Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga, Kwame Anthony Appiah (Foreword by)

From the Publisher

Immediately hailed as a classic (Atlantic Monthly called it "the best contemporary novel on colonialism to be written by an African woman"), Nervous Conditions is a wrenching chronicle of the coming of age of Tambu, a teenage girl in 1960s Rhodesia, and her relationship with her British-educated cousin, Nyasha. Tambu, who yearns to be free of the constraints of her rural village, thinks her dreams have come true when her wealthy uncle offers to sponsor her education. But education at his mission school comes with a price. There she meets sophisticated Nyasha, whose rebellion against her father brings disaster. With irony and skill, Dangarembga explores the struggle of two young women to liberate themselves in a society still suffering the effects of colonization. This edition of this highly acclaimed novel is "an expression of liberation not to be missed." — Alice Walker

Publishers Weekly

Tambu, an adolescent living in colonial Rhodesia of the '60s, seizes the opportunity to leave her rural community to study at the missionary school run by her wealthy, British-educated uncle. With an uncanny and often critical self-awareness, Tambu narrates this skillful first novel by a Zimbabwe native. Like many heroes of the bildungsroman, Tambu, in addition to excelling at her curriculum, slowly reaches some painful conclusions--about her family, her proscribed role as a woman, and the inherent evils of colonization. Tambu often thinks of her mother, ``who suffered from being female and poor and uneducated and black so stoically.'' Yet, she and her cousin, Nyasha, move increasingly farther away from their cultural heritage. At a funeral in her native village, Tambu admires the mourning of the women, ``shrill, sharp, shiny, needles of sound piercing cleanly and deeply to let the anguish in, not out.'' In many ways, this novel becomes Tambu's keening--a resonant, eloquent tribute to the women in her life, and to their losses. (Mar.)

What People Are Saying

Doris Lessing
"This is the novel we have been waiting for....I am sure it will be a classic."

Alice Walker
"Sardonic, coolly observant, splendidly detached from every form of chauvinistic nonesence, 'Nervous Conditions' introduces a new voice that, in its self-assurance, sounds, at times, very old. As if the African sisters, mothers and cousins of antiquity were, at last, beginning to reassert themselves in these perilous times, and to speak."

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