ABSTRACT
Tsitsi Dangarembga was born on February 14, 1959, in colonial Rhodesia. At the age of two, she moved with her parents to England, where she remained until 1965. Upon her return to Rhodesia, Dangarembga entered a mission school in Mutare and then completed her secondary education at an American convent school. By her own account, she felt isolated as a child and began writing to herself as a way of coping with her sense of alienation. At home and at school, she read mostly the English classics, although her academic interests shifted to the sciences. She read her first African novel (Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat) as a teenager, but it was not until she returned from Cambridge shortly before Zimbabwean independence in 1980 that she became avidly involved with African and African-American literature.
