Nervous Conditions (Nervous Conditions #1)

by Tsitsi Dangarembga

The needs and sensibilities of the women in my family were not considered a priority, or even legitimate.

Thinking about it, feeling the injustice of it, this is how I came to dislike my brother, and not only my brother, my father, my mother — in fact everybody.

The victimisation, I saw, was universal. It didn’t depend on poverty, on lack of education or on tradition. It didn’t depend on any of the things I had thought it depended on. Men took it everywhere with them.

But what I didn’t like was the way all the conflicts came back to this question of femaleness. Femaleness as opposed and inferior to maleness.

‘It’s bad enough,’ she said severely, ‘when a country gets colonised, but when the people do as well! That’s the end, really, that’s the end.’

She thought there was a difference between people deserting their daughters and people saving themselves.