The groundbreaking first novel in Tsitsi Dangarembga's award-winning trilogy, Nervous Conditions, won the Commonwealth Writers Prize & has been "hailed as one of the 20th century's most significant works of African literature" (NY Times). Two decades before Zimbabwe would win independence & ended white minority rule, 13-year-old Tambudzai Sigauke embarks on her education.

On her shoulders rest the economic hopes of her parents, siblings, & extended family, & within her burns the desire for independence. She yearns to be free of the constraints of her rural village & thinks she's found her way out when her wealthy uncle offers to sponsor her schooling. But she soon learns that the education she receives at his mission school comes with a price.

A distinguishing feature of this work is its courageous honesty & devastating understatement.

A modern classic in the African literary canon & voted in the Top Ten Africa's 100 Best Books of the 20th Century, this novel brings to the politics of decolonization theory the energy of women's rights. An extraordinarily well-crafted work, this book is a work of vision. Through its deft negotiation of race, class, gender & cultural change, it dramatizes the 'nervousness' of the 'postcolonial' conditions that bedevil us still. In Tambu & the women of her family, we African women see ourselves, whether at home or displaced, doing daily battle with our changing world with a mixture of tenacity, bewilderment & grace.

Tsitsi Dangarembga: author of 3 novels: Nervous Conditions, winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize; This Mournable Body, shortlisted for the Booker Prize & The Book of Not. She won the PEN Pinter Prize in 2021 & the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. Dangarembga is also a filmmaker, playwright, & the director of the Institute of Creative Arts for Progress in Africa Trust.

Female African Authors