Fifteen years ago, Tsitsi Dangarembga wrote Nervous Conditions,
a text that has become one of the set books in most African countries.
In Nervous Conditions, Dangarembga gives us a tale of Tambudzayi,
a young, rural, black Rhodesian female who is informally adopted
by her paternal uncle so she can get an education and change the
lives of her rural family. At the end of Nervous Conditions, Tambu
has learnt how to use a fork and knife. She has also become somewhat
politicized by her bulimic cousin, Nyasha, and has won a scholarship
to The Young Ladies’ College of the Sacred Heart. What more
can she want? A lot, as the sequel, The Book of Not (Ayebia),
shows.
In the The Book of Not, set mostly at the high school Tambu attends,
the author shows the struggles of young Tambu in a pre-independence
Zimbabwe and a post-independent Rhodesia as she attempts to fit
in as one of a handful of black students at a largely white private
girls’ school. Tambu takes heed of her uncle’s words
and believes that with education she can earn the world’s
respect but this meets with disillusionment, when, after she gets
the best O Level results, a less qualified person is given the
school honours.
Her principal announces the winner: “… this young
lady is also a champion swimmer. As the Young ladies’ college
of the Sacred Heart undertakes to nurture well-rounded human beings,
the O-Level trophy goes to….” And the name is not
Tambudzai’s but that of a white classmate who was second
best. Her only black colleague pushes her to question the status
quo but our Tambu keeps quiet.
She again responds in the same manner after her studies in post-independence
Rhodesia when, as a copywriter at a white owned advertising agency,
her advertising campaign is credited to a senior white male copywriter
who then gets an award for it. The country is free. She is now
staying in a multicultural hostel for young ladies as one of a
handful of black ladies but she encounters the same injustices
post as she did pre-independence and there is no one she can complain
to because the powers-that-be are the same at her workplace as
at her high school. If there was ever a way of highlighting that
the more things change the more they stay the same, Dangarembga
manages to make that theme shine in The Book of Not.
To a reader of the 21st century, Tambu is infuriating in her timidity
and her inability to fight back, and yet, Dangarembga writes her
prose so well that in spite of wanting to kick Tambu even as you
read, you cannot, but avoid turning the pages to find out just
what the lead character’s end will be. It is also a sign
of Dangarembga’s historical accuracy that Tambu is the way
she is in spite of her education because, face it, women (black
or white) who acted liberated and spoke back in the early years
of post-independence Zimbabwe were an anomaly.
But Tambu can also be endearing even as she annoys. She joins
a group of white schoolmates to go and knit for the Rhodesian
Army. Her reason? Her twin white classmates’ parents were
killed by black guerillas and she hoped when the twins got back
to school they could hear what she is doing and realize that ‘we
are all not bad.’ Reconciliation? Forget Bishop Tutu. They
should have had a Tambudzayi as leader of South Africa’s
post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
In The Book of Not, Dangarembga reintroduces a lot of her old
characters, including Tambu’s detestable mother, her misogynistic
uncle, her bitter aunt, and her intelligent and ever-questioning
cousin Nyasha. It is the family we have all wanted to run away
from at some point in time. For all connoisseurs of African literature,
The Book of Not is an important new read. The story of Tambu surprises
with its poignant commentary on a still painful Zimbabwean past.
