Tsitsi Dangarembga
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Tsitsi Dangarembga (b. 1959) is a Zimbabwean author and filmmaker.
[edit] Biography
The writer was born in Mutoko, Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) in 1959. She spent part of her childhood in England, beginning her education there but concluding her A-levels in a missionary school in her home country, in the town of Mutare. She later studied medicine at Cambridge University, but became homesick and returned home as black-majority rule began in 1980.
She started to study psychology at the University of Zimbabwe, as well as holding a job as a copywriter at a marketing agency for two years and being a member of the university drama group. This early writing gave her an avenue for expression, and she wrote many plays, such as The Lost of the Soil. She then joined the theater group Zambuko, and participated in the production of two plays, Katshaa and Mavambo.
In 1985 Dangerembga published a short story in Sweden called "The Letter". In 1987, she also published the play She Does Not Weep in Harare. At the age of twenty-five, she had her first taste of success with the novel Nervous Conditions. It was the first to be published by a black Zimbabwean woman. It won the African section of the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 1989. She continued her education later in Berlin at the Deutsche Film und Fernseh Akademie, studying film direction. She made many 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.
[edit] Works
As a novelist Dangarembga made her debut with Nervous Conditions, a partially autobiographical work which appeared in Great Britain in 1988 and the next year in the United States. A sequel, The Book of Not, was published in 2006.
Dangerembga wrote the story for the film Neria (1993), which became the highest-grossing film in Zimbabwean history. The protagonist is a widowed woman, whose brother-in-law abuses traditional customs to control her assets for his own benefit. Neria loses her material possessions and her child, but gets then help from her female friend (played by Kubi Indi) against her late husband's family. The title song is by Oliver Mtukudzi, who also appears in the film.
In 1996 she directed the film Everyone's Child. It was the first feature film directed by a black Zimbabwean woman. The story followed the tragic fates of four siblings, after their parents die of AIDS. The soundtrack featured songs by Zimbabwe's most popular musicians, including Thomas Mapfumo, Leonard Zhakata and Andy Brown.
