Tsitsi Dangarembga: ‘We are never completely free; we have moments of freedom’

The Nervous Conditions referenced by the title of the first novel of Tstisi Dangarembga, 66, were also described by Jean-Paul Sartre in the prologue to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. Said nerves come from the loss of all references, from no longer understanding one’s place in the world.

This happened to Dangarembga herself when, after living with a British foster family, she returned to Zimbabwe. Her life was a race to maintain her own voice as a psychiatrist, psychologist, writer and, when she failed to get her work published, filmmaker.

After training to be a film director in Berlin, she returned to Zimbabwe to create a film school that looked to build up a local spirit of criticism, so that her country’s history would no longer be solely explained from the outside. Her husband, German filmmaker Olaf Koschke, runs the school. Their three children, an architect and two engineers, live in Berlin.

This interview takes place at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània in Barcelona (CCCB), where Dangarembga lived for three months at the invitation of the CCCB, the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and the Mir-Puig Foundation.

Question. “I have been in flight since I left the womb.” How did your path to freedom begin?

Answer. I don’t think we’ll ever reach freedom. I think that it’s a thing we sometimes get closer to, and sometimes we move further away from. Some people believe that freedom is an individual matter. And they may have a lived context that allows them to believe that they are free. But something always happens that makes it clear that we are never completely free; we have moments of freedom. Freedom is a desire. Achieving it requires us to move towards it.

Q. Have you ever felt free?

A. No. I have always lived in limiting circumstances. Since I was very small, I’ve had a relationship with the structures of colonization. That has made me conscious of my limits.

Q. You have written about the destruction produced by colonization, sometimes in paradoxical ways. Your parents became professors. You question that achievement.

A. In a process of colonization, everything is in the service of the colonization project. Including the education of colonized people so that they may educate their fellow citizens in the submission that colonization entails. People’s emancipation is not sought. Their growth is not pursued, their submission is sought.

Q. Does that search for submission include the work of the church?

A. In a Bible belonging to a Catholic priest, who was a missionary in the Congo, a letter from Leopold II was found. In it, the Belgian king spoke of teaching the aspects of Christianity that led to people’s docility and avoiding its liberatory aspects. In my opinion, the colonial project and religion have always acted in collusion to protect colonization.

Q. What do you think about NGOs?

A. We live in a world structured by the way in which capital is developed. Capital is the power that rules the world. And there is no project born from capital that does not serve capital. A friend who directs a cultural institution in Zimbabwe told me that working with an NGO is like someone showing up, pulling off the person who’s strangling you, letting you breathe — then putting the strangler right back on top of you.

Q. So, what can be done? Where can we find energy and hope?

A. I think that one heals and improves from understanding and not from confrontation. We are in the world together. The Global South has for years been a testing ground for ways of extracting what capital calls value. Some European leaders fear the invasion of immigrants and look to strengthen borders. It makes no sense, because we have a system governing the planet that is based on the extraction of value. What makes you think that system is going to respect borders?

Q. You have written that you were born “without complete humanity.”

A. I developed an identity in a society that denies humanity to Black people. My submission was threefold: being Black, a woman and poor. Our civilization, according to the North, was not civilized. That made them want to destroy it. And one might ask, if it wasn’t a civilization, why such determination to destroy it?

Q. Today you’re no longer a poor woman.

A. I am less poor. But I face a fourth category of submission: age. The Africa that interests the Global North is the powerful one. And the young one. Hendrik Verwoerd, who was the first prime minister of South Africa, said that when apartheid began, African women and children were unnecessary appendages. The danger of not stopping something like that is that it escalates. Today, adult African men have become unnecessary appendages.

Q. What has to happen for your humanity to be in question?

A. Power divides. It’s a political issue. Slavery has to do with the strong bodies that Europe needed. Now young people’s minds are more valuable.

Q. In 1890, Cecil Rhodes invaded what was then known as Rhodesia with 500 men.

A. It was a private army, not a national one. I read in that invasion one of the first instances of capital acting as sovereign.

Q. In Zimbabwe, the Land Apportionment Act of 1930 only allowed Africans to buy land in 7% of the country.

A. Eighty percent of the planet was Western property. Now we see Afrikaners denying that certain groups existed before they arrived. It’s interesting. That discussion brings us back to an essential question: who is human? They believe that the previous inhabitants were not human. Not recognizing humanity is a way of trying to rewrite history. If you are white and rich, the world will believe you.

Q. Many white people don’t feel like we are part of those who enslaved and exploited.

A. Abuse has the effect of grouping us together. We lose our individuality. The oppressed share a discriminatory experience, and anything that threatens their lives leads to a feeling of rejection.

Q. All of your work looks to construct a personal and collective identity to explain who you are, so that no one has to tell your story through novels and films.

A. The West speaks of an Africa that does not exist. I feel privileged to have been able to develop the ability to question things beyond accepting what is comfortable, safe, or what seemed reasonable. My personal background prepared me: living with a family of people with less melanin since I was two years old made me understand that I would always be seen differently. [Though she has written an autobiographical book called Black and Female, Dangarembga does not speak of people in terms of Black and white, but rather, of those with more or less melanin]. When I returned to Zimbabwe, I was aware that there, they also practiced a form of apartheid. I was a reflective child. If I didn’t understand something, I’d mull it over and research it. My mother told me that she suffered for me, that she knew it would get me in trouble. She projected her fear onto me.

Q. Your mother was the first woman to get a university degree in South Africa.

A. But to be able to work and have a family, you have to make sacrifices. And stay quiet. To respect is not staying quiet, it is speaking out. Although I have learned that it makes no sense to say things that are only going to nurture animosity. Where you will not be hard is not the place to speak.

Q. Isn’t it necessary to sacrifice to achieve things?

A. People should never sacrifice the essential.

Q. In your novels, you appear to similar to both the young woman who studies to please others and the rebel who is searching for her own voice…

A. I always write of what I know. Everything is autobiographical, that which I’ve lived or witnessed. One questions power when one has references, and can conceive of something beyond survival. With my novels, I look to offer tools for analyzing the world. One can observe sexism in one’s own family, and then know how to see abuses when faced with another kind of power.

Q. In Black and Female, you criticize paternalism, which infantilizes women.

A. That idea of protecting women — when in reality, women are generally more protectors than protected — shows that the feminist movement still has a long way to go. It’s important to understand that people are the product of their relationships with power, because we have seen that power changes them. That affects our situation, but it shouldn’t transform our identity. It’s important to know who your group is. Capital builds barriers between groups of people. It’s not interested in consensus.

Q. You’ve written that colonization turns one’s religion into superstition, one’s art into craft and tries to civilize you according to values and customs that are not your own. Reading your books, I’ve thought of the similarities between colonialism and technification.

A. They’re similar. Social media was designed to keep us from thinking autonomously. Colonization reduced us to labor. And technology reduces us to data. Everything we do, as small as it may be, is information that serves the capitalist system.

Q. What is progress?

A. We have built a society that pushes people to leave the countryside and move to the city. You arrive not knowing if you will get to a better life, but you have hope. The people who, today, are doing well in the countryside are those who decided to return after learning about life in the city. I have thought a lot of the Greek concept of the hero who goes out into the world and returns. We have that in our head, not the stories of the people who suffer trying to better their lives.

Q. The news reports on them every day.

A. Those aren’t personal stories. The system creates those kinds of lives. And the system is not interested in saying what it’s doing poorly.

Q. You write that colonization disguises wounds as gifts, as in scholarships and hospitals.

A. It’s about being useful to the empire. And the empire is like a guillotine: it wants you in its service.

Q. Has colonialization given us anything good?

A. It’s impossible to say this part is good and that part is bad because everything in colonization responds to a goal: perpetuating the system. And the system of the exploitation of one part of the population at the hands of another is not good.

Q. Your parents got their education in one of the missions and became professors.

A. And in tools of the empire to educate other Black people. To be able to vote as a Black person, you had to have a certain education. That is to say, they created division among Black people. When Livingstone traveled to what today is Zimbabwe, Zambia and Botswana, he wasn’t able to evangelize people and in his journal he wrote, “It’s impossible to convert them because they are happy with the life they have.” So the only way to achieve what the British crown wanted was to destroy their way of life. That is what happened.

Q. How did you learn of that incredibly high price?

A. My first memories are in the United Kingdom. My parents studied in London and I lived with a foster family.

Q. Do you still have a relationship with them?

A. The mother came to visit us in Rhodesia. But she’s dead now.

Q. You were with that family for three years. You returned to Rhodesia and ultimately became the only Black woman studying medicine at a college in Cambridge. Don’t you feel privileged by the colonizers?

A. As a child, I didn’t think about any of that. But when I was 16, during our civil war, I had to leave high school because white people were starting to leave the country and since there weren’t enough teachers, Black people couldn’t study anymore. That’s when I saw it: inequality can ruin people’s lives.

Q. You were able to get to Cambridge.

A. I was. But many people weren’t.

Q. You have written that your childhood in the United Kingdom taught you to distrust happiness.

A. My toys, my parents… everything disappeared. I think that even today, I feel uncomfortable with happiness. I’m distrustful. I understand that it is something that I should enjoy when it happens and not expect it to change some fundamental part of your life. It was a practical lesson.

Q. Were you a difficult child?

A. A little girl who asks questions can become an adult who thinks she should give answers. It was very hard for me to tell my kids “I don’t know.” But my parents would have replied that I was difficult. There are many stories of Black children who were fostered in the United Kingdom and who, when they returned to Africa, were unable to adapt. One lost the ability to speak and had to return to their foster parents. Being a foster child may seem like a privilege. In part, it is. But it means that you are constantly severing fundamental relationships. It is not healthy.

Q. Why did it happen?

A. I asked my mother. She said that in our culture, it was normal to go to live with family members. That’s how she understood it.

Q. Why did the United Kingdom encourage the practice?

A. They sent single men to England to be educated so that they could serve the colonial enterprise. They realized that they were forming relationships with white women, and that became a problem. So they changed the rules: they gave scholarship to married couples, so that both spouses could study.

Q. And that’s how the children came.

A. Even the children were used by the colonizing company. They were placed with families who needed financial assistance. It was paid care.

Q. You returned to Harare to study psychology.

A. Understanding the construction of identity has been the motivating factor behind everything I do. I think it comes from having been a foster child.

Q. After your studies, you began to write. What did your parents say to that?

A. They saw it as a hobby. I didn’t get published until I sent my book to an editorial that published Black authors.

Q. Since you weren’t getting published, you studied film in Germany. And upon your return, you founded a film festival.

A. An NGO to train women filmmakers. It’s all the same: looking for the way to communicate what we truly are, not what they say about us.

Q. A form of decolonization?

A. That has been my work: to decolonize. It’s important, because these things come back. In Europe, there are people today who fear immigrants.

Q. The nervous condition.

A. That’s right. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote it in the prologue of Frantz Fanon’s book The Wretched of the Earth: “The status of ‘native’ is a nervous condition introduced and maintained by the settler among colonized people with their consent.” That fear is installed in the mind of voters whom someone wants to manipulate. It talks about immigrants taking their job, but not about how immigrants work for less. Immigrants come to work while you sit down to watch Netflix.

Q. Is it possible to heal without seeking vengeance?

A. I don’t understanding healing with violence. The body heals with time and, I think, the spirit too. When you have the means — shade, water, the chance to rest — you heal faster.

Q. Your country’s independence didn’t bring many people out of poverty or lead to social awareness.

A. Independence led Zimbabwe to align itself with the Communist bloc, and geopolitics changed. Europe could no longer defend its presence in African as being for the sake of our development.

Q. What was the impact of Communism?

A. What they created was capitalism for the elite and socialism for everyone else. It’s true that investment in education increased and spending on weapons decreased. But when students began to protest, they stopped investing in education. It’s automatic: no one wants a mass of people who can’t be manipulated. But... why not try the opposite, an educated mass? What would happen?

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