Nervous Condition
Women in Africa must not only liberate themselves from the influences of colonial rule, they must also fight the effects of male-controlled customs in the history of their culture. Tsitsi Dangarembga's portrayal of women in her novel Nervous Conditions is a prominent reminder that African women are under a double oppression when it comes to making their voices being heard. Tambu is an escaped female, Maiguru is an entangled female, and Nyasha is a rebellious female, this is how these women are shown within Nervous Condition, they either when with the tradition or try to break the tradition to become their own individual and stand on their own. Nervous Condition showed what it meant to be a man such as Babamukuru and Nhamo in a male-controlled tradition, how it is to feel as if you are being liberated from the struggles you face as a man in the village to a man with a huge future and not wanting to disappoint those who has made the way for you.
Maiguru, although educated, is an entrapped woman. Her education only serves to make her more resentful of her entrapment. Maiguru is still subjected to the demands of her husband and the men of her community. She knows and understands the "European way" but years of ingrained culture and patriarchy force her to keep silent and obedient. Maiguru's education is viewed as an oddity. The people of her village assume she was simply taking care of her husband and her family while they lived in England. “What it is,” she sighed, “to have to choose between self and security.” Maiguru’s words succinctly summarize the sacrifices she has made in order to raise a family and subscribe to a more traditional notion of a woman’s role in African society. Even though she tried to show her strength as a woman she will always be seen as the woman whose job is to stand by her husband and her education goes nowhere.
Nyasha is the rebellious female. "You can't go on all the time being whatever's necessary. You've got to have some conviction, and I'm convinced I don't want to be anyone's underdog. It's not right for anyone to be that. But once you get used to it, well, it just seems natural and you just carry on. And that's the end of you. You're trapped. They control everything you do." (Dangaremgba 1988: 119). Nyasha has had the benefit of a British education and has firsthand knowledge of the kind of lives women in Europe lead. She is ever aware of the differences in the way Shona women are treated compared with the treatment of British women. Unlike her mother, Nyasha has no memories of traditions and customs to silence her voice. Instead she finds herself caught between two worlds. Her schoolmates shun her for her white mannerisms and she has no Shona mannerisms to fall back on. Nyasha is truly a woman without a home, and as she struggles to make a place for herself in society, she finds that the effort just may kill her. According to Utilitarianism versus Universalism “Despite her human weaknesses and her errors of judgement, it is Nyasha, and not Tambudzai, who is the leading interpreter of the novel.” Nyasha never let anyone defined who she was, she was her own person.
Tambu is the promise of the escaped female. She views the cultural differences in social status and gender equality from a vantage point. She has experienced secondhand through her female relatives the effects of patriarchal rule on women's self-worth and the effects of cultural conflict when Africans allow colonial ideals to displace their African roots. Tambu comes close to forgetting her culture but her mother's caution always returns to remind her and ground her in the reality of her ethnic heritage, according to Utilitarianism versus Universalism “Tambudzai is enchanted by the promise of luxurious ease and comfort at the mission and is repelled by hardship and squalor of the homestead.” Tambu femaleness in a male-centered culture, as well as her battles for education, voice, and self under the interacting forces of patriarchy and colonization. "I'm sorry, Babamukuru, but I do not want to go to the wedding." Tambu is proud of herself and she feels emancipated, because she spoke up for herself and didn't attend her parents wedding. This decision wasn’t Tambu way of getting attention but rather it was to express her anger at Babamukuru for blaming her parents unofficial marriage for the family's bad luck, and is compounded by her embarrassment about Babamukuru labeling her parents as sinners. For while Nhamo’s death and the occasion of her story correlate, “my story,” Tambu states, “is not after all about death but about her escape, about Maiguru’s entrapment; and about Nyasha’s rebellion.
A child whose maleness the culture privileges, Nhamo had been chosen for education at the mission school where his uncle Babamukuru, educated in South Africa and Britain, serves as headmaster. But Nhamo’s sudden death from mumps compels the selection of Tambu as his replacement, a development that partly sets in motion the odyssey she narrates. This narration proper is carried by the devices that help relay and deepen it, for example, the idea of space. Our attention is directed almost immediately to this element of space when, early in the novel, Dangaremgba introduces the scenario of (a) cramped, airless bus and passengers needing “relief” from it, therefore establishing space congestion and need for escape and expansion as a major motif in Tambu’s story. Nhamo’s budding elitism and the enormous privileges Shona culture grants him as a male child condition his view of the house. Babamukuru’s house has such a powerful grip on Nhamo it induces him to revoke sooner than later his sense of obligation to help uplift his family’s homestead squalor, the foremost reason he is sent to be educated at the mission. His rather positive description of the house emphasizes its elegance, exteriorities, and spaciousness. Tambu says that Nhamo “had had a refrain with which he had punctuated his enthusiastic and reverent descriptions of the luxury and comfort of Babamukuru’s house. ‘Not even the Whites,’ he had used to carol in an impressionistic descant, ‘not even the Whites themselves could afford it!’” (Dangaremgba 1988: 61). Nhamo’s fairly uncritical rendition neglects the house’s female inhabitants and their overall mental and physical health. Narrowed by his gender privileges and class aspirations, Nhamo’s perspective overlooks or cannot articulate fully and empathically how the women respond to the internal strictures posed by the kingdom’s resident dictator and the house’s structural defects.
Babamukuru, suppresses other voices particularly those of women and delineates and polices the domestic space the familial household as a territory of inviolable and unnegotiable male/God-like power, both physical and ideological. For when Babamukuru tells Nyasha, in the heat of their physical fight provoked after he calls her a whore for socializing with a male friend, “We cannot have two men in this house” (Dangaremgba 1988: 115), he speaks no less of biological maleness and structural house than maleness and house as complementary and combatable, ideological spaces. Couched in his statement above is his fear of and intent to squash the seeming unthinkable: a gendered ideological challenge in “God’s” vast and sacred space.
Babamukuru’s persistent steeliness as his daughter’s health declines deepens his human and ideological flaws; however, in tandem with the novel’s disinterest in narrowness and one-dimensionality, he is depicted not as a total monster but rather a pitiable confluence of competing historical inheritances. If it is any indication Nyasha’s anguished comment that it is not altogether her father’s fault in that “They [England] did it [. . .] especially to him. They put him through it all,” turning him into “a good boy, a good munt. A bloody good kaffir” (Dangaremgba 1988: 200), then it makes sense the argument that he is as much a victimizer as he is a victim of warring cultural institutions. He is the product of his time, consistent with how Nhamo, before his death, was acting “in the expected manner” (Dangaremgba 1988: 12). Babamukuru is a man overwhelmed by the responsibilities his success entails. His position is a difficult one: he is placed within and has to negotiate two systems of economic, political, and family regulation, the English and the Shona.
Dangaremgba worries nonetheless that false yet despotic male divinities and spaces could emerge at the fortuitous convergence of the complications of one’s position as family benefactor and the other elements that transform some of Africa’s postcolonial elite into power-houses and spaces. The elements include: order of birth, privileged gender, pioneering education, professional hierarchy, marital position, parental rights, and economic benefaction (Dangaremgba 1988:87). When those forces interact unchecked, especially in a patriarchal culture, men become Providence: the omnipotent, revered, feared, and incontrovertible shaper of human destiny a “God” status that colonization assumed in its encounter with the native. This is an encounter that has left the latter, whose world is now permanently disrupted, with enduring tensions.
In the novel Nervous Conditions, radical feminists suggest that due to patriarchy, women have been come to be known as the “other” gender group in contrast to the male norm, and they suggest that all men benefit from the oppression of women. This school of feminist thought can be said to follow the exact assumptions made by Dangarembga in her illustrations and portrayal of the struggles these fictional women face in their community and how they strive to overcome adversity. Furthermore, the issues that arose in the context of the story line can be related directly to problems facing women in Africa, both in the past and to this day.