Quote by Tsitsi Dangarembga: “The condition of native is a nervous condition.”

Being colonised is not just a political or economic condition — it is a psychological one. The colonised person lives in a state of permanent tension, navigating two worlds, two sets of expectations, two versions of who they are supposed to be. This is not metaphorical; it is a description of actual mental and emotional stress created by colonial power.

Nervous Conditions was published in 1988, eight years after Zimbabwean independence, as the promises of liberation were already being complicated by political repression under Mugabe's ZANU-PF government. The novel looked back at the colonial era to understand the psychological inheritances that independence alone could not undo.

Zimbabwean novelist and filmmaker whose 1988 debut novel Nervous Conditions was the first novel by a Black Zimbabwean woman to be published in English. The novel's title is drawn from a line in Fanon's preface to The Wretched of the Earth. She received the PEN International Award for Freedom of Expression in 2021 after being arrested at a protest in Harare.