Zimbabwe - Nervous Conditions et al.

Country: Zimbabwe
Book: Nervous Conditions/The Book of Not/
This Mournable Body
Author: Tsitsi Dangarembga
Publication Year: 1988/2006/2018
Genre: Historical Fiction

Country: Zimbabwe
Book: We Need New Names/Glory
Author: NoViolet Bulawayo
Publication Year: 2013/2022
Genre: Fiction

We see a lot of firsts on this journey around the literary world. When Tsitsi Dangarembga’s  novel, Nervous Conditions, was published in 1988, she became the first female Zimbabwean author to be published in English. As we noted with Sia Figiel and Where We Once Belonged (see: Samoa), being published in English is a dubious honour and a patronising one to be invested on a non-white, non-Western author. Doubly dubious when the author also happens to be a woman.

It is also faint praise for an author from a country that was a British colony until April 1980. Or who was educated in England until her A Levels and later studied medicine at Cambridge University. Surely it would be more impressive to learn of an English writer writing in Nambya, Chewa, Shona, or any other Bantu language. One imagines that for many of the 15 official languages of Zimbabwe that are not English, it has yet to happen.

Yet this is where we find ourselves and Nervous Conditions is indeed the first book by a female Zimbabwean author to be published in English. It would go on to spawn two sequels: The Book of Not in 2006 and This Mournable Body in 2018. Each book is told, in one way or another (see below) by the main character, Tambudzai.

The book opens with the death of Tambudzai’s brother. Nhamo had attended a missionary school run by their uncle. Their parents could only afford to send one child to the school. With Nhamo’s death, Tambudzai is able to take his place. She is unable to feel upset about her brother’s death for this reason, although her lack of grief hints at deeper psychological issues that are revealed later in the series.

Like myriad books in this series, Nervous Conditions and its sequels are a mixture of fact and fiction. Tambudzai shares a room with her cousin, Nyasha. Like Dangarembga , Nyasha has spent part of her education studying in England.

Nervous Conditions is in one sense the kind of bildungsroman we have seen throughout this project (see: Kenya, Barbados, Brazil, Morocco et. al.). Yet it is also about the many kinds of oppression that lead to the nervous conditions referred to in the title. The oppression of a religious school in pre-Independence Zimbabwe that is wedded to western ideas of education. To the oppressive double standards to which girls and women are subjected in such schools. Also to the oppression of the ongoing independence war that was fought against the British 1965-1980 and which is always in the background as Tambudzai (and indeed Dangarembga) was growing up. Any wonder that she is in a constant state of agitation?

The Book of Not, written nearly 20 years later, picks up from the end of Nervous Conditions. Tambudzai attends Young Ladies' College of the Sacred Heart, where the prejudices of colonialism come further to bear. The oppression of western religions reasserts itself, as personified by Sister Emmanuel, who states that allowing a handful of black students into a principally white school is proof of their Christian values. Tambudzai becomes increasingly indoctrinated against independence. After graduation, she moves to Harare to become a copy writer at an advertising agency, cutting ties with her family as she does so.

By the time of This Mournable Body, Tambudzai alienation from her nationality and herself is complete. The entire novel is told in the second person with Tambudzai narrating the story to herself. She has left her copy writing job and moved into a boarding house. She finds a job as a high school biology teacher, but violently attacks one of her students, after which she suffers the breakdown which has bubbled under the surface since she was at the mission school. She is hospitalised, where the family she rejected for so many years come to visit her.

In the final act, Tambudzai gets a job with an ecotourism company and is forced to return home at long last. The company want a safe village to which it can take tourists and avoid more dangerous parts of the country. Yet when her mother attacks a tourist for taking a half naked photograph of her, Tambudzai finally appreciates the limits of colonialism and capitalism in improving the fortunes of the average Zimbabwean.

Tsitsi Dangarembga

Nervous Conditions reminds us that Zimbabwe’s story does not begin and end with Robert Mugabe and independence. The trail to hyperinflation and white Zimbabwean land being given to black farmers (of which western critics are curiously less critical when the inverse is done in the West Bank, for instance) begins a century or more before 1980.

The myopia from which we suffer when considering former colonial countries is brought into sharp focus when seen through the lens of works like this. They show us just how insulting it is to congratulate a non-European writer for writing in English (or any European language).

Indeed, many parts of Africa chose English, French or Arabic as their lingua franca because the colonisers were so sloppy in drawing national boundaries that they cut right across tribal lands, forcing rival tribes to share a nationality. Even the Swahili spoken in Kenya, Rwanda and other East African countries is spoken there because it developed from trade with Arabic countries on the other side of the Horn of Africa.

Independent Zimbabwe had already existed for 18 months when NoViolet Bulawayo was born in 1981. Her first novel, We Need New Names, has similarities to Nervous Conditions in being another bildungsroman. However, the childhood of Darling and her friends is all the more nightmarish than that of Tambudzai. Armed guards watching over the white neighborhoods. Dead bodies swinging in the trees. Their houses demolished by the paramilitary police. Their fathers forced to seek work abroad and barely remembered. The consequences of independence and Mugabe’s corrupt regime are like scenery painted in blood behind the action taking place on stage.

Darling is one of the lucky ones in going to live with her aunt in America. Once again we see the refuge escaping to the United States (see: Afghanistan, Cambodia, Vietnam, Dominican Republic et. al.) who later becomes a writer. The second half of the novel is almost pedestrian compared to the first half. Want gives way to plenty. Darling and her girlfriends watch pornography every day, going alphabetically through the categories (they are too scared to look at gay porn).  This aside, her life becomes much the same as any other coming of age story set in America during the last half century.

Through the wonders of the internet. Darling is able to stay in touch with her friends back in Zimbabwe. They become indignant towards her when she hasn’t returned home for a visit in many years. Yet she had entered America on a tourist visit and would be unable to re-enter if she left. Nothing is resolved by the end, which are always the most honest novels. Real lives are only resolved in death, because only them can a person’s life be assessed objectively and not by them.

Like Nervous Conditions, We Need New Names is obviously autobiographical. Bulawayo went to college in Michigan and Texas. The inclusion of the internet suggests the story is a a decade or more after when Bulawayo was a child. Or the American scenes are based on real events that took place later in her life. Either way, they show how little has changed in the country, even since Mugabe’s death in 2019. He was 95. Only the good die young, as they say.

What can we say about Bulawayo’s second novel, Glory? How to begin describe it? Is it Africa’s answer to Animal Farm? Or Zimbabwe’s answer to the Lion King (I haven’t seen the Lion King, liking neither Disney nor musicals, so I am unable to say one way of the other).

What we can say is that Glory is an allegory for the coup that finally unseated Robert Mugabe in 2017, two years before his death. His analogue in the story is the Old Horse, who is overthrown after ruling the fictional country of Jidada for 40 years. Other characters take the form of donkeys, goats, pigs, dogs, cats and a host of other animals. All of Orwell’s farmyard menagerie is represented, as well as more Afro-centric creatures, like the giant crocodile who wreaks havoc when he comes on land.

In most other regards, the animal inhabitants of Jidada behave just like humans. They drive, sit at desks at school and cook and eat food. They also use smart phones, with entire chapters dedicated to social media posts discussing events taking place in real time. At times they behave like normal animals, at others more like anthropomorphised versions. Like a Zimbabwean version of Bojack Horseman.

Glory satarises Zimbabwean politics, but also politics at large with references heard to ‘make Jidada great again’, which as well as the obvious, calls back to Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Talents, where an American presidential candidate first used the slogan with chilling prescience.

As well as Orwell and Butler, Glory calls back to other allegorical stories. Orwell himself was calling on a western story telling tradition that goes back to Aesop. Orwell was also well versed in Kipling, no matter his criticism of the man’s politics. The Jungle Book (I have seen that Disney movie) and the Just So stories are steeped in Indian folk tales. In describing the crocodile as ‘Brobdingnagian’, Bulawayo is referencing Gulliver’s Travels, whose second voyage finds him in the land of Brobdingnag, occupied by giants. On his fourth journey, of course, Lemuel Gulliver meets the race of intelligent horses, the Houyhnhnms.

Glory is in many ways cyclical in nature. Through repeated chapter titles like, Defending the Revolution, 1983 and Defending the Revolution, 2019, we see how little changes with the overthrow of the Old Horse. Atrocities are still committed by those in authority. Elections are held under the hashtag #freefaircredible. A red flag to be sure. Everyone in Jidada knows corruption has taken place. The final chapter is entitled: Second Revolution. The cycle, like Vico’s ricorso, is about to begin all over again.

Bulawayo has said in interviews that she tried to write about the fall of Mugabe in non-fiction, but found satire to be a more appropriate format to talk about it. Perhaps it is more therapeutic as well. Less triggering. Less traumatic. Indeed, the book Glory best approximates is not Animal Farm, but Art Spiegelman’s holocaust graphic novel, Maus. A way to process the Mugabe’s years and their aftermath from a detached distance. To be able to satirise without dishonouring the dead. Exactly as Spiegelman did with Hitler and the carnage he unleashed.

As Tsitsi Dangarembga was the first black Zimbabwean female author to be published in English. NoViolet Bulawayo became, with We Need New Names, the first black African woman to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize (Glory was later nominated as well). Another dubious honour, given how long it has taken for a black African women to be recognised by the Booker Prize.

We default to women writers on this project for exactly these reasons. To recognise how far world literature still has to go. Marginalised groups are not marginalised for lack of talent. They are marginalised because gatekeepers like the publishing industry are still in the hands of a narrow section of society. The situation is changing, however glacially, and we should recognise that. Yet as Nina Simone famously sung of the civil rights movement, we must also say in refrain of publishing: Too slow. Too slow. 

NoViolet Bulawayo