said, “it is from there that springs the fountain of my creative being.”
Dangarembga was born in Mutoko in colonial Rhodesia, but at the age of two she moved with her parents to England, thereby citing English as her first language — it was used all through her education and she forgot most of the Shona that she had learnt.

In 1965 she returned to Rhodesia, where she entered a mission school in Mutare and learned Shona again. She then completed her secondary education at an American convent school.
In 1977 Dangarembga went to Cambridge to study medicine. After three years she abandoned her studies and returned to Zimbabwe, where amongst other things she worked for some time at an advertising agency, and started to study psychology at the University of Zimbabwe.
During these years she became involved with the Drama Club and wrote and staged three plays, She No Longer Weeps (1987), The Lost of the Soil, and The Third One.

“The writers in Zimbabwe were basically men at the time,” she said in an interview.
“And so I really didn’t see that the situation would be remedied unless some woman sat down and wrote something, so that’s what I did!”
Upon graduation she worked as a teacher, but finding it difficult to combine an academic career and literature, then devoted herself entirely to writing. Her short story, The Letter won a price in a writing competition arranged by SIDA, the Swedish International Development Authority, and was             published in the anthology Whispering Land  (1985).

In it Dangarembga drew a parallel between broken family ties under South African apartheid with national disintegration. The narrator, a woman, receives the first letter from her husband — after 12 years.
He had been considered a security risk but manages to escape before being arrested. Her mother tells her to destroy the letter, but she wants to save it.

Soldiers raid her house and she is taken to a police station. The story ends with a brutal conclusion: “As for myself, well, I have already told you that I became a political person twelve years ago in the Township. Therefore I have had ample time to get used to the aberrations of people in the grip of totalitarian fervour.
“I do not know what is going to happen to me. I may be charged with an act of treason plotted in Pretoria, or they may hold me here to abuse me physically and mentally for a while before conceding that my desire to be with my husband is not grounds for indictment.”

As a novelist Dangarembga made her debut with Nervous Conditions, a partially autobiographical work which appeared in Great Britain in 1988 and the next year in the United States.

She had already began to write in her childhood, and read mostly the English classics, but the period following Zimbabwean independence inspired her to read contemporary African literature and the writings of Afro-American women.
“I personally do not have a fund of our cultural tradition or oral history to draw from,” she once confessed, “but I really did feel that if I am able to put down the little

I know then it’s a start . . . if at the age of twenty-six somebody has a story to tell it’s likely to be about growing up!
“Also I’m always conscious at the back of my mind that there is very little that a woman in Zimbabwe can pick up — in Zimbabwe today — and say yes, I know, that’s me . . . Because I know I felt that gap so dreadfully . . .” (Tsitsi Dangarembga by Jane Wilkinson, in Talking with African Writers, 1992)

The title of Nervous Conditions is borrowed from Jean-Paul Sartre’s introduction to Franz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth.
The “nervous condition” of the native is, according to Sartre, a function of mutually reinforcing attitudes between coloniser and colonised that condemn the colonised to what amounts to a psychological disorder.

Following her success as a novelist, Dangarembga turned her attention to film, before turning to politics when she joined Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) led by Deputy Prime Minister Arthur Mutambara, and was named in 2010 the secretary for education in a portfolio reshuffle
In 1992 Dangarembga founded Nyeria Films, a film production company in Harare. Her films have received several awards. Kare Kare Zvako (2005) was the winner of the Golden Dhow in Zanzibar, and won also the Short Film Award Cinemaafricano in Milano, and Short Film Award ZIFF.

Peretera Maneta (2006) received the Unesco Children’s and Human Rights Award and won the Zanzibar International Film festival. With Everyone’s Child (1996), shot on location in Harare and Domboshawa, Dangarembga made film history in her country. It was the first full length feature movie directed by a black Zimbabwean woman.

The story follows the tragic fates of four siblings, Tamari and Itai, after their parents die of Aids.
The soundtrack featured songs by Zimbabwe’s most popular musicians, including Thomas Mapfumo, Leonard Zhakata and Andy “Tomato Sauce” Brown. Dangarembga herself has also served on the board of the Zimbabwe College of Music for five years, two of them as chair.

The Book of Not (2006), set against Zimbabwe’s struggle for freedom from white rule, continued the semi-autobiographical story of Tambu at the Sacred Heart academy. Tambu is not a traditional likeable heroine of a Bildungsroman: now her faults and failures overshadow her virtues and accomplishments.
Dangarembga has completed her doctoral studies in the Department of African Studies at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Her PhD thesis will deal with the reception of African film. Some of her works include-

  • The Puppeteer, 1996 (film)
  • The Elephant People, 2000 (film)
  • On the Boarder, 2000 (film)
  • High Hopes, 2004 (film)
  • Kare Kare Zvako, 2005 (film)
  • Pamvura (At the water), 2005 (film)
  • Peretera Manetera (Spell my name), 2006 (film)
  • The Book of Not: A sequel to Nervous Conditions, 2006 (novel)
  • Mother’s Day, 2006 (film)
  • Nyami-nyami, 2010 (film)
  • Everyone’s Child (1996)
  • Neria (1992)


Source http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/tsitsi.htm.

 

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