1.
I should read more African literature. Not out of any sense of obligation or commitment to diversity. I’m not writing this because it’s February. No, I should read more African literature, because every time I do, I come away having loved what I read. I am fully in favor of purposefully expanding aesthetic horizons to include the so-called periphery. But sometimes it all feels so forced, making a chore out of what should be a pleasure and, sometimes, having the ironic impact of constructing aesthetic ghettos.
I didn’t come to Nervous Conditions out of any sense of obligation. I came by way of the Booker Prize shortlist, which in 2020 included Tsitsi Dangarembga’s This Mournable Body. That book was released in 2018 but is the third book in a trilogy that began with Nervous Conditions, first published in 1988. As an aside, I’ve read three opening books of trilogies in the last year or so and have yet to progress to the second on any of them. One was Rachel Cusk’s Outlines, which I wrote about here, and the other was the first book in Naguib Mahfouz’ Cairo Trilogy, which I will call-back to later.
Nervous Conditions is a semi-autobiographical novel that tells the story of Tambu, a Shona girl living in Rhodesia who leaves her family’s homestead to go and live with her uncle and aunt at a mission school. Tambu’s uncle, Babamukuru, is the headmaster of the school and the patriarch of Tambu’s extended family. He is a kind of model African, having received his master’s degree at an English university and returned to provide material support to his family. Education as a means of improvement, both material and moral, is one of the book’s constant themes. However, there is a pall over Tambu’s education, as the place at the mission school had originally belonged to her brother, whose death is reported on the novel’s opening pages.
Nervous Conditions is a charming book, at least it starts out as one. Much of its charm comes from the combination of Tambu's precociousness and her ignorance. She is a stellar student and intent on using her studies to elevate her status above that of peasant, but she also believes that a peasant is “a land-fowl which looks something like a guinea fowl.” How could you not root for her?
The title of the book comes from Jean-Paul Sartre’s preface to Frantz Fanon’s posthumously published work, The Wretched of the Earth. Sartre writes, “the status of native is a neurosis introduced and maintained by the colonist in the colonized with their consent.” Fanon was a Martinique-born psychiatrist who earned his medical degree in France and then worked in colonial Algeria. Many of the ideas that animate The Wretched of the Earth come from his work treating Algerian patients.
For Fanon, colonization leads to a perpetual state of antagonism between the colonizer and the colonized. All parties involved try various methods of resolving this tension, of letting it dissipate peacefully through negotiation or compromise, but none can work. It is a state that can only be ameliorated by the violence of revolution and the action of decolonization. As he puts it:
The muscles of the colonized are always tensed. It is not that he is anxious or terrorized, but he is always ready to change his role as game for that of hunter. The colonized subject is a persecuted man who is forever dreaming of becoming the persecutor.1
Fanon died in 1961. As his death came right in the midst of the age of European decolonization, there is much in his work that we could question critically. However, his work is informed not just by post-colonial theory, but by his own experiences as a French subject and his work with Algerian patients. This rooting in lived experience is something prominently on display in Dangarembga’s work.
2.
As much as post-colonialism and decolonization and neo-colonialism remain consistent topics, this discourse tends be long on theoretical abstractions and short on historical knowledge and situational understanding. Take the multi-generational tragedy that is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In many quarters, you don't have to know much about the historical context, the geopolitics of the region, or the sociology of any group involved. You simply need to utter "white settler colonialism" and you’ve reached the truth of the conflict.
The same lack of specific knowledge extends to the colonial apologetics that pop up from time to time. These are perhaps best illustrated by the historian Niall Ferguson, who wrote a 1000-page paean to the British Empire. In Ferguson’s estimation, the British Empire was a net positive to the world and clearly better than the other European empires and many of the native alternatives. This argument is couched in crude utilitarian terms, a bit strange for a self-described classical liberal from the Scottish Enlightenment tradition, but I have long since stopped expecting ideological consistency in these matters. As Nervous Conditions reflects, these kinds of utilitarian calculations tend to break down under the weight of real human lives, an idea to which I will return shortly.
As much as the two sides of the colonialism debate adopt the posture of sworn enemies, they do tend to find common ground in one area. They are both joined in their insistence that the global north and the global south must exist in a stereotypical relationship in which the north represents order and reason and the south is typified by intuition and indigenous wisdom. Of course, order is relative. If we haven't learned that much from the last 150 years of philosophy and theory, then what hope is there?
This acknowledgement of relative relationships runs through Nervous Conditions. When Tambu arrives at her uncle's house, she is met with a sense of disorder that slowly builds to almost total disorientation. She leaves her cluttered and dirty homestead for a house scrubbed to dullness. But for Tambu, the world of the village represents order, with its attention to the immediate needs of survival and its strict social relationships. By contrast, her new surroundings are chaotic. She finds a house full of strange devices of uncertain utility. And she becomes reacquainted with her cousin Nyasha, who as a daughter who alternates between talking back to her mother and ignoring her.
The focus on domesticity and the interior lives of its characters is one of the novel’s strong points. Despite the title and the setting, colonialism is not the main focus of Nervous Conditions. This is a book about Tambu and her family. Colonialism is the background noise.
3.
All of the above is a roundabout way of saying that Nervous Conditions works so well because it manages to put some meat on tired old bones. As another example, when Dangaremgba writes of the patriarchy, she is referring to a literal one, to the group of men who head Tambu’s extended family, the men who eat first and the best cuts of meat, and who make all of the family’s decisions.
The book is very good at showing the link between individual ego and these various sociological dysfunctions. I was reminded of the above-mentioned Cairo Trilogy and its family patriarch, Ahmad 'Abd al-Jawad, a man whose stern harsh dealings with his family is contrasted with the mirth he displays outside of the home. He oversees his home according to strict Muslim practices but allows himself to enjoy music and drink and extramarital affairs. We might be tempted to dismiss this as mere hypocrisy, but there is more to it. Islam is the superego that provides external moral standards, but Abd al-Jawad is mostly driven by the ego of maintaining his appearances. It is the same with Babamukuru, who in dealing with his daughter’s rebellions is more concerned with his own reputation than with her well-being.
It is Tambu’s relationship with this family patriarchy, and in turn, the men’s relationship to each other and to the wider world that we see the insidiousness of the colonial condition. Tambu’s uncle lays claim to his role as head of the family by the same utilitarian logic that Ferguson uses to justify the British Empire. Yes, the colonial powers brought advantageous technology, but what price did they charge? What did they take in trade?
I won’t get too far into specific plot points, but the novel reaches a kind of emotional crescendo when Babamukuru makes a particular decision regarding the family. The men gather to speak about the family’s bad luck. Tambu’s father, falling back on indigenous medicine, suggests a witchdoctor and cleansing ceremony. Babamukuru recoils from his brother’s ignorance and instead announces that Tambu’s parents will instead have the church wedding that they never had. He replaces indigenous ritual with colonial ones.
In Tambu’s response, we find the perfect response to colonial apologetics. Yes, her uncle is magnanimous. He is charitable. But his largesse comes at the price of choice and dignity and sanity. Tambu’s response to her uncle switches from blind obedience to his will to a kind of willful masochism in opposing him. The nature of their relationship destroys the possibility of a middle ground. As Fannon puts it, “the colonial world is a Manichaean world.”2
What makes those colonial apologetics so incredibly daft is that they equally deny existence of another way. Yes, Europeans brought some nice things, but nations can exchange nice things without all the land expropriation and slavery and political disenfranchisement. For instance, I am typing this on a laptop likely manufactured in China. And while the supply chain that assembled this device might be full of all sorts of failures and ethically questionable steps, it didn't require either China or the United States to invade and conquer the other.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth (p. 16). Grove Atlantic. Kindle Edition.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth (p. 6). Grove Atlantic. Kindle Edition.
Having now read all the three books I think the first one is the best.
I was always of the opinion that both sides of the colonialism debate were barking up the wrong tree, so to speak. What we are really looking at is the movement of people, and in that paradigm you are either expanding or contracting, civilizationally. So, if your civilization is expanding, you are looking to conquer, and if it is dying off, or at least not as strong as some other group, then you will be conquered, and in turn, might flee, becoming a refugee, which could be its own sort of colonizer.
But, putting it in the context of "decolonization" and its attendant verbiage is an attempt to, ahem, colonize the subject, and turn it into terms that favor certain ideologies'. Did that help dig into a thorny issue? I guess it depends on what someone feels is important about the issue.
The book sounds like a Comedy of Manners, a la Wodehouse. Then again, it might be more melancholy than his works. Maybe I will stumble across it one day, as that is how I find most of my reading materials.