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Nervous Conditions illustrates the way in which colonial cultural constructs, especially 'race', inhibit the construction of sexual identity. The relationship between coloniser and colonised somehow parallels that between males and females. The colonial experience exacerbates gender attitudes within the colonised community and prevents the women in the novel from constructing their sexual and social identity harmoniously.
Tsitsi Dangarembga, the author oí Nervous Conditions, was born in what was then called Rhodesia in 1959. The country, which would no doubt have gained independence from the British Crown round about 1965, like other British colonies in the region, remained under the white minority rule of Ian Smith's breakaway regime until it eventually became independent Zimbabwe in 1981. The intervening years were made grim for the colonised African majority by civil war and international sanctions. Set in the pre-independence period, though it was written just after independence, Nervous Conditions1 corresponds to the author's childhood.
Henry Louis Gates Junior has clearly demonstrated that '[r]ace as a meaningful criterion within the biological sciences has long been recognised as a fiction'.2 If evidence were needed to discredit the notion of race, the attempts by the South African apartheid regime to classify the entire population by racial group surely provide it. From the initial list of nine racial groups that figured in the Population Registration Act of 1950, they were constantly obliged to add further groups and sub-groups, until there were finally over fifty. For the entire forty-odd years of its existence, the system gave rise to endless court cases where people applied for reclassification or saw their classification challenged.
If different 'races' in the sense of 'species' really existed within humankind, the problem would be solved, as any combination would produce sterile offspring, as occurs in the animal kingdom. This use of the word 'kingdom' echoes back to the post-Enlightenment origins of these classificatory teams. The need to classify everything in the natural world and place it in a hierarchy coincided with the beginnings of Western exploration, the discovery of other peoples, and imperialism.
I am particularly interested in seeing the development of cultural and psychological constructs as dynamic processes. This implies that instead of referring to ontological 'identity' as though it were a fixed and unique state of being,...