Background
Tsitsi Dangarembga was born on February 4, 1959, in Rhodesia, now called Zimbabwe, in the town of Mutoko. She moved to England as a young girl and spent her early childhood there.
Tsitsi Dangarembga was born on February 4, 1959, in Rhodesia, now called Zimbabwe, in the town of Mutoko. She moved to England as a young girl and spent her early childhood there.
Dangarembga studied medicine at Cambridge University but returned home soon after Zimbabwe was internationally recognised in 1980. She took up psychology at the University of Zimbabwe and became a member of a drama group. She then continued her education later in Berlin at the German Film and Television Academy, where she studied film direction and produced several film productions, including a documentary for German television.
Dangarembga started her career, working as a copywriter for a marketing agency, while she still was a student. During that time she also discovered her love of theater. She wrote several plays that were put into production at the university. In 1983, her play The Lost of the Soil got the attention of Robert McLaren, and Dangarembga joined his theater group, Zambuko. While involved in this groups she participated in the production of two plays, “Katshaa!” and “Mavambo.”
Dangarembga also explored prose writing. In 1985, she published a short story in Sweden called "The Letter". In 1987, she published the play She Does Not Weep in Harare. At the age of 25, she had her first taste of success with her novel Nervous Conditions, published in 1988.
Two years later she went to Berlin to continue her education and produced several film productions, including a documentary for German television. She also made the film Everyone's Child, shown worldwide including at the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival.
Dangarembga returned to Zimbabwe with her family in 2000 to work at Nuyerai Films, the film production company she founded in Harare. She is also the executive director of Women Filmmakers of Zimbabwe and is the founding director of the Women’s Film Festival of Harare. She founded the International Images Film Festival in 2002 in response to the proliferation of beauty contests at that time, to provide diverse narratives by and about women.
Now Dangarembga works as a freelance writer and filmmaker, living in Harare, Zimbabwe.
A former medical and psychology student, Tsitsi Dangarembga is the first black Zimbabwean woman to direct a feature film and is the author of the prize-winning novel Nervous Conditions. She has written in several genres, including a work of short fiction, a novel, a stage play, and two screenplays. The novel, Nervous Conditions, was first published in Zimbabwe in 1987, but soon thereafter was also issued in England and the United States. In 1989, it won the African section of the Commonwealth Writers Prize. Prior to this award, Dangarembga had won the second prize in a short story competition of the Swedish aid-organization, SIDA. Moreover, the novel Nervous Conditions was named as one of the top 100 books that have changed the world.
While studying at the German Film and Television Academy, Dangarembga produced films including a documentary for German television. She wrote and directed the feature film Everyone’s Child, which was released in 1996.
In 2006, The Independent named Dangarembga one of the fifty greatest artists shaping the African Continent.
In May 2016, Dangarembga was selected by the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center for their 2015 Artists in Residency Programme.
(A searing novel about the obstacles facing women in Zimba...)
2018(A sequel to Nervous Conditions, this is a powerful and en...)
2006
