial system offers Babamukuru a privileged position.
He was able to receive colonial university education in South Africa and attain his Master’s
degree in England. In return for his academic career and prosperity, which enables his position as
the provider for his extended family, he has to fulfil many obligations. He works for the colonial
system and is the headmaster of the mission school which Tambu wishes to attend. He represents
the system’s indirect ruler who works as a transformer between the colonial authority and the
marginalised natives, and whose law “becomes the law of the white men” (Fanon 42). Therefore,
Babamukuru impersonates an African patriarchal traditional leader and the custodian of the
cultural law. Sugnet underlines, “with all his advanced degrees and Christian ways, Babamukuru
is an impressive kind of ‘native,’ created by the British colonial system to serve its purposes”
(Fanon 43). Fanon’s psychoanalytical work condemns colonialism for the disruptive forces it
releases on the side of the colonised. He claims that colonialism “dislocated and distorted the
colonised’s psyche” and “eroded his very being, his very subjectivity” (86). He further suggests
that “the colonial experience annihilates the colonised’s sense of self” (87). Nervous
Conditions mirrors his position with regard to colonialism. Fanon describes the colonial
condition “as psychopathological, a disease that distorts human relations and renders everyone
within it ‘sick’” (88). The novel demonstrates, quite in Fanon’s sense, how the process of
colonisation distorts human relationships and erodes the very subjectivity of the colonised.
Tambu’s mother Mainini makes consistent references to ‘Englishness’, which she relates to
colonialism. She identifies Englishness as a deadly social disease, with an ability to destroy one’s
identity and split families apart. It is depicted as a symbolic sickness that poses danger to the life
of colonial society, brought about by the process of colonialism. She blames Englishness for the
alienation of her children. Mainini warns Tambu, “Tell me, my daughter, what will I, your
mother say to you when you come home a stranger full of white ways and ideas? It will be
English, English, all the time” (187). When she speaks of the anglicised siblings Nyasha and
Chido, she blames ‘Englishness’ for their plight: “‘It’s Englishness’… ‘It’ll kill them all if they
are not careful’” (207).

Nyasha’s deep cultural hybridity shows the serious consequences of Englishness as symptomatic
of the infection of Western influence. In Black Skin, White Masks Fanon analyses “the harm
done to marginalised groups by continuous exposure to ‘a galaxy of erosive stereotypes’ (129),
which causes them to develop feelings of inferiority, inadequacy, and self-hatre.” (89). Similarly,
in the novel, Nyasha’s exposure to Western concepts of beauty provokes in her feelings of
inadequacy and thus the urge to adjust. Nyasha has internalised the European ideal of female
beauty and tries to adjust to it by reducing her food intake. She prefers angles to curves and
disapproves of Tambu’s traditional female physique, “Pity about the backside… It is rather
large” (92). In a possible transference of Black Skin, White Masks onto Nyasha’s character, she
becomes the black person adopting white masks. The white mask causes a disturbing experience
in a black subject because there is always a gap between the black skin and white mask. This gap
is marked by the impossibility to transcend it. By putting on a white mask the black subject tries
to make the fact of his blackness vanish, but never succeeds. This disturbs his or her psyche and



shatters his or her very being. Nyasha’s depiction in the novel supports Fanon’s argument that
“the colonial subject cannot escape the blackness of the skin and is ‘forever in combat with his
own image’” (Fanon 81). Schatteman argues that Nyasha “is an extreme embodiment of the
white-masked black with her desire for slimness, her definite British accent and her western
concepts of feminism” (92). Nevertheless, her white mask cannot make the fact of her black skin
vanish and thus, tragically, advances her into nothingness. The tension between performance and
appearance prompts Nyasha’s self-destructive behaviour and leads her into anorexia. This
inescapable situation traumatises Nyasha’s psyche, as for Fanon “psychic trauma results when
the colonised subject realises that he can never attain the whiteness he has been taught to desire,
or shed the blackness he has learnt to devalue” (93). This situation of imitation “reflects the
miserable schizophrenia of the colonized identity” (94). This tension suggests that colonial
ideologies are always a matter of flux and agony. Dangarembga demonstrates how colonialism
disrupts and distorts mother-child relationships and hinders the female protagonists’ healthy
identification with the mother. The mother’s role is especially important in nurturing and
socialising her children. Laurie Vickroy emphasises Jessica Benjamin’s point that “the mother
must have her own independent identity to be able to give the child the recognition it wants and
guide its healthy development” (69). The oppressive system deprives mothers of their own
identities and renders them (deeply conflicted between the social demands of motherhood, their
own needs, and their children’s well-being). The novelist successfully presents how mothers are
continually denied their point of view and status as subjects in oppressive, repressive and
depressive systems and how their male counterparts’ limited scope of action becomes destructive
of themselves and their children. She delineates how a mother’s role is compromised when
mechanisms of oppressive control … limit her options and rights. Tambu illustrates her mother’s
subjugation: “for most of her life my mother’s mind, belonging first to her father and then to her
husband, had not been hers to make up” (155).

Quest for Education and Radical Instinct in Nervous Conditions

Through a wider lens and with a closer gaze at the importance of place and human actors,
Dangarembga situates her protagonist, Tambu, in a Zimbabwean culture where she fights to gain
a western education while at risk of forgetting her roots. Tambu, a young girl living in patriarchal
Zimbabwe, is eager to obtain an education which would serve as an escape route for a woman
living in a society as hers. This gaining of an education comes at a price as Tambu is forced to
grow her own mealies, and then sells them to provide school fees for herself.

Pamela Abbort, Claire Wallace and Melisa Tyler argue that radical feminism is “concerned with
women’s rights rather than gender equality” (qtd in Sibanda 2016). It is not motivated by the
quest to minimize differences between women and men, but rather it sustains the belief that there
is a female or feminine nature that has been concealed and or distorted throughout history; one
that needs to be liberated and revalued. This is termed ‘gynocentrism’ (Sibanda 2016). To the



radical feminist, it is men who have fundamentally benefited from the subordination of woman.
Radical feminists see women as an oppressed group who had to struggle for their own liberation
against their oppressors - that is, against men. According to Sibanda (2016), they reject any
assistance from members of the opposite sex in their struggle to achieve the rights they desire.
Radical feminists also invariably agree that women should organize themselves independent of
men. They also argue that women are not equal but morally superior to men. Consequently, some
radical feminists wish to see ‘patriarchy’ being replaced by ‘matriarchy’ (Chinweizu 150).

According to Vukoicic radical feminism is a theory which rests on the assumption that all social
activity is a result of certain restrictions and coercion, and although every social system contains
specific forms of interactive constraints, they do not have to cause repression. She avers that,

Under patriarchy, however, interaction and communication are limited in a way that creates and
maintains rigidity which is seen as oppression, while patriarchy takes central place where, and
why, a fundamental power struggle between the sexes takes place. (Vukoicic 2013)

The above assertion suggests that, much of feminism has been inspired by the desire for
something better than the matriarchist paradise. However, radical feminists find it politically
expedient to present their demands in the language of liberation from oppression and oppressive
laws. But then, Chinweizu believes that it is hard without standing the word “operation” on its
head, to fathom how their boredom, an affliction of the leisured and idle rich, can be taken as a
product of oppression (118). Still on this, one observes that in Nervous Conditions the education
of boys take precedence over that of girls, for economic as well as other reasons. Given the
custom whereby a woman joined her husband’s family after marriage, the better economic
investment was to educate a son, since the money he earned would stay in the family. “Have you
ever heard,” rants Tambu’s father when considering sending his daughter to school, “of a
woman who remains in her father’s house? ... She will meet a young man and I will have lost
everything” (30). He dismisses her intellectual aptitude as of little use to him. Undaunted,
Tambu resolves to be educated and learns later that her Aunty Maiguru had shown the same
resolve: “I ... studied for that (Masters) degree and got it in spite of all of them - your uncle, your
grandparents, and the rest of your family” (101). Returning to Zimbabwe with her degree,
Maiguru pursues teaching, almost the only profession open to African women outside domestic
service.

The African people by mid-century even today in the post covid-19 era were excluded from
nearly every possible route to advancement; from the lands beyond the overcrowded, soil
depleted reserved areas and from skilled jobs in government, mining, and business (Beach 180).
Therefore, girls who attended school in Rhodesia, studied reading, writing, and arithmetic, but
the curriculum was largely directed toward training them to become good Christian’s wives of
African men. They received daily lessons in hygiene and Bible study. At the secondary level,
needlework and cookery appeared alongside other subjects. This type of gender conditioning was
not limited to Zimbabwe or, for that matter, to African people particularly women. During the



1960s such conditioning occurred outside the continent and found its bearing in countries of the
colonized. Similarly, one of the ways capitalism secures adherence to its rule as earlier observed
is by teaching separation of people from the natural world and suppressing the emotion that
might allow us to feel the absence of our connection to the earth. As a result, many dysfunctional
rules internalized during infancy and early childhood is extremely difficult to change. This is
why most rules on gender relations have subsisted in Africa. But borrowing from Gore, if the
global environmental crisis is rooted in the dysfunctional pattern of our civilization’s relationship
to the natural world, confronting and fully understanding that pattern, and recognizing its
destructive impact on the environment and on us, is the first step towards mourning what we
have lost, healing the damage we have done to the earth and to our civilization, and coming to
terms with the new story of what it means to be a steward of the earth (237).

As the novel opens, Tambu describes how she gets a chance to pursue her education at the
Umtali mission school, where her uncle Babamukuru, the head of the Siguake family, was
headmaster and Academic Director. This happened after the death of her brother, Nhamo, who
had first joined the uncle and his family to study at the mission. Following his return with his
wife and two children from England, Babamukuru visited the homestead and convinced his
brother, Jeremiah, to send Nhamo to the mission. Nhamo had been at the top of the class in his
first two years of primary school, which excited the uncle very much. At the mission his habits
and attitudes towards his nuclear family and their ancestral homestead changed drastically; he
would return to his rural home only when he was forced to help with the harvest. When he did
come, Nhamo bullied his sisters, Tambu and Netsai. If Netsai did not heed him, Nhamo would
take a stick to her. Tambu as a result of the bullying states flatly, “I was not sorry when my
brother died,” but fears she is too harsh in her judgment of him (1). She ponders whether he was
a victim of sexist ideology, which did not consider “the needs and sensibilities of the women in
my family ... a priority, or even legitimate” (12). Undaunted, Tambu decides to earn the fees
herself by growing maize for sale. Her crop is nearly ripe when it begins mysteriously to
disappear. When she learns that Nhamo, her brother is the guilty party, she gives him his just
desserts: “I sat on top of him, banged his head into the ground, screamed and spat and cursed”
(22-3). Mr. Matimba, the local teacher, breaks up the fight, and helps Tambu sell her crop in the
city, where - out of pity and indignation at what she thinks of as “child labour” and “slavery” - a
white woman contributes ten pounds for Tambu’s school fees.

When Tambu takes her qualifying exam for Sacred Heart College, the nuns test her on Louisa
May Alcott’s Little Women, set across the globe in New England a hundred years earlier, this
novel follows four daughters and their prospects for marriages that will lift them out of poverty.
The emphasis, endorsed by the colonial test giver ideologists, is on the young woman as
prospective wife. Actually, one of the four daughters, Jo, chafes under the limitations placed on
women and longs for the freedom enjoyed by men, but this does not keep her marriage too from



being featured in Alcott's novel. Directly or indirectly, Nervous Conditions brings the joint
sexism of traditional norms (laws) and colonial attitudes as well as practices to the forefront.

Jamil Khader believes that the second part of the novel intertwines Tambu’s story with events in
the lives of other characters, especially her cousin, Nyasha, her uncle’s wife, Maiguru, and her
Aunt Lucia (2006). After her brother’s death, Tambu moves into her uncle’s house near Umtali
to attend the protestant mission school for Africans. Tambu describes her relocation in a spiritual
vocabulary, describing it as an experience of reincarnation. “Babamukuru was God; therefore, I
had arrived in Heaven. I was in danger of becoming an angel, or at the very least a saint, and
forgetting how ordinary humans existed from minute to minute and from hand to mouth” (70).
Trusting in Babamukuru’s wisdom and thirsting for education, Tambu feels her transfer to this
new place is the right step in her development. Nyasha is excited to see her cousin. Tambu, on
the other hand, frowns on Nyasha’s disrespectful attitude to her mother, Maiguru, whom Tambu
considers “the embodiment of courtesy and good breeding” (74). When she knows that she will
share a room with Nyasha, Tambu expresses mixed feelings.

Disappointly, the horizontal oppression unleashes the nervous conditions of all the characters in
the novel. As such, the chain reaction of patriarchal oppression imposes a threat to the mental
and physical health of the colonised women. Maiguru and Mainini both give numerous hints of
the repressed rage they harbour over their assigned roles through their attempt to hide these
feelings.” The oppressed women of the novel are frequently characterised by silence. In many
instances in the novel, female characters refrain from uttering their opinions. They reluctantly
comply with the traditional silence of women unless asked. Especially for the partly Western
educated Maiguru, the situation is difficult to endure. Her excessive submissiveness to the
patriarchal norms unnerves her extremely. Mainini’s attitude of indifference is her reaction to
oppression. Tambu also suffers under the oppressive situation and often has a need to say what
she thinks.

Justin Edwards outlines Pauline Ada Uwakweh’s argumentation that “silence is used as a
patriarchal weapon of control” for the reason that “voicing is self-defining, liberational, and
cathartic” (55). When the powerful Babamukuru “tries to silence all the women in the family,”
(56) his daughter, Nyasha, accurately designates her father “a historical artefact” (Edwards 162).
The concept of a ‘historical artefact’ stems from Frantz Fanon (57) and Dangarembga extends
this concept to native women. Her heroines demonstrate that not only native men, but also native
women are not natural but ‘historical artefacts’ constructed by the oppressive colonial
system. Dangerambga according to Renee Scahatteman, describes the struggles of the young
Tambu against the immediate manifestations of “patriarchal law in her life” (59). Mainini’s
predicament shows her powerlessness and hopelessness in the face of stifling traditional norms
and cultural practices, and even Maiguru is denied agency, control and even identity on her own
part as a woman. Concerning all these characters, the novel shows how female “self and



sexuality are constructed and controlled by indigenous patriarchal laws and British colonial
practices,” (Scahatteman 60) and how “patriarchy and colonisation collude to worsen women’s
predicament” regardless of their academic prowess as Charles Sugnet opines (61). In the end,
however, Tambu experiences success in her academics, social relations, and English language
skills. But at her new home the atmosphere is less than peaceful. Tambu recounts the first crisis
in the relationship between her uncle and Nyasha: Nyasha’s parents object to her reading D. H.
Lawrence’s “indecent” novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which she brings to the dining room. A
friendly, loving relationship develops between Tambu and Nyasha, who begins to disillusion
Tambu about the power structures of their society and to shake Tambu’s naive convictions about
right and wrong. Nyasha points out the complexities of Babamukuru and Maiguru’s behaviour as
well as those events shaping the history of Rhodesia and the world. Tambu feels sorry for
Maiguru, who has made sacrifices in her academic career (she has a master’s degree) to attend to
her duties as a mother and wife, and who has no control over the money she earns from teaching
as dictated by the traditional norms.

More so, the novel shows the sharp edges of colonial education offered to native Africans. The
patriarchal colonial rule sought to maintain its hegemony by electing African men who received
colonial education more their women. These men were catapulted to the colonial elite. This
indirect rule facilitated the colonisation of the rest of the indigenous population through their
‘traditional’ leaders as custodians of the traditional laws (norms). Thus, the colonial education of
the African elite “served colonial economic and political needs” (Sugnet 37). Africans’ “status
as agents of colonial hegemony” offered “privilege, material reward, and apparent security”
(Sugnet 38). Colonial education, however, has a double edge. It represents “literary and cultural
temptations of Europe” and is a booster of “cultural transgression” (Sugnet 40). By transmitting
Western values and belief systems, colonial education extinguishes the traditional values of the
natives. It is an intricate tool to achieve the goal of colonial authorities, to colonise the mind of
the natives.

Additionally, the intersection of education provided by the mission with the patriarchal elements
of the Shona culture increases women’s plight in the novel. Though Nyasha has gained a critical
apparatus in England with which help she is able to analyse critically the whole traditional and
cultural situations, she is incapable of leading a traditional and cultural Shona life because she
has also picked up English social expectations that disrupt her acceptance of patriarchal social
norms. Her hybrid identity poses her between the antagonistic cultures and renders her an
outsider within her native Shona community. Dangarembga delineates how Babamukuru
oppresses his well-educated wife, Maiguru, who holds a Master’s degree in Philosophy from
London and has her own job. Maiguru struggles to cope with the oppressive social situation. She
has to give away her entire salary for the sustenance of Babamukuru’s relatives and is unable “to
stand up to her husband or protect her daughter” (52). Tambu remarks, “… it was a great shame
that Maiguru had been deprived of the opportunity to make the most of herself, even if she had



accepted that deprivation” (103). Maiguru’s inability to act alone under oppressive circumstances
and keep her salary to herself causes her daughter Nyasha to lose respect of her. Maiguru has to
fulfil the traditional expectations of an obedient and good wife is spite of her European education.
She is at pains to comply with the Shona tradition and fulfil the obligations of a working wife
and mother. Caught in her powerless situation, she desperately laments, “I am not happy. I am
not happy any more in this house” (175). As the only Western-educated woman of her native
community she is not accepted among other married women. Her desperate situation shows how
“English education…renders educated women into outsiders in their own communities.” (53)

The crisis between Nyasha and her father escalates, reaching a climax after the school Christmas
party. On the teenagers’ way home from the party, Nyasha lags behind with her brother’s friend,
Andy Baker, who wants to teach her a new dance. Demanding to know why his daughter is late,
Babamukuru spies on her and then questions her about her tardiness, growing infuriated because
she talks back to him. When he calls his daughter a “whore” and slaps her, she punches him
back, at which point her father threatens to kill her, because there cannot be “two men in this
house” (115). Tambu realizes then just how universal gender oppression is:

The victimization, I saw, was universal. It didn’t depend on poverty, on lack of education or on
tradition.... Men took it everywhere with them.... You couldn’t ignore the fact that Nyasha had
no respect for Babamukuru when she ought to have had lots of it. But what I didn’t like was the
way all the conflicts came back to this question of femaleness. Femaleness as opposed and
inferior to maleness. (Nervous Conditions 115-6)

After this incident, Nyasha grows isolated and detached, retreating into a private world that
nobody else can reach. Babamukuru, his family, and Tambu return to the ancestral homestead for
the Christmas holiday. All the members of the extended family gather for an annual reunion,
during which they held a dare, a patriarchal convention about family business. This affords the
Siguake patriarchal family the opportunity to discuss the relationship between Lucia, Tambu’s
maternal aunty, and Takesure, a cousin whom Babamukuru had employed to help with the farm
work so that Takesure could earn the money to pay the bride-wealth for his second wife.
Takesure, however, has impregnated Lucia, who shrewdly credits the baby to Jeremiah, judging
him to be the better man of the two. In fact, she later got involved with him. Indignant at his
brother’s sinful behaviour, Babamukuru orders Takesure to leave with Lucia, but the two of them
have stayed. Initially kept out of the trial-like convention with the other women and children,
Lucia rushes in to confront Takesure and his lies, and to make it clear that her interest in staying
was to help her sister Mainini out of the misery of her life with Jeremiah. Deciding that all this
misfortune is because Jeremiah and Mainini did not have a Christian wedding, he directs them to
be remarried “in church before God” (147). One could assert here that Nervous Conditions is an



exemplary novel of insidious trauma and frustration induced by patriarchal traditional laws
(practices), colonial oppression and gender discrimination. The novel’s traumatic conditions
move away from the corporeal schema of trauma and expose trauma deriving from psychological
damage. The novel explores the traumatised condition of “the native” as a consequence of
colonial intervention into the balance of traditional Shona culture in colonial Zimbabwe.
Dangarembga’s first-person narrator Tambudzai provides a sophisticated view into the coming-
of-age consciousness of a teenage narrator struggling to cope and survive in a distorted African
patriarchal colonial world. Tambu’s complex identity provides the reader with an elaborate
analysis of the sources underlying the traumatic nervous conditions of the colonised. This
explains why Tambu feels that her uncle is making a mockery out of her parents’ union and her
own existence. She refuses to take part in the comedy of her parents’ church wedding. On the
morning of the wedding, her emotions leave her weak and unable to get out of bed. She risks
losing everything by refusing to attend the wedding. Later, her uncle punishes her with 15 lashes
and orders her to do all the housework for two weeks, during which Lucia and Maiguru give
Babamukuru a piece of their own minds about family matters.

Trauma studies as an area of cultural investigation came to prominence in the early-to-mid-1990s.
Cathy Caruth is one of the leading figures in trauma studies, and argues that “a textualist
approach to trauma can afford us unique access to history. She believes that “the analysis of
cultural artefacts that bear witness to traumatic histories, can enable to gain access to extreme
events and experiences” that constitute trauma (7). To this end, scholars of trauma studies like
Caruth query the Western-biased approach to trauma and investigate the culture-bound
deficiencies in trauma research. Caruth declares in its most general definition that trauma
describes an “overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events in which the response
to the event occurs in the often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations or
other intrusive phenomena (11). The very definition of trauma sets an emphasis on sudden,
unexpected catastrophic events and, deriving from “the Greek word meaning wound,” trauma
has still predominantly a corporeal connotation in Western psychoanalysis (Caruth 15). However,
the patriarchal colonial situation in African itself is inherently traumatising and has pathological
consequences on the psyche of the colonised. Thus, the definition of trauma has been expanded
by the analogy of the corporeal wound to the wound of the mind. The feminist psychotherapist
Laura Brown has argued that colonial trauma is an “insidious trauma,” by which “the
traumatogenic effects of oppression that are not necessarily overtly violent or threatening to the
bodily well-being at the given moment do violence to the soul and spirit” (qtd in Roger
Luckhurst, 4). The novel, Nervous Conditions predominantly portray the expanded and revised
notion of trauma, as trauma to the soul. Therefore, disposing of her submissive, compliant image,
Maiguru explodes by stating that,

When it comes to taking my money so that you can…waste it on ridiculous weddings, that’s
when they are my relatives too…. I am tired of my house being a hotel for your family. I am



tired of being a housekeeper for them. I am tired of being nothing in a home I am working
myself sick to support (Nervous Conditions, 172).

To show Babamukuru that she is serious about what she is saying as a traumatised woman,
Maiguru walks out the door. She takes refuge at her brother’s house, until Babamukuru brings
her home; she is now less submissive and more genuinely happy than before the emotional
outburst. The action of the novel advances quickly unveiling the horizontal oppression that
unleashes the nervous conditions of all the female characters in a male world in the novel. As
such, the chain reaction of patriarchal oppression imposes a threat to the mental, social and
physical health of the colonised and subjugated stereotyped African women. Maiguru and
Mainini both give numerous hints of the repressed rage they harbour over their assigned roles
through their attempt to hide these feelings.

Conclusion

The revival of traditions, culture, customs and the practices derived from them, after the demise
of colonialism, imperialism, and apartheid will definitely require us to enter into a dialogue on
the character of our ancestors and what is really indigenous. However, the process should take
the context into consideration. Some of the cultural practices, norms and customary laws that
were necessary then are unnecessary now due to development, international global best practices,
gender inclusiveness, equity and equality.

For an ennobling gender consciousness and paradigm in an African critical scholarship on
gender and nation building processes, Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions is germane. She
achieves this by depicting and locating girl children and mothers at the center of struggle to
transform weakness and vulnerability into strength, while at the same time showing that
women’s participation and collaboration with patriarchy in their oppression and subordination
and marginalization potentially renders the fruition of their emancipatory agenda complicated.
This observation is critically important especially in the context of a highly inhibitive
Zimbabwean Shona patriarchal society and cultural practices in which women are socialized and
induced to acquire those qualities which fit them into a relationship of dependence on men and
those qualities being gentleness, passivity, submission, and striving to please men always.

In Africa, especially in the period of decolonization and independence, writers - including
feminist writers - write about the liberation of African societies from colonial rule. It is believed
then that those feminists ought to pledge their primary allegiance to the nation and its traditions
(Khader, 2016). At this point in time, affirming the potency of the African cultures and negating
the colonial stereotypes about Africans were more important than posing difficult questions
about gender relations. Feminist writers thus found themselves faced with a difficult dilemma;
how could they praise African traditions and nationalist groups that made women second-class
citizens? Along with other writers, Dangarembga responded through fiction that refused to



condemn colonial exploitation alone for women’s miserable lot or to celebrate the national
struggle as a step forward in the emancipation of the whole society. But she rather exposed the
colonially induced patriarchal exploitation of the African women.

Dangarembga’s contributions through her critical works are also vital against the backdrop of
identities of women that have been socially constructed in a much less positive way, “as those
who are permanently vulnerable and neurotically lacking the impetus to struggle and triumph,”
(Muhwati e tal 2010). At the core of women’s oppression and marginalization subordination and
domination, Dangarembga uses her protagonist to open our eyes as readers to the importance of
human actors and land in the preservation of African traditions as she secures freedom for the
modern African women. The bodies for her protagonists and other characters alike prove that our
Africanness does not die when we leave the place from where we originate. Tambu undergoes an
out of body experience as a means of finding and recognizing her place within her garden of
refuge and garden of domesticity. There is an emancipation of the body through which a mental
breakdown (trauma) takes place for her and other females.

Again, the author directly implicates patriarchy as she indicts colonialism in connection with
related specific cultural, religious and historical practices peculiar to the Zimbabwean Shona
society. Like other African feminist writers, Dangarembga’s work reads as a literary attack
against male power structures subtly erected by colonialism that have confiscated and misused
power for the sole glory of patriarchy. She indicts the Shona patriarchal society for being “male-
centered and male oriented by ostracizing women from the circles of power management,”
(Damlegue 2015). In placing women and the girl child at the center of her focus and negotiating
their subject position in Zimbabwean and African milieu specifically, Dangarembga’s conceptual
and epistemological thrust enjoins the vision of other Zimbabwean English fiction writers.

Nervous Conditions, however, is not a conventional post-colonial novel; the novel is better seen
as a radical revisionist feminism bildungsroman. Although, it shows how colonial education
pulled African children away from their roots and cultures, it also depicts how local patriarchal
society worked hand-in-hand with colonialism to repress Shona women. In other words, the
novel refuses to celebrate native culture as long as it subordinates or sanctions the colonial
subordination of women.

Finally, single educated young ladies and single mothers like Tambu, Nyasa, Maiguru and
Mainini respectively whose actions and beliefs are immersed in the radical feminists’
consciousness are held up as ideal for emulation by women fighting in the various trenches for
gender equality with men. While conceding the importance of women’s right to education and as
people deserving right to question male sexism and oppression, radical feminism rather than
Africana Womanism is preferred as a conceivable alternative for the Africana woman in her
collective struggle with the entire community as it enhances future possibilities for the dignity of
Africana womanbeing and the humanity of all.



Therefore, Nervous Conditions seems to suggest that the liberation of Zimbabwean women and
indeed African women in general cannot happen without education and language, which are
often used to define culture and identity. And so, characterization in the narrative through
women’s voices tell more about their victimization, at least in terms of schooling and equal
cultural treatment. Thus, Tambu the narrator/protagonist represents her culture as being
connected to the nation. Meanwhile, a culture cannot exist without the nation’s support as culture
can be perceived as a lived experience of the ordinary.

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