Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions of course takes its title from Satre’s introduction to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. It’s an unflinching witness to settler colonialism’s psycho-somatic effects on black women like Nyasha, Maiguru, Mai and Tambudzai, who comes to believe the price of a life worth living is her brother’s death. If it’s one thing to live the double consciousness of a black minority in white dominated society, it’s quite another to live the double consciousness of a minoritised black majority. As I reread the Tambudzai trilogy, I was struck by how bodily, how fleshy, Dangarembga’s exploration of black women’s existence under settler rule is. It struck me: if Frantz Fanon ends his phenomenology of black-being-in-the-world in Black Skin, White Masks by calling out in prayer ‘O my body, make of me always a man who questions!’, Dangarembga’s trilogy provides us with the black feminist response: O my body, make of me always a woman who questions!

Listening to the Flesh

Labouring side by side with Tambu at Mainini Lucia’s security company, Christine, the war veteran, remarks:

your education is not only in your head anymore […] your knowledge is now also in your body, every bit of it.

Tambudzai Sigauke – who, since we first met her in Nervous Conditions as a precocious girl who is not sorry when her brother dies, has come full circle in This Mournable Body’sclosing lines. Having spent years running away from the hard labouring life of the body to which her mother is condemned, to kuma ruzevha, and towards the life of the mind Babamunini enjoys at the mission school, it is the body to which Tambu returns. 

Re-reading Tambu’s return to her body, I recall my father’s weekend ritual.

“Ndichambo terera nyama,” he announces.

“I’m going to listen to the flesh.”

He’s going to lie down, be still, and listen to the rumblings of his flesh after the week’s labour at his surgery. 

I’ve always found this listening to the flesh a curious statement. What is it that our flesh might have to tell us?

What Christine gestures Tambu and us towards is that there is a bodily archive of knowledge that we carry in the flesh.

Through our educations – as it was in Tambu’s miseducation at Babamunini’s mission school and the Young Ladies’ College of the Sacred Heart – we are taught to unlearn and distrust our embodied experiences, histories, knowledges, and imaginations of the world, to make disembodied pronouncements on it. This is to say: we are taught to stop listening to the flesh.  

Labouring side by side with her, Christine sees that Tambu has stopped trying to eat books. Tambu is now listening to the flesh. 

Kuterera nyama. 

As Hortense Spillers teaches, there’s a historic distinction between the flesh and the body. Slavery and colonisation’s economies of violence transformed our African flesh into bodies of labour and property stripped of our personhood.

And yet, in our mother tongue chiShona (and many African languages as Kholeka Shange teaches), Tambu would never have referred to herself as a ‘black female body’. She might try to refer to herself as ‘muviri we mukadzi mutema’, but chiShona doesn’t conceive of muviri – the body – as separate from the spirit, soul and mind. To speak of muviri is to invoke the person who lives inside the body. To speak of a body outside the person whom it belongs to is to speak of chitunha – the body of dead person; in other words, a corpse. 

To speak then of nyama, the flesh of a person’s body, is to invoke the most corporeal site of a living person – the site of living, breathing, feeling, through which the world is experienced, encountered and absorbed. The flesh, then, is a site of re-memory, and re-remembering what Toni Morrison called“a knowing so deep.”

To return to the flesh we must be alive to what has happened to our bodies. After all, our bodies are, to borrow from Bessie Head, a question of power.

If Fanon calls out ‘O my body, make of me always a man who questions!’,  Dangarembga responds: “O my body, make of me always a woman who questions!”

Over the trilogy – Nervous Conditions, The Book of Not, This Mournable Body – Dangarembga explores black women’s bodies as questions of power. 

Tambu, whose body marks her unfit for the same education as her brother. 

Nyasha, who refused to eat and threw up when she did. 

Netsai, whose leg is blown off at the Pungwe. 

Sacred Heart’s black girls, punished for taking a shit in the white girls’ toilets and having no place to dispose their soiled pads. 

Gertrude’s breasts and buttocks, exposed to the jeering crowd.  

MaiTaka’s leg, broken by her husband.

Tambu, who faints, hallucinates and, like Nyasha, ends up in psychiatric care. 

Through Dangarembga’s unflinching witness, the word is made flesh, the flesh is made word.

In this inseparability between body and language, Dangarembga has shown us that hers is more than a textual vision of enfleshing freedom. In 2020, alive to the cries, the sufferings and the yearnings of her people, Dangarembga took her physical person out onto Harare’s streets, and posed her own body as a question to power.

Placing her physical and textual bodies in the line of fire, Dangarembga returns to the flesh so that we, like Tambu, might re-member ourselves and our worlds.

Panashe Chigumadzi is an essayist and novelist, born in Zimbabwe and raised in South Africa. Her debut novel Sweet Medicine (Blackbird Books, 2015) won the 2016 K. Sello Duiker Literary Award. Her second book, These Bones Will Rise Again, a historical memoir reflecting on Robert Mugabe’s ouster, was shortlisted for the 2019 Alan Paton Award for Non-Fiction. Acolumnist for The New York Times, and contributing editor of the Johannesburg Review of Books, her work has featured in titles including The Guardian, Chimurenga, Boston Review, Africa is A Country, Transition, Washington Post and Die Ziet.  Prior to this, Chigumadzi was the founding editor of Vanguard Magazine, a platform for young black women coming of age in post-apartheid South Africa. She gained media experience both as a journalist for CNBC Africa and columnist for Forbes Woman Africa, and as a project executive for the Africa Business News Group.  In 2015, Chigumadzi was a Ruth First Fellow, delivering the annual memorial lecture in honour of the anti-apartheid activist. The following year, Chigumadzi, was the curator of Soweto’s inaugural Abantu Book Festival, South Africa’s most important gathering for black readers and writers. Having completed her masters degree in African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand, she is now a doctoral candidate at Harvard University’s Department of African and African American Studies.

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I had demonstrated several times in the months before. The first was in May, when the government granted a business associate of President Mnangagwa billions of local dollars to upgrade a private hospital into a COVID-19 facility. Seriously ill, and in respiratory distress, I was referred to the facility by my doctor, a couple of months after the grant was effected. I arrived to find it closed to the public – although nurses and other staff meandered or sat around. On asking when the hospital would open, I was referred to the Ministry of Health.

When I arrived home, I made a call for like-minded citizens to join me in a protest at the hospital. A couple of dozen people responded. My demonstration strategy was to substitute running round my garden with running up and down in front of the hospital, with a placard hung from my neck. As we debated protest messages and built consensus on social media, the COVID-19 lockdown was enforced.  Amidst movement restrictions enforced jointly by the police and the military, I ended up demonstrating on my own.

This was not surprising. ZanuPf intimidation and violence – following over a century of identity- and wealth-destroying colonialism – have left many people fearful, devoid of initiative. Government mismanagement and abuse of the economy have resulted in an unemployment rate of over 80%.  The UN World Food programme predicts that 8 million Zimbabweans – that’s half the population – will face severe hunger this year if food aid is not provided. We resent, and suffer a degree of shame at, our reputation for our being amongst the most educated population on the continent not translating into wellbeing and prosperity.

Against this background, Ngarivhume’s call for a demonstration was inspiring. It was hard to believe there was a person amongst us brave enough to suggest a public expression of discontent with ZanuPf. The call was made on social media, several weeks before the demonstration was to take place, giving people time to organise. The response was immediate and passionate, with lively discussions on how best to conduct the demonstration in Zimbabwe’s repressive environment. 

There being a couple of dozen riot police in the back of the truck, I thought better of exhibiting my screenshot of the Constitution.

Freelance journalist Hopewell Chin’ono took up the call to protest. Reporting on corruption involving COVID-19 relief, Chin’ono had publicly alleged that the First Family, including President Mnangagwa’s wife and some of his children, were central figures in the double-dealing. With Chin’ono’s influential support, it looked as though nothing could stop the demonstration, and that, for the first time since the military-incited public demonstrations of 18 November 2017, which were part of the process that deposed then-President Robert Mugabe, Zimbabweans were going to demand an end to our government’s excesses.

The authorities moved swiftly to stop the momentum. Ngarivhume tweeted that state agents were searching for him; he and Chin’ono were arrested on 20 July. Then, two days before the demonstration, Minister of Home Affairs and Cultural Heritage, Kazembe Kazembe, announced that the protest was illegal. And next, President Mnangagwa denounced it as an insurrection.

I was outraged by this assault on civil liberties. There were no signs of a deteriorating security situation in the streets. Instead, rumours that factions within ZanuPf  intended to use the demonstration as cover for an inside job against President Mnangagwa intensified. I didn’t see why squabbles inside the governing party should reduce my and other Zimbabwean’s constitutional rights. In the runup to 31 July – encouraged, by my solo demonstration at the hospital, that some civil protest space still existed – I carried out several more solo demonstrations. On these occasions, I often passed police officers, who did not interfere with my right to demonstrate peacefully. So, in spite of warnings from the governing party, I resolved to continue to demonstrate. Meanwhile, on social media, the consensus was that the new context made a traditional demonstration suicidal, and that people should therefore demonstrate in their neighbourhoods, in small groups. On 30 July, I put out a call for women to demonstrate at the corners of their streets.

Their world is hermetically sealed to any contrary ideas.

On the day of the demonstration, armed with a screenshot of the relevant section of the Constitution on my cell phone and carrying my placards, I left my yard to meet a friend at a shopping centre. There was a deathly silence in the streets, where neither cars nor pedestrians moved. There were no groups of demonstrators. Although people in Zimbabwe want change, we do not yet have the capacity, material or psychological, to create it. It is a predicament portrayed in my novel This Mournable Body, shortlisted this week for the 2020 Booker Prize, which follows the devastating journey of university graduate Tambudzai Sigauke. She tries, wholly unsuccessfully, to build a dignified life for herself in post-independence Zimbabwe.

My friend and I walked down the road towards town. Only a few cars drove by. To be more visible to a greater number of people, we stopped at an intersection, where we could catch traffic travelling in all four directions. A strange man came up and filmed our placards without asking our permission. Later, a state-owned vehicle passed by, did a U-turn up the road, and returned to stop in front of my friend. A few minutes after that vehicle left, a riot vehicle came. A state agent in black riot gear stepped out to tell us: ‘What you are doing is illegal’. There being a couple of dozen riot police in the back of the truck, I thought better of exhibiting my screenshot of the Constitution. My friend and I climbed into the vehicle. Minutes later, we were sitting on a concrete floor in Borrowdale police station.

After a couple of hours, we were moved to Harare Central Police Station. We were driven there in a large, white double cab, with three police officers for company. The windows were up. The stridently cheerful voice of a DJ on a state radio channel was followed by up-tempo music. In that moment, I realised how Zimbabweans who have no access to social media – or to news other than the state media, or the few so-called independent newspapers compromised by their dependence on state licences to operate – believe that ZanuPf is acting in the name of the people to meet the nation’s challenges. Their world is hermetically sealed to any contrary ideas.

I was detained for a night, before being granted bail the following evening. 

I came out more determined than ever to work on my forthcoming book. In it, a group of young people exist in a post-apocalypse, totalitarian Africa. There, they take on an ancestral mission to save their world.     

Tsitsi Dangarembga is the author of three novels, including Nervous Conditions, winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and This Mournable Body, currently shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize. She is also a filmmaker, playwright, and the director of the Institute of Creative Arts for Progress in Africa Trust. She lives in Harare, Zimbabwe.

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