Tsitsi Dangarembga: “By being forced to the margins, I have no choice but to observe”

When Ma’Shingayi learns of her son’s death, she articulates a rift that had begun long before — when he gradually stopped visiting her and increasingly spoke English instead of Shona, their family’s native language. “First you took his tongue so that he could not speak to me, and now you have taken everything, taken everything for good,” she laments. This grief marks a turning point for Tambudzai Sigauke, one of Ma’Shingayi’s daughters and the protagonist of Nervous Conditions. 

Following her brother’s death, Tambudzai gains the opportunity to attend a better school — an education that flings open the doors to an entirely new world. 

Published in 1988, Nervous Conditions is the first novel in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s trilogy, followed by The Book of Not in 2006 and This Mournable Body in 2018.  

Born in Mutoko, in 1959, The Zimbabwean author traces the personal and societal fractures of a nation forged as a colonial private enterprise — one that fought for liberation from a white-minority regime, only to be governed since independence by the ruthless victors of that struggle. 

Though Nervous Conditions was named one of the BBC’s “100 stories that shaped our world” in 2018, Dangarembga refuses to be solely defined by a work she wrote decades ago. Today, she struggles to bring her films to audiences in an industry still resistant to stories shaped by voices like hers—Black and female, terms she reclaims in her latest book, Black and Female (2022). In it, she explores how imperialism has shaped her life and identity. During the conversation, she shares a new glimmer of hope: her decades-old dark comedy musical, Q-ing, might finally be published. 

This spring, the Barcelona Contemporary Culture Centre (CCCB), with support from the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) and funding from the Fundació privada Mir-Puig, hosted Dangarembga through a literary residency programme. The acclaimed writer and filmmaker — who wrote Neria (1991), Zimbabwe’s highest-grossing film to date — spoke with Geeska in her office in Barcelona, discussing topics ranging from the colonial underpinnings of the global economy to the scarcity of African women directors in contemporary cinema. 

Jaume Portell: What does the Shona language mean to you?  

Tsitsi Dangarembga: The Shona language, like any other language, is a means of expression. Language transmits a lot of culture, the cosmology and the worldview of the culture where the language develops. It is very important to have a language whose roots are in the long history and prehistory of Africa because that means there are aspects of this culture that are available to me. When I think about other languages that I engage with now, I realize that the more I use them, the more I can understand the kind of psychological, socio-psychological origins of the language. Shona is a language that I use to communicate with other Shona speakers, and it is also a window into a way of being.  

JP: Tambudzai, the protagonist in Nervous conditions lives in a perpetual dichotomy. Education offers her a path to material advancement in a white-dominated society, but at the cost of partly severing her ties to her humble Black roots. What does the promise of education offer Zimbabweans today, and how has this shifted since the publication of Nervous Conditions?  

TD: The promise of education in Zimbabwe has changed a lot. I wrote Nervous Conditions in the first years of independence in the early 1980s. At that time, we were convinced that independence was going to bring us a lot of opportunities in life. We were a nation in transition, on the back of the colonial economic structures that had been set up, and for a while those structures remained fairly intact. The government realized that political independence without economic independence is a pseudo-independence. And when they realized that there was a move to occupy those economic structures.   

However, the globalized economic structure was created to benefit those who designed it (Europe), and it is not easily changed. Those in power lacked the necessary skills to manage the economy, and external forces were not willing to allow them to interfere with the established economic order. As a result, Zimbabwe has been in an ongoing economic crisis for over a decade and a half. Unemployment is extremely high. We have several universities in the country, but the uptake of graduates into employment is extremely low.  

There are advantages to education that people could still exploit today, such as the ability to analyze one's circumstances and devise plans for improvement. However, in a situation of unrelenting poverty, it becomes difficult to even find the cognitive space and the peace required for intellectual activity.  

JP: You have described Rhodesia as a private enterprise. How did it work? 

TD:  Rhodesia was formed by Cecil Rhodes’ British South Africa company; a private charted company whose objective was to make money out of the area they were in. This was a normal practice in Europe at the time. When Zimbabwe was appropriated for the British, it was a private army of this company that moved up from where Rhodes was based in Cape Town at the time and crossed the Limpopo and went up further to where Harare is today.  This idea of companies having private armies is not something peculiar to the British South Africa company. This is happening today, in South America: there is a scourge of this kind of activity, where private companies have the resources to arm themselves, and they can find a reason to validate that kind of behavior. 

JP: In your books, the characters often describe the soldiers of the liberation movement as a bunch of thugs. Why did you decide to explain the struggle for independence like this?   

TD: The idea behind what drives a particular activity is quite different from the activity itself. Yes, these people suffered hardships in order to achieve a certain aim. And it is good that that aim was achieved, but I'm writing in a context where up until this day the official discourse is to valorize the liberation movement.  

Zimbabwe never even had anything as fundamental as a truth and reconciliation commission. It is also important to acknowledge the personal side, because even for these people who are now in these big positions, it was a horror. They were not in a euphoric state, because “look, we are fighting white supremacy, how wonderful”, no. It was dreadful even for them.   

I am a pacifist, I'm anti-war. And for me, the bottom line is that war brings pain and suffering to individuals. Somebody who was born in 1970 would have lived through about nine years of liberation struggle. And that person is now in their mid-50s. What kind of person can that be? When you're a young child who saw family members being bayoneted or you saw other family members being forced to brutalize other family members. We need to consider that there is a whole demographic of Zimbabwean society that was traumatized in that way. Nobody has ever thought about the long-term effects of that trauma. Is it surprising that we have a country that is going the way it is?  

JP: Dambudzo Marechera, the author of House of Hunger, was once asked if he was observing but not participating in Zimbabwean society. He answered “how can you observe a stone that's about to strike you?” How would you describe your current relationship with Zimbabwe?  

TD: I think you must be quick-witted. You must see that the stone is about to strike you, it's dangerous and you need to get out of the way and act accordingly. People from the top down must conform, people who would like to see things being done differently do not have the space to make this happen. And this makes for a very difficult situation for a person like me, especially now, and I guess also in the later era of the Mugabe presidency.

The space is very closed and if you are seen as someone who acts in ways that do not reinforce the state, you will be marginalized and that definitely is the position that I occupy now. It’s very interesting because by being forced to the margins I have no choice but to observe.   

JP: You describe Rhodesia as a place that limits the movement of black people. As I was reading that, I was asking myself, “has the world become a greater Rhodesia?” What advice would you offer to the world to cope with being a Greater Rhodesia?  

TD: In Rhodesia there were enclaves of whiteness in what was said to be a nation state. The majority of the lands were, especially the unproductive areas, designated as areas for melanated people to live. That structure was not dismantled. Capitalism, the driving economic principle behind colonization, requires the appropriation of what does not belong to you because you want it all for yourself. This happened around the globe and people rebelled against it, so it began to defeat the objective of capitalism, because always having to quell rebellion is expensive.  It was possible to return those territories to people in terms of administration that continued the economic extraction. Now people are beginning to talk about that too. It is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain that, even in the countries where the system is exported from. Before, the fact that there were these subjugated territories acted as a buffer and there was sufficient wealth. 

I think there has been a change. I think that by colluding with dictators, the world over, this has made some inroads into the morality and the moral consciousness of the people who basically run the world. Today it is possible for somebody like Mr. Trump to stand up in America and say, "I'm going to devastate the rest of the world because I want America to be the best and the strongest and the most powerful” and all the Americans cheer. We thought that we had last seen that happen in Europe in Germany with National Socialism. We see it's simply emerging again. But it is emerging in the context of a development of a certain economic mode that has been going on for millennia. And I think people don't understand that if a system has been put in place, you have to acknowledge the system and its nature before you can do anything about it. 

JP: This is the tragedy of many leftists: they want to change a system without recognizing how it functions. 

TD: We have this problem in Zimbabwe too. I have to say that there is a level where I am complicit. What agency do I have to actually change this at this particular time? “I am making this choice to do this, because by doing that I can do other good things”, but I must admit that I'm in the system and I’m part of it. And that is a lot of what Tambudzai’s trajectory is: to show how she is part of the system, not to blame her but to say that this is how life is. You must realize that as a fish you are in certain water. She wanted to belong to a powerful resource group and not to belong to another kind of group.   

It's not easy for a Zimbabwean to say “yes, I am part of this”. “Well, what do you want me to do? If I go and vote differently, they will steal my vote anyway, or they'll come and beat me up in my house”, which is true. But at least let's acknowledge the moral and the existential dilemmas that we are in. And if we can at least begin with that then we can go further. I think this is why the global North was not able to keep up its progressive movement. If you cannot recognize how you have been positioned by the very forces that you say you are contending with, then you are not going to be able to contend with them effectively.  

JP: One character who fascinated me, in The Book of Not, is Mrs. May. She seems oblivious to everything happening around her, to the point where she can’t even distinguish between Tambu and Isabel, two young Black women. This dynamic finally erupts when Tambu snaps and declares, “I’m not Isabel—I am Tambu!” Tambu’s frustration stems from observing how Mrs. May addresses every white girl by name and intimately engages with their lives, while reducing her to a nameless, interchangeable figure. Do you think that Western media tends to do this with Africa? 

TD: Absolutely. Mrs. May comes from a society that is the microcosm of the society that informs the Western media, so there will be things in common. At the end of the day, a lot of these articles have to appeal to global Northern audiences so that they buy them. And the global Northern audience wants something that's familiar, that makes it feel good. And knowing that the poor or awful Africans are there with their awfulness and their poverty, and we are over here in our relative ease and plenty, it’s comforting I suppose.  

JP: The teachers in the Sacred Heart are always reminding the black students the great opportunity that has been given to them. Why do you think the West has this sort of obsession with African children? 

TD: It’s the infantilization of Africa. If we are engaging with a continent in terms of its not yet mature human beings, we can justify our paternalism towards the continent while at the same time feeling that we are doing a good deed. The nuns at Sacred Heart are part of this and they were part of the white community of the country. Whether this was by design or not, it was in an apartheid state which meant if you were white, you occupied a certain grouping in society. They were working with other white people at Sacred Heart to maintain this fiction of a continent that is infantile, that really needs to be behaved towards in a paternalistic or parental manner.  

JP: Let's move a bit to the cinema. I read that Q-ing is a script or an idea you had about a movie. A musical of people waiting at a fuel station. But so far, it's not a movie yet.  

TD: Just yesterday -at the time of the interview-, I had a long conversation with a very good filmmaker in Zimbabwe, Tomas Brickhill. He produced a film that was one of the few Zimbabwean films that went on to Netflix called Cook Off. I've been working with him on the music for Q-ing.   

It’s very difficult for me to find support for the things that I do. It's not possible for me to really sit down and say, "Now I'm going to write my film." Tomas Brickhill is interested in working on the script with me, so I think that we will be seeing more of Q-ing, soon. Q-ing is a metaphor for hopelessness and the national systems that have brought things to this situation. 

JP: How significant is cinema in your life?  

TD: I went to England in '87 after I had completed Nervous Conditions around '83, and it was on that trip in '87 when I went to The Women's Press (the editor of that book) and they found that they still had the manuscript, and they read it.   

And then it was another year until it appeared. By the time I got the acceptance from The Women's Press, it no longer seemed as if that meant anything. Although Nervous Conditions sold well, The Women's Press absolutely defrauded me of my earnings. I remained in poverty anyway. 

I needed something else to do, so I went to film school, and I began to see how melanated people are excluded from film narrative. This made me look at the policies of film making during colonization: everywhere you would see that local populations were banned from making films. At film school, the films that made a great impact on the ways of telling were movies like ‘Birth of a Nation’, by Griffith. There was no mention about the content, it was only ‘isn’t it such a brilliant film?’. 

JP: How did you feel as your entourage didn’t notice something wrong?  

TD: Often, when a person is one of the early voices to say, ‘this is wrong’, it’s very difficult to accept that. One of my dreams is to have the time and the research resources to investigate the British film policy. Secondary sources that I have read indicate that they had policies like “we must always show a British person in a positive relation with a colonial subject. You can’t show a British person enacting violence upon the body of a colonial subject”. Film constructed a certain universe; it worked to construct all of us in certain ways.   

I remember a passage of a book that talks about a screening of a colonial film in India, where the narrative was constructed in such a way that when the British troops went in to decimate an Indian population, all the Indian viewers cheered. The film is constructed so you identify with the hero.  

JP: If you hadn’t been in London by 1987 and a cancelled meeting hadn’t suddenly left you with an open window to visit The Women’s Press, “Nervous Conditions” might never have seen the light of day. How do you envision your life unfolding without that unintended twist of fate?  

TD: That is a hard one. I don't see many people in my country having been able to develop a solid career in narrative making. I probably would have done what I had wanted to do as an alternative: studying clinical psychology. When I started in the psychology department, I was told - remember it was just after independence- “we are building the department of clinical psychology. By the time you graduate, it will be functional." It wasn't functional by the time I graduated. But it did come to function three or four years later. I probably would have gone back to do clinical psychology at some time.