When Tsitsi Dangarembga comes into view, draped in a grey-and-burgundy shawl against the Hamburg drizzle, my instinct is to greet her as a long-lost friend. I may be meeting the great Zimbabwean writer for the first time, but I feel I know her so well. It’s not just that I had that very morning finished the final novel in her agonising semi-autobiographical trilogy; it’s also that it has taken us 18 months of to-and-fro via countless changes of plan, from southern Africa to New England, to fix our lunch.
There are a few hardy locals in the courtyard of Yu Garden, a Chinese restaurant with happy memories for my guest. But late July though it is, it is too cold and damp a day for us and we head into the dark-beamed interior.
We had first planned to meet in 2021. On my mind was her recently concluded trilogy, a 30-year work of writing, whose plot unspools over the past five traumatic decades of her homeland. But even as literary accolades flooded in, politics intervened. Her bravery in denouncing Zimbabwe’s authoritarian regime led to her being in and out of court. In September last year, just a few days after we had made a third plan in the capital Harare, she was — ludicrously — convicted of inciting violence and given a six-month suspended sentence. Her “crime” was the impudence of walking down a road bearing a placard calling for a better life for Zimbabweans.
She discreetly opted for de facto exile. This January, after we nearly met in Boston while she had a fellowship at Harvard, she wrote: “The universe should reward your perseverance and find a time for this lunch to happen!”
Well, the universe did. Now, a few minutes walk from Hamburg’s picture-postcard Aussenalster Lake, in a neighbourhood of villas as far from the manic heart of Harare as I can imagine, the stars have aligned.
The conviction was overturned in May. She did briefly slip back home. But she has resumed her peripatetic existence and has just started a fellowship in Hamburg even as politics come to the boil again back in Zimbabwe. Next week, the country hosts another of its deeply flawed exercises in democracy.
“I didn’t want to be there in the pre-election time,” she says. “I mean, there’s nothing one can actually do, so I might as well be in an environment where I can work. That’s better than sitting in Zimbabwe and becoming upset at what’s happening in the political arena. Not that one is spared wherever one happens to be . . . ”
She recalls how a woman came up to her after a literary dinner in Sweden to tell of how the teenage son of a Zimbabwean opposition supporter had been attacked in Stockholm. They cannot know for sure that this was linked to the regime, but they suspect it was. Even if it was not, the story reflects the fear all too familiar to opponents of a tyrannical system.
“It follows you,” says Dangarembga. “Wherever.”
In her first novel, Nervous Conditions, Dangarembga wrote one of the opening lines — and introduces one of the searing voices — of modern fiction. “I was not sorry when my brother died,” says her narrator Tambudzai, then a 13-year-old girl growing up in rural poverty in racist white-run Rhodesia. Not only is she a second-class citizen by virtue of her race, she is a woman in a society run by and for men. Her brother’s death means that now she too has a chance of an education, a privilege previously reserved for him.
Like her creator, Tambudzai is sharp-eyed and relentlessly — understandably — dissatisfied. She has a pitiless take on her own life, family, friends, employers and society. Her trauma and battles unfold against and echo the backdrop of the nation’s: the war of independence, the hope of liberation, then the disappointments of the new order.
Yet they very nearly didn’t unfold at all. The manuscript of Nervous Conditions, written in the mid-1980s, the early years of independent Zimbabwe, and now feted as a trailblazer of feminist African fiction, was rejected by Zimbabwean publishers — and ignored in Britain. “I think publishers were not looking for much from Zimbabwe,” Dangarembga says; “they certainly were not looking for feminist literature.”
She was then in her mid-twenties and struggling to survive as a writer. She came to London, where “something stronger than fear pushed me to the [Women’s Press] publishing house”; her manuscript, “gathering dust” in a basement, ended up getting published in 1988 thanks to “one loyal editor”. This was all the more remarkable, she thinks, given the then “filter” of the industry that rationed out how many — or rather few — books from Africa it published. “It was more like a valve than a filter . . . so one had to trickle through.”
It is tempting, with the comfort of hindsight, to see the publication of Nervous Conditions as the start of an inexorable rise to global acclaim. The first novel written in English by a black Zimbabwean woman, it won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize the following year. The final part of Tambudzai’s trilogy, This Mournable Body, which was published in 2020 in the UK, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and has won a host of commendations.
But Dangarembga has had to keep battling all the way — not unlike Tambudzai. In the late 1980s, in despair at not being able to make a living out of writing, she turned to film-making. (In the early 1990s she wrote the script for Neria, which was to be Zimbabwe’s highest-grossing film.) The second part of her trilogy appeared only in 2006.
Yu Garden
Feldbrunnenstrasse 67
20148 Hamburg
Mapo tofu €16.90
Mushroom mix with beanshoots €18.90
Sesame balls x2 €9.80
Krombacher wheat beer x2 €12.40
Fresh mint tea x2 €9.80
Total inc service €77.80
She is telling me how happy she is that young women writers from Africa “don’t have to go through what I went through” — or at least not often — when the waitress arrives with two brimming glasses. On Dangarembga’s advice, we are having Krombacher non-alcoholic wheat beer. It is fruity yet delightfully sour. “It tastes like the original,” she says. “It’s just you don’t go woozy after you’ve drunk it!”
She toasts my perseverance. I raise a glass to hers. She orders for both of us two spicy vegetarian dishes: mapo tofu, a popular Sichuan recipe with water chestnuts and onions in a chilli sauce, and mushrooms with beanshoots. They have happy associations; she was taken to Yu Garden on her first evening in Hamburg by the foundation sponsoring her fellowship.
We return to the frontline of African writing. Even now, she says, there is a widespread assumption that it lacks a universal message. “There is an idea in different populations that information from certain parts of the world has value, whereas the products from other parts do not. People are often surprised when they find writing out of Africa that they can identify with.”
And so we come to the furnace at the core of her writing, the legacy of empire. Time and again, she returns to its corroding subtleties. These, more than the overt brutality and exploitation of colonialism, are at the heart of Tambudzai’s story and frustrations — and of Dangarembga’s own life.
“Empire is like a guillotine,” she wrote in a recent essay. “Empire required my parents to leave their home in Southern Rhodesia to travel to London on scholarships for professional education. This . . . was to enable them to return . . . and be even more useful to empire.”
It was 1961. The then two-year-old Dangarembga moved to the UK with her parents and her older brother. Her mother was clearly remarkable, the first black woman from what was then Southern Rhodesia to have a BA. Her father was a teacher. The two children ended up being placed with white foster parents in Kent for a few years while their parents studied in London. She was fortunate, she says, to have a good foster home, but she knows of other Zimbabweans who had a “tragic” time. It was in those years that she first learnt about race.
“I was so young that I don’t have pre-England memories. I did not realise there was a distinction [between white and black]. I actually had to learn about the concept of blackness and how it was applied to me . . . and the idea of belonging to a group.”
She continues: “Most melanated people in Rhodesia did not have [white] Rhodesians around them. That’s what the reserves [barren areas set aside by the settlers for black Africans] were for. It’s such an amazing concept that you have an area where you have a reserve human capacity and you can dip into it whenever you need. And your filter is the education system as to who you extract from this reserve human capacity.”
Dangarembga returned to Zimbabwe aged six. While she obviously identifies with her narrator, her life story is far closer to Tambudzai’s flashier cousin Nyasha, who returns to Zimbabwe as a girl after a stint in the UK and finds herself not quite at home in either world, flitting between the two. In real life, Dangarembga has done the same: she returned to the UK aged 18 to study medicine at the University of Cambridge — as the only black student at Sidney Sussex college — but dropped out after two unhappy years. We last read of Nyasha married to a German running an NGO in Harare; Dangarembga is now running an arts NGO with her German husband.
I feel a twinge of regret when she tells me that 35 years after Tambudzai first emerged on the printed page, her story is finally over. Is she still there, I ask, in your head?
“I don’t think I’ll ever be free of her,” she replies. “One of the first lessons of feminism for women of colour was that you have to stand up. So when I began writing myself into a knot, I thought to myself it is my duty to write these two characters into life and not out of it. I had to continue until they both had reasonable existences. So that’s what I did.”
The waitress returns. We have devoured our dishes. “Fresh, crunchy and spicy,” declares Dangarembga, delighted that I too approve. I order another Krombacher. She suggests we share a portion of sesame seed balls, which she assures me I will love. We turn to politics — and next week’s election.
She speaks so softly that I can scarcely hear her against the hum of the restaurant. Yet this retiring figure has a spine of steel. She spent a night in a cell in 2020 when she was arrested for her protest. Day after day, she posts on social media fierce denunciations of the regime. Has she ever been tempted to rein in her critiques? She shakes her head.
“There is no place to pull back to. If there were, I would be there, but there isn’t. People should not feel they are on the brink of extinction every minute of the day. I have less security than I did growing up. It is crazy that in independent Zimbabwe people should be less secure in terms of health, education and being able to sustain themselves. I am traumatised, actually. Yes.”
Next week the presiders over this disastrous record will be on the ballot papers for Zimbabwe’s latest five-yearly exercise in managed democracy. President Emmerson Mnangagwa, the autocratic successor of the independence leader Robert Mugabe, will seek a second term after a campaign of skulduggery and intimidation. His Zanu-PF party is looking to maintain its uninterrupted record in office since 1980.
I have covered many flawed Zimbabwean elections over the past three decades, I tell Dangarembga. The Congress party was in power in India for three decades before falling at the ballot box. Is there any chance of Zanu-PF suffering the same fate?
“Oh definitely, eventually. Everything has a period of growth and a period of decay. For me, the more pressing question is over the growth of something new and more vibrant . . . I’m not sure whether the atmosphere in the country can provide for that or whether it can just provide clones of what we have.”
Her analysis is simple. She sees the current kleptocratic elite as having learnt all too well from the European colonialists — as have Africa’s new imperialists, she says: China and Russia and others. “The narrative is presented differently but the intention and motivation are similar.”
So how long will it be before Africa finds itself treated as an equal? She cites approvingly the argument of Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o that it’s up to Africans “not to allow that kind of treatment”. But for this to happen, she adds, African states need to move on from the worship of the heroic revolutionary past.
“There’s always the narrative of the creation of the nation. So that is the past that people hold on to because they can’t see anything else, they can’t see a future.”
And what does she say to Zimbabweans who argue that she is giving succour to people who wanted the postcolonial state to fail? “If one has a government which has invested in causing misery, then I feel one has to speak about it. I am not known for not having opinions nor for being reticent. I narrate.”
I look at my notes and read a quote from one of her essays: “just surviving is very ingrained in this part of the world.” Is it not hard to challenge the system when you are struggling to survive?
“Yes, our government in Zimbabwe has understood that very well and behaves in ways to make sure the majority of the population are in that situation. They also make sure they are not just surviving themselves, materially — but they have to ensure that the rest of the population is, for them to be able to continue doing what they do.”
Dangarembga recalls when Tambudzai first goes to a mission school. “She sees the flowers and she’s astonished that you can just plant things because they’re beautiful and you want to have beauty around you — not because you have to eat or else you will die.”
As we savour our gooey sesame balls, she tells me of a project that takes us far from the awfulness of Zimbabwean politics. She has written a piece for Oslo’s “Future Library” project. Its editors have commissioned a number of writers whose work will be unveiled in the 22nd century. All she can say is that her story is set in Zimbabwe and is called “Narini and Her Donkey”.
“The liberating thing was that I didn’t have to worry about what people are going to say. I could just write whatever I wanted.”
With that thought, we step out into the sunlight which has at last broken through the gloom.
Alec Russell is the FT’s foreign editor and a former southern Africa correspondent
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