Nervous Conditions

So this is the book that has excited many young, emerging feminist activists and politically conscious women over the last two and a half decades. Having seen them go gaga over it on social media, mentioning it over and over again as a classic, I was curious. And as I held it in the bookstore, my eyes appraising as usual, trying to get a feel of it, I was arrested by the opening line:

‘I was not sorry when my brother died.’

Talk of an audacious opening line. And the first paragraph too is a mesmerizing and bold summary of the book itself, setting the tone for straightforward, sometimes deceptively simple, prose.

Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions (the title is inspired by a quote in Fanon’s book The Wretched of the Earth – “the condition of the native is a nervous condition”) is told in the first person through the voice of Tambu as she relives her coming of age story. She not only details her own struggle to gain formal education against a backdrop of a paternalistic and colonial society in rural Zimbabwe; she also tells of the struggles of four other women – her mother, cousin Nyasha, aunt Lucia, and her uncle’s wife Maiguru. Their struggles against cultural paternalism/patriarchy signify the nervous conditions from which they try to escape, but only Tambu and Lucia are shown to have succeeded in some respects, while Tambu’s mother and Maiguru, who are uneducated and educated respectively, both paradoxically remain entrapped despite their different social statuses. Nyasha rebels and her fate therefore hangs in the balance.

Nervous Conditions is quintessentially a coming of age story, beginning with young sibling rivalry and resentment between Tambu and her brother Nhamo who is taken to school while Tambu is discouraged simply because she is a girl. Tambu has to resort to her own resources, including selling maize to raise her school fees, and ironically only gets to go to the Missionary school after her brother dies (hence her declaration that she wasn’t sorry when he died). Getting formal education therefore becomes her escape from her “nervous conditions” (cultural paternalism/patriarchy), as is too for her aunt Lucia, who is able to defy cultural expectations to enroll in school at an older age.

Nevertheless, the contradictions of missionary education in colonial society are uncovered through Nyasha’s rebellion. While she studies hard to pass her examinations, she views education with suspicion, convinced that missionary education is serving a purpose that is not altogether altruistic. At the same time, having been exposed to life in England, she is freethinking, rebelling against her father’s paternalism.

Lucia attempts to convince her sister, Tambu’s mother, to escape cultural paternalism by leaving her philandering and lazy husband, but she refuses, apparently resigned to her fate in a patriarchal society that expects little of women beyond rearing children and tending to domestic duties.

Nervous Conditions is therefore not a linear story; it presents stories within the story, each advancing the same themes but from different angles. It is a series of rebellions against the patriarchs of the family – Nyasha and Tambu’s fathers. Tambu rebels against her father to assert her right to education; Lucia rebels against patriarchal expectations to settle down as a docile married woman; Nyasha rebels against her father’s controlling authoritarianism; and Maiguru rebels against her husband to gain greater freedoms, rights and respect as his wife. Some succeed, some fail, and Tambu’s mother doesn’t even try. The overarching theme is set against supplementary themes such as colonialism, poverty and inequality, missionary education, religion and culture, and family values.

Dangarembga’s portrayal of these challenges, dilemmas, and ironies is indeed profound and deft. She employs a very descriptive style to adequately portray life in rural, colonial and patriarchal Zimbabwe. In the end, one gets a feel of the extra challenges women faced in these conditions (and continue to face even in “free” African societies) and the determination required of them to overcome them.

Nervous Conditions is an enduring indictment, and I would recommend it as a great and inspiring read.

Picture credit: Goodreads

The Hiatus

I return to this blog shamefaced, like a married man returning to his wife after having some fleeting fun. I return with a beseeching smile, pleading eyes and a lowered, cajoling voice. Wait, a blog is all about words. So perhaps, hopefully, I return with a profuse stream of words that will soothe the hurt of neglect off the blog. I am ready to swear to good behavior; to be faithful at all times and to keep it in my mind the way the smell of meat hangs on a butcher. Yeah right.

All the same, belated compliments of the new season, as South Africans like to put it. In retrospect, I wish you all a merry festive season and a happy new year all in one breath, notwithstanding how absurd it sounds. It’s as if I disappeared into space and returned just now, trying to catch up on everything all at once without offering a sufficient explanation as to what brought forth a lengthy and criminal disappearance. Moroseness and remorse should pronounce themselves rather loudly here, but I am not given too much to excessive displays of both. Nevertheless, I do have some sort of explanation to such neglect (and this is not tongue in cheek): the last couple of months was a transitional period for me.

My Tour of Duty in Pretoria came to an end and so I made the transition back to our beloved city Nairobi, which somehow doesn’t feel obliged to return too much of that love. We love it despite its traffic, smog, smoke, dust, noise, bustle, congestion and so on (lately metal detectors), but it goes ahead and increases the intensity of what we dislike about it, the way a DJ would pump up the track in anticipation of rapturous screams, only that we, the revelers of our city, scream more in agony. We gnash our teeth, curse the accursed city, swear at an unresponsive serikali, and wish we could live in the rural homes we come from (well, not really). In the end, we stare back at an unrepentant Nairobi with the same defiance it throws our way. We stand toe to toe with it, eye-to-eye, unblinking as the hurtling towards a final confrontation gains speed.

Luckily, I hadn’t been on leave for more than a year, a fact I whimpered pitifully at the bosses that be (wouldn’t it be nice to be such a boss one day) and managed to get 30 days leave. So I breezed through Nairobi, kept contact with it to a bare minimum. The main joy it brought me was seeing my two sisters, brother-in-law, and a nephew who are based there, more so the young nephew as he couldn’t possibly remember me from the last time he saw me a year and a half ago. The delight I felt as he called me “anko”, reaching out his hand to be held as he walked, is a precious memory I will cherish. Liberal amounts of meat consumed at the Carnivore and Congolese live music at Simmers Restaurant pale in comparison.

My hometown Kakamega changes at a snail’s pace. The moment I arrived I could swear I was there only the previous day. Motorbike and bicycle bodabodas are still the main modes of transport. I quickly picked up grumblings about the absurdity of taxes on chicken and cows, proposed, bizarrely I must agree, by the County Assembly. Beyond that the Government and what it does seemed like distant thoughts on everyone’s mind. I was truly in Luhya land, where matters chicken and cows can easily inspire a revolution.

Again, the delight of meeting family after a long period of absence is precious. My mother, sisters, brother, nephews, nieces, uncles, aunts, and cousins – there simply wasn’t enough time for all. It is all a balancing act. I visited my late dad’s resting place, and the emotion reminded me of how fickle but precious, in short contradictory, life is.

Beyond the usual frustrations, such us being a walking ATM machine for long lost “friends” and relatives who make clear their dire financial situations just two minutes into pleasantries, my hometown is beautiful. The luscious green and the deep blue cloudless January and February skies enthralled the stuttering and spontaneous poet in me:

Simple green and profound blue

As I laze in breeze and shade

Away from city's haste and fade

I say this for it be true:

I am at peace, in rustic serenity;

I am home, in everyday simplicity.

This is the town where I learned to read and write; this is where everything about me was born. This is where I was defined, the reason why my relationships with cities will always be casual, fleeting and unemotional. The sighs I heave here are deep in appreciation of astounding, rustic and unaffected beauty; I smile back, unpretentious, from the heart, uninhibited.

And it is from here that I return to this blog shamefaced, like a married man returning to his wife after having some fleeting fun.

We Need New Names

Much has already been said about NoViolet Bulawayo’s Man Booker Prize-nominated We Need New Names, but I arrogate to myself the right to add my two-pence worth: it is beautifully written.

Ok, I realize I have to say a little bit more. We Need New Names is a thinly disguised tale of political and economic disempowerment in Zimbabwe, told through the eyes (and ears) of the juvenile, witty and humorous Darling and her fellow urchins Bastard, Chipo, Godknows, Stina, and Sbho. Narrated by Darling in the first-person, it follows her and her friends’ tribulations first in their poverty-stricken home area, ironically named Paradise, through to her emigration to America to join her Aunt in “Destroyedmichygen”, where she nevertheless finds that life isn’t as she had expected.

“So where are the twists in the story?” you might ask. Well, there aren’t. It is sort of an engaging commentary that brings up issue after issue, discarding them once they have been presented to you, presumably to solicit your empathy, or, if you are prickled enough, your outrage. Easy – just think of any problems that may be there in Zimbabwe, and you’ll find them in this book. Poverty, political and economic marginalization, emigration to South Africa and other places (principally America and the UK), HIV/AIDS, rape (Chipo is pregnant as a result of being raped by her grandfather), longevity of Mugabe in power, difficult lives and dislocation in exile, and many more (such as devious, greedy preachers, and even China in Africa). It is no wonder Nigerian Novelist Helon Habila notes “a palpable anxiety to cover every "African" topic; almost as if the writer had a checklist made from the morning's news on Africa.”

“Poverty porn” critics have had their feast on this book already. However, what would writing be if it weren’t from the heart, from what you see and feel and hear? If what you observe is devastating or disconcerting enough for you to write about it, why should you gag yourself? Anyway, enough of my little rant. If you shut your eyes to this little “checklist” hypothesis, you will be hit right in the gut by refreshing, innocent and keenly observant wit and humor that can only come from cheeky juveniles (Darling and her crew). If you are still standing, more will come and knock you down. That’s what saves this book and makes it very readable – tackling heavy issues through humorous and innocent-witted observant kids.

For instance, a twelve-year-old kid would leave you cross-eyed if she told you this:

“If you’re stealing something it’s better if it’s small and hideable or something you can eat quickly and be done with, like guavas. That way, people can’t see you with the thing to be reminded that you are a shameless thief and that you stole it from them, so I don’t know what the white people were trying to do in the first place, stealing not just a tiny piece but a whole country. Who can ever forget you stole something like that?”

We Need New Names is bittersweet. You will find yourself laughing then catching yourself, or just being unsure whether to laugh or not, trying to uphold your indignation but finding yourself unable to clamp that laugh that forces itself out with a snort:

“I remind myself I have decided that praying to God is a waste of time. You pray and pray and pray and nothing changes, like for example I prayed for a real house and good clothes and a bicycle and things for a long, long, time, and none of it has happened… I’ve thought about it properly, this whole praying thing, I mean really thought about it, and what I think is that maybe people are doing it wrong; that instead of asking God nicely, people should be demanding and questioning and threatening to stop worshipping him…”

Beneath every startling and witty observation is a heavy theme or issue that sneaks up on you. However, Darling’s wit and humor somewhat cools down as she grows older and moves to America to join her aunt. With that, the book’s sparkle and energy fades off slightly and becomes a bit laden by the theme of displacement and dislocation. Darling finds new problems in America. For instance, while she gets more food than she can eat, “there are times, though, that no matter how much food I eat, I find the food does nothing for me, like I am hungry for my country and nothing is going to fix that.”

NoViolet Bulawayo (Zimbabweans have colorful names indeed, her real name isn’t as colorful but she just had to do it on her pen name) doesn’t present an epic, astounding, or sweeping work of literature. This book’s appeal lies in its subtle trickery: You will read through heavy themes without feeling overburdened by them. You will feel involved. Sometimes you will laugh with Darling and her gang; sometimes you will feel like reprimanding them, or feel sorry for them and wish you could do something for them, or you would simply appreciate being part of them and sharing their sad or silly little secrets. This is the magic of writing.

Picture Credit: Goodreads

Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred

I have had the honour of listening to former South African President Thabo Mbeki deliver a couple of lectures. He shuffles and fidgets as he speaks, his beady eyes focused on either his script or on the audience. Looking at him speak, one gets the feeling that the wealth of knowledge and intellect cannot, will not, be hemmed in, and he fidgets and shuffles even more to let them out. His mildly impassioned baritone voice entrances as much as it holds attention – it holds your hand as it takes you on an intellectual high, and in the end one really doesn’t have a choice but be impressed. He exudes quiet but profound confidence that belies his short physical stature. After all, he is a man who caught the attention of the intellectual bigwigs of the African National Congress (ANC) when he was just a teenager.

Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred tells the extraordinary story of an extraordinary man. It is a detailed account of the life of a man who, drawing attention from an early age with his precocity, gave his life to the ANC, through exile during the struggle and in independent South Africa.

A common result of apartheid was the utter destruction of family life, but in the case of Thabo Mbeki, it became something akin to an understated tragedy. The ANC was his family. His father, Govan Mbeki, caught up in the early hints of an anti-apartheid struggle, was hardly around for his children as they grew up, and was then sentenced to life in prison on Robben Island together with Mandela. His marriage to Epainette, Mbeki’s mother, fell apart. Mbeki thus grew up with the imperative that the struggle was more important than family; his comrades were his family. Throughout the struggle, even when faced with the disappearances of his own son Kwanda and his brother Jama, he placed the struggle on a pedestal – all else came secondary.

This is the running theme in this biography by Mark Gevisser. Mbeki has often been described as aloof, cold, unfeeling, but this book dissects his motivations and presents him as someone who couldn’t, given his background, have lived any other way. I was however a little exasperated. I thought Mbeki and his family could have done something regarding his brother, for instance, who disappeared in Botswana, and at least have his remains brought to South Africa for proper burial. But then I caught myself: it is easy to be judgmental when the implications of situations and events aren’t fully apparent, no matter how much you may picture them in your head as you read.

Indeed, Mbeki lived through a time when dedication to the anti-apartheid struggle and movement was expected to be unquestioned. Even to his own father, he was no longer a son but a comrade. To Mbeki, his father Govan was no more than his mentors Duma Nokwe, Oliver Tambo, and finally Nelson Mandela. Thus Gevisser explores the not altogether warm relationship between father and son, tempered by the imperatives of struggle. In fact, Mbeki is shown to have had more of a father-son relationship with Oliver Tambo than with his own father.

An offshoot of this thread is the fact that Mbeki was seen as a favored child of the ANC as soon as he was noticed. We are cautioned however that, while he carried the Mbeki name, it was his precocious intellect that stood him out from the rest. He nevertheless faced some antagonism from fellow comrades of his age, most notably the late South African Communist Party leader Chris Hani, who felt slighted by the perceived favoritism. Indeed, Mbeki was coerced into scholarship in exile (London and Moscow) against his wishes (he wanted to join the struggle immediately after High School), and then made the then ANC President Oliver Tambo’s Political Secretary in Lusaka. Mbeki’s life therefore became a series of mentorships, the most prominent of which was with Tambo. In the latter part of the book Mbeki is shown to have come of age finally, winning the ANC Presidency unopposed on his own (without the loom of Tambo), delivering the highest percentage win of the ANC in national elections, and overcoming a difficult relationship with Nelson Mandela.

Whether as a result of prolonged exile or a natural aversion to violence, Mbeki’s approach to the struggle in the late 1980s and early 1990s favored negotiations above all else, and this antagonized him further with more militant comrades led by Chris Hani.

Gevisser suggests that perhaps Mbeki was caught up in the tensions and confluence of the three main arms of the movement – exile (in which he belonged), prison, and “underground” (those who remained in South Africa but managed to operate without being arrested). Some form of mistrust festered, even among the exiles, some of whom were in the “trenches” in Angola and Mozambique while Mbeki trotted the world defending the movement. He was thus seen as an untested comrade who insisted on talks, even talks about talks, at all costs, and was viewed with suspicion. Further, Mbeki is shown as being disdainful of establishing a home base, as Chris Hani and Jacob Zuma had done with their respective ethnic communities. The perception was therefore reinforced that he was out of touch with the masses and wasn’t a “people’s person”.

Thus we see that Mbeki has always been set apart, or set himself apart, from the rest, a fact that caught up with him in the ANC National Conference in Polokwane in 2007 when he was ousted as the Party’s President. There were no longer the shadows of Govan Mbeki, Duma Nokwe or Oliver Tambo to watch over him. The ANC, his comrades, his family, rejected him after having given over fifty years of his life to the movement.

Mbeki is presented in this biography as someone who has deep confidence in himself and his abilities, and who maybe, as a result, somehow needed to prove it again and again. He has always taken great exception to subtle racism, real or perceived. For instance, he resented what he called the “Mandela exceptionalism”:

“Mbeki called this attitude “Mandela exceptionalism” when he was being polite; the “one good native” syndrome when he was not. The argument went like this: Africa was irredeemable, and Mandela was the only good leader to ever come out of it; once he left office, South Africa would sink like the rest of the continent into the mire of corruption and decay, as Nigeria had. It seemed to Mbeki that Mandela was actually colluding in the world’s impression that he was the “one good native”, the consequence of which was the perception that all other black leaders – Mbeki foremost – were incompetent…”

Mbeki’s prickliness at these “subtle” and “unstated” forms of racism by the West was perhaps what hardened his resolve against anti-retroviral drugs, an unfortunate blight on his distinguished career, or what motivated his decision to defend Robert Mugabe, perhaps rightly so. Perhaps it is because he thought the black man is not really free, that the dream has been deferred, that he saw racism where it could have been implausible. It motivated his African Renaissance philosophy to keep the deferred dream alive.

In summary, this book is an extraordinarily well-written and detailed account of the life of one of the ANC’s foremost fixers – he always got the job done, whether as a diplomat, a charmer, a recruiter, a negotiator, or as President. It is a tribute to Mbeki’s lifelong dedication to the Party, his well-meaning motivations, and his pursuit of the dream deferred.

Picture credit: Goodreads

Tender Hairs Bristle

Tender hairs bristle, on my neck

And recoil. Blood rushes, and rushes back

Heart beats, thunder in my ear

Eyes bulge, lip drops

A word forms on it. I stop it –

It’s hopeless. I slump, and resign.

I wait. I look, and look again

Words won’t come, and I’m crushed more

Shrinking, sinking, drowning, wishing

Eons pass. Time is heavy

Heart breaks, more than the heartbroken

Feeling, feeling, feeling.

She looks one more time, and turns

Gone. I know, I understand, I stun

Eyes speak beyond words – her eyes

I turn. My eyes now speak

She gathers. Hurried. A flash of skin, and gone too

I look again. I’m all alone.

Picture credit: Soletron.com