“You would betray your own mother for meat”

With the emergence of her 1988 Nervous Conditions, Tsisti Dangarembga became the first Black Zimbabwean woman to publish a novel in English. The novel tells the story of Tambudzai, a Black Zimbabwean girl coming of age in 1960s colonial Rhodesia, and her cousin Nyasha, who suffers from eating disorders after living in England as a child. Many scholars have interpreted the Nyasha’s anorexia and bulimia as forms of resistance to colonialism and patriarchy (see, e.g., Bahri, “Disembodying the Corpus”). They observe that the colonizers’ texts are figured as food throughout the novel, and Nyasha, as in Fanon’s description of the period of decolonization, “vomit[s] them up” (The Wretched of the Earth 43). Others have recognized the association between meat and masculinity among Dangarembga’s Shona characters as well as in cultures across the globe. Through the lenses of vegan studies and postcolonial theory, in this chapter, we demonstrate that Nyasha’s resistance is to the colonization and patriarchal control, not just of her body, but of her diet itself. We also examine statements by the protagonist’s mother Ma’Shingayi, who links the slaughter of cattle to the loss of her children to missionary schools. Thus, we advocate for a greater focus on diet changes as forms of colonization, and opportunities for resistance, in postcolonial African literature.