“Wizards well versed in treachery and black magic came from the south and forced the people from the land,” so begins the grandmother’s narrative in Nervous Conditions. The land of Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) had become destitute for the natives after the invasion by the Europeans. Grandmothers, particularly keen on imparting cultural history and familial legends, became the Empire’s immediate target in the war on cultural heritage. 

In our story, the grandmother informs the children gathered around of how she acquired knowledge of the wizards. She "had heard that beings similar in appearance to the wizards but not of them, for these were holy, had set up a mission not too far from the homestead.” The grandmother envisions an opportunity to present to the “holy” ones, her son, since the “‘white wizard had no use for women and children.” She would “endure and obey” if only they would take him and “prepare him for life in their world.” And the holy wizards accept Babamukuru into their fold. He submits to the education offered at the village missionary and, as a result of absorbing his lessons so well, Babamukuru is sent to study at the university in England. 

The grandmother tells the children that they are now witnesses to Babamukuru’s success. He is a big man, head of the missionary school, owner of a home and car. Oh, what a grand strategy! As evidence of his position among the wizards, Babamukuru is truly recognized as the one of the greatest men among the Shona people, for he has transcended race!

And so ends the grandmother’s narrative, (or not) a “truly a romantic story” for the young narrator, Tambu, who now envisions images of England and escape from the homestead! She is deeply infatuated, not only with the message of the grandmother’s story, but also with “the way her grandmother told” it. Tactics are everything!

Tambu vows to emulate her great uncle, Babamukuru. Even after Tambu is reminded by her brother, Nhamo, that she “is a girl” and after her father rejects her ambitions to attend school, Tambu is determined to collect enough school fees so she can follow in her brother’s footsteps and ultimately achieve the success of Babamukuru.

Tambu writes that she remembers how the maize plants grew under her grandmother’s care. “My grandmother,” she recounts, “had been an inexorable cultivator of land, sower of seeds and reaper of rich harvests until, literally until, her very last moment.” What a powerful memory of the young Tambu, working “side by side” with her grandmother, carrying out a productive, valuable task for the benefit of the family and community! Luckily for her, in the conqueror’s atmosphere of Rhodesia, she has learned how to hijack this memory for the manifestation of success! Tambu begins cultivating mealies with visions of her uncle’s success overwhelming everything, including family and friends. Never mind them: she lives with family and friends in “peaceful detachment.” 

Nhamo suddenly dies, but there is no time to grieve. Besides, Tambu writes, she felt “vindicated.” She became his substitute at the missionary school.  

Tambu moves to her uncle’s home in an upscale village. In the big house, she adjusts to the awe-inspiring presence of her uncle and his wife.  Their daughter, Nyasha, has recently returned from England where she was educated. Tambu is eager to talk with Nyasha and widen her knowledge of England, but she is surprised to find an angry, sullen Nyasha who refuses to talk with her parents! The younger Tambu is taken aback by this ungrateful cousin. Nyasha’s mother mumbles that her daughter has become “‘too Anglicised’” to live her life in Rhodesia. Both the mother and Tambu have witnessed Nyasha’s absorption in D.H. Lawrence novels. The mother believes the novels are the source of her daughter’s strange behavior. Tambu isn’t sure it’s that simple. While she admits that she did not know how to read Nyasha’s narrative, she sensed that “there was something about her that was too intangible for me to be comfortable with, so intangible that I could not decide whether it was intangible good or intangible bad.” Nyasha, when she breaks her silence momentarily, informs Tambu that she feels a “stranger” among her Shona neighbors. 

Strange! Tambu isn’t deterred and vows to develop “in the way that Babamukuru” sees fit so she, too, has the opportunity to be educated in England. 

In time, Nyasha moves from reading D.H. Lawrence to thriving “on inconsistencies,” Tambu records.  She “liked to chart them so that she could turn her attention to the next set of problems in the hope of finding fundamental solutions.”  Nyasha becomes the mouse running the trend mill, going nowhere fast. She succumbs to rage and lashes out at the closest representative of her nemesis, Babamukuru. They fight, physically drawing on their well-acquired reservoir of hate, to kill one another. Afterward, Babamukuru, whose consciousness is thoroughly saturated with Englishness, admonishes the daughter’s resistance. In turn, the daughter resigns to killing the stranger within by refusing to eat. Doctors and psychiatrists barely save a Nyasha who screams about being “trapped.” But in the atmosphere of “peaceful detachment,” like that atmosphere Tambu experienced on the homestead, we are assured that all will be normal, again - maybe?  

At the site of “organized repression of the cultural life,” writes Amilcar Cabral, “we find the seed of opposition, which leads to the structuring and development of the liberation movement.” Here is hope!

Tambu has been granted a new message, one of resistance.  This message, not surprisingly, comes from Nyasha: “you can’t go on all the time being whatever’s necessary.  You’ve got to have some convictions, and I’m convinced I don’t want to be anyone’s underdog. It’s not right for anyone to be that.”

It’s not right for anyone to be that - being whatever is necessary. 

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has been a writer, for over thirty years of commentary, resistance criticism and cultural theory, and short stories with a Marxist sensibility to the impact of cultural narrative violence and its antithesis, resistance narratives. With entrenched dedication to justice and equality, she has served as a coordinator of student and community resistance projects that encourage the Black Feminist idea of an equalitarian community and facilitator of student-teacher communities behind the walls of academia for the last twenty years. Dr. Daniels holds a PhD in Modern American Literatures, with a specialty in Cultural Theory (race, gender, class narratives) from Loyola University, Chicago. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.