D

TSITSI DANGAREMBGA (B. 1959) Tsitsi Dangarembga was born in Mutoko, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and educated in the UK and Rhodesia. Her early writing was for the theatre, but she came to critical attention with her groundbreaking and highly influential novel Nervous Conditions (1988). The first novel in English by a black Zimbabwean woman, Nervous Conditions takes its title from a phrase used in Jean-Paul Sartre’s introduction to Frantz Fanon’s Les Damnés de la Terre (1961, trans. The Wretched of the Earth). It explores retrospectively the efforts of a young girl, Tambudzai (Tambu) Sigauke, to attain education, self-determination and independence in the patriarchal realm of late-colonial Rhodesia, a country struggling to cope with the tensions created between tradition and transition. The novel also concerns the story of her cousin, Nyasha, whose anorexia comes to be linked in the novel to wider problems of identity, gender, tradition and patriarchy which particularly confront the lives of women. In 2006 Dangarembga published a sequel, The Book of Not, which follows Tambu’s young life amid the Zimbabwean conflicts of the 1970s. In addition to her novels, Dangarembga is an accomplished filmmaker: she studied film in Berlin, Germany, where she lived throughout the 1990s. Her films include Neria (1993) Everyone’s Child (1996) and Kare Kare Zvako (2004). Tsitsi Dangarembga lives in Zimababwe, where she runs a production company called Nyerai Films with her husband.