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Dangarembga's novel, set in colonial Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), portrays a young intelligent African girl, Tambu, who faces the same severing of traditional and modern culture that Nnu Ego faced, but in a completely different setting. As Tambu pursues western education, she finds herself alienated and cut off from her parents and other Africans who maintain the traditional culture and values. The very education that allows her to survive in the new world that colonialism creates also severs her from the family and friends she loves. She watches her cousin develop an eating disorder and observes the unhappiness in her aunt's marriage because, though she is educated, she is unable to pursue the career she would like because of her husband's expectations of a more traditional wife. These, Tambu explains, are symptoms of African women caught in the worlds between tradition and modernity, African culture and western culture, education and a male-dominated world. She terms these symptoms "nervous conditions."
Nervous Conditions ends abruptly, just as Tambu enters another phase of her education. Her cousin's eating disorder has reached a critical stage and her aunt and uncle's marriage appears to be collapsing. But the novel also ends with hope. Tambu's observations of the disorder colonialism brought to her family cause her to resist its growth in her own mind. "Something in my mind began to assert itself, to question things and refuse to be brainwashed, bringing me to this time when I can set down this story," she says in the final paragraph (204). This novel, she says, is only the beginning of the story. Her statement holds within it an inherent promise: the real story, how African women begin to assert themselves, is a story that will also be told.
The two novels tell the same story from different perspectives. The Joys of Motherhood explores the disappointment the older generation faces as their world changes. Nervous Conditions, on the other hand, explores how the younger generation experiences alienation from their families as a result of the changing world.
Both Nervous Conditions and The Joys of Motherhood may be purchased from Amazon.com or Barnes and Noble.
Tsitsi Dangarmebga. Nervous Conditions. Seattle, WA: Seal Press, 1989. Buchi Emecheta. The Joys of Motherhood. New York: Braziller, 1979.
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