Nervous Conditions

Nervous Conditions is the first novel of the Zimbabwean writer Tsitsi Dangarembga, published in 1988 and set in Rhodesia in the 1960s.

Tambu narrates the book, and she is honest from the first page: she is not sorry that her brother died, because it means she can go to school. Her uncle Babamukuru runs the mission and the family, and taking Tambu in is one of the ways he shows how important he is. What she finds in his house is her cousin Nyasha, who was brought up in England and cannot fit back into the expectations held of a Rhodesian girl, and who argues with her father in public in ways Tambu has never seen. Tambu works hard, wins a place at a convent school, and slowly understands the arrangement she has entered into: the price of her education is her acceptance of the household's rules about women and about obedience.

It was the first novel in English by a black woman from Zimbabwe, and it began a trilogy that continues with The Book of Not and This Mournable Body.