Nervous Conditions (Nervous Conditions #1)

by Tsitsi Dangarembga

My uncle became prosperous and respected, well enough salaried to reduce a little the meagreness of his family’s existence. This indicated that life could be lived with a modicum of dignity in any circumstances if you worked hard enough and obeyed the rules. Yes, it was a romantic story, the way my grandmother told it. The suffering was not minimised but the message was clear: endure and obey, for there is no other way. She was so proud of her eldest son, who had done exactly this.

Words like ‘always’ and ‘never’ were meaningful to my father, who thought in absolutes and whose mind consequently made great leaps in antagonistic directions when it leapt at all. ‘Then let her go,’ he said.

I was fortunate that my father was so obviously impossible, otherwise I would have been confused. Under the circumstances the situation was clear: there was no way of pleasing my father, nor was there any reason to. Relieved, I set about pleasing myself, which antagonised him even further. He did not like to see me over-absorbed in intellectual pursuits. He became very agitated after he had found me several times reading the sheet of newspaper in which the bread from magrosa had been wrapped as I waited for the sadza to thicken. He thought I was emulating my brother, that the things I read would fill my mind with impractical ideas, making me quite useless for the real tasks of feminine living. It was a difficult time for him because Mr Matimba had shown him that in terms of cash my education was an investment, but then in terms of cattle so was my conformity. In frustration he resorted to absolutes. Ignoring Babamukuru’s imminent homecoming, he threatened to take me out of school again. It was a thoughtless threat: how could he have done that? Not having the power, he left me alone. We co-existed in peaceful detachment.

A piece of meat fell out too. I picked it out of the ashes and ate it, and then felt sick because I was still thinking about Nhamo and the cousins, and being cross with Nhamo for excluding me from their circle in spite of the fact that I did not approve of any of them. I considered the situation. Had I approved of my cousins before they went to England? Most definitely I had; I had loved them. When they visited the homestead we had played long, exciting games. Why did I no longer like them? I could not be sure. Did I like anybody? What about Babamukuru? Had the change to do with me or had it to do with them? These were complex, dangerous thoughts that I was stirring up, not the kind that you can ponder safely but the kind that become autonomous and malignant if you let them. If I continued in this way, I would soon be itching to beat Nhamo up because his smirking had brought the matter to a head. But I could not have the satisfaction of indulging my frustration in this way. Nhamo and I had stopped beating each other up a long time ago, at the time that I went back to school, more because we had developed so differently that we no longer had enough common ground in which to fight, than out of mutual respect or affection. Besides, I was reluctantly aware that beating up Nhamo would not help; my discontent had to do with more than my brother’s annoying manners. Sensing how unwise it was to think too deeply about these things in case I manoeuvred myself into a blind alley at t...

Then when Nhamo came home at the end of his first year with Babamukuru, you could see he too was no longer the same person. The change in his appearance was dramatic. He had added several inches to his height and many to his width, so that he was not little and scrawny any more but fit and muscular. Vitamins had nourished his skin to a shiny smoothness, several tones lighter in complexion than it used to be. His hair was no longer arranged in rows of dusty, wild cucumber tufts but was black, shiny with oil and smoothly combed. All this was good, but there was one terrible change. He had forgotten how to speak Shona. A few words escaped haltingly, ungrammatically and strangely accented when he spoke to my mother, but he did not speak to her very often any more. He talked most fluently with my father. They had long conversations in English, which Nhamo broke into small, irregular syllables and which my father chopped into smaller and even rougher phonemes. Father was pleased with Nhamo’s command of the English language. He said it was the first step in the family’s emancipation since we could all improve our language by practising on Nhamo. But he was the only one who was impressed by this inexplicable state my brother had developed. The rest of us spoke to Nhamo in Shona, to which, when he did answer, he answered in English, making a point of speaking slowly, deliberately, enunciating each syllable clearly so that we could understand. This restricted our communication to mu...

Lucia, who had grown shrewd in her years of dealing with men, denied that the foetus was Takesure’s. She accredited it instead to my father, although this could not have been true. My father, doing his best not to offend Babamukuru, had sensibly not allowed himself to enjoy Lucia’s voluptuousness until after she had fallen pregnant. From this feat of self-control Lucia had deduced that my father had marginally more stamina than Takesure and for this reason would make a better father. For his part, my father was quite taken with the idea of having Lucia as a second wife. Although she had been brought up in abject poverty, she had not, like my mother, been married to it at fifteen. Her spirit, unfettered in this respect, had experimented with living and drawn its own conclusions. Consequently, she was a much bolder woman than my mother, and my father, who no longer felt threatened by a woman’s boldness since he had proved his mettle by dispiriting my mother, was excited by the thought of possessing a woman like Lucia, like possessing a thunderstorm to make it crackle and thunder and lightning at your command.

I was so impressed with Babamukuru I could not stop admiring him. That evening as we prepared for bed I simply had to tell Nyasha for the umpteenth time how wonderful Babamukuru was; how good and kind it was of him to be so concerned about Lucia and how, because of all this, he deserved all our love and loyalty and respect. But she told me I had misjudged the situation. It was the obligation of all decent people in positions like Babamukuru’s to do such things. Nyasha had a way of looking at things that made it difficult for her to be impressed by Babamukuru. Her way was based on history. It all sounded rather wild to me then, and it was difficult for me to make the long leaps that Nyasha’s mind made between Babamukuru and Lucia and events past, present and future. All the same, I tried hard to understand, because Nyasha was very persuasive and also because I liked to think. I liked to exercise my mind. The things Nyasha said always gave me a lot to think about. This is how I began, very tentatively, to consider the consequences of our past, but I could not go as far as Nyasha. I simply was not ready to accept that Babamukuru was a historical artefact; or that advantage and disadvantage were predetermined, so that Lucia could not really hope to achieve much as a result of Babamukuru’s generosity; and that the benefit would only really be a long-term one if people like Babamukuru kept on fulfilling their social obligation; and people like Lucia would pull themselves together.

There was definitely something wrong with me, otherwise I would have had something to say for myself. I knew I had not taken a stand on many issues since coming to the mission, but all along I had been thinking that it was because there had been no reason to, that when the time came I would be able to do it. Coming to the mission, continuing my education and doing well at it, these had been the things that mattered. And since these things had been progressing according to plan for nearly two years, I had thought that ambiguities no longer existed. I had thought that issues would continue to be clearly delimited, with Babamukuru, who was as nearly divine as any human being could hope to be, imposing the limits. Through him, because of him, black would remain definitely sombre and white permanently clear, even in spite of Nyasha, whose strange disposition hinted at shades and textures within the same colour. My vagueness and my reverence for my uncle, what he was, what he had achieved, what he represented and therefore what he wanted, had stunted the growth of my faculty of criticism, sapped the energy that in childhood I had used to define my own position. It had happened insidiously, the many favourable comparisons with Nyasha doing a lot of the damage. It was such a bed of confusion. I would not have been here with Babamukuru if I had not been able to stand up to my own father, yet now I was unable to tell my uncle that his wedding was a farce. And still I could not accep...