Episode 1: Tsitsi Dangarembga | The African Imaginary Podcast
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In this, our first episode of The African Imaginary Podcast, host Khangi Khoza and writer Tsitsi Dangarembga dive into the importance of the African imagination, Tsitsi’s African icons, spirituality in her later writing, advice to writers, and more.
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Tsitsi Dangarembga is one of Africa’s key literary voices. She has been writing for four decades and is best known for her trilogy of novels set in her home country, Zimbabwe. Nervous Conditions was the first novel by a black Zimbabwean woman to be published in English, and was praised by the late Chinua Achebe for being ‘as natural as the grass grows’.
In 2020, Dangarembga’s novel This Mournable Body was shortlisted for the Booker Prize – something she has described as ‘absolutely immense’ and life-changing. Two years later she was named by The Financial Times as one of the 20 most influential women in the world after she was arrested in Harare for inciting public violence. Her crime was walking with a placard that read ‘We Want Better. Reform Our Institutions’.
Among Dangarembga’s other awards are the English PEN Pinter Prize, the German Peace Prize, Yale University’s Windham Campbell Prize and the PEN Catalan Free Voice Award. She is a former fellow of the Rockefeller Bellagio Centre, the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study and the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, and she was the International Chair in Creative Writing (Africa) at the University of East Anglia, and is an honorary fellow of her alma mater, Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.
She says that the subject of the African imaginary has ‘been on [her] mind, waking and sleeping, for the last 30 years’, because she believes that ‘no significant human advancement has ever taken place without tapping human creative potential’.
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Tsitsi Dangarembga is one of Africa’s key literary voices. She has been writing for four decades and is best known for her trilogy of novels set in her home country, Zimbabwe. Nervous Conditions was the first novel by a black Zimbabwean woman to be published in English, and was praised by the late Chinua Achebe for being ‘as natural as the grass grows’.
In 2020, Dangarembga’s novel This Mournable Body was shortlisted for the Booker Prize – something she has described as ‘absolutely immense’ and life-changing. Two years later she was named by The Financial Times as one of the 20 most influential women in the world after she was arrested in Harare for inciting public violence. Her crime was walking with a placard that read ‘We Want Better. Reform Our Institutions’.
Among Dangarembga’s other awards are the English PEN Pinter Prize, the German Peace Prize, Yale University’s Windham Campbell Prize and the PEN Catalan Free Voice Award. She is a former fellow of the Rockefeller Bellagio Centre, the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study and the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, and she was the International Chair in Creative Writing (Africa) at the University of East Anglia, and is an honorary fellow of her alma mater, Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.
She says that the subject of the African imaginary has ‘been on [her] mind, waking and sleeping, for the last 30 years’, because she believes that ‘no significant human advancement has ever taken place without tapping human creative potential’.
Chapters
- 00:00 Intro
- 01:05 What is the ‘African imaginary’?
- 04:01 Tsitsi plays ‘Keep or Toss’
- 06:20 The meaning of Tsitsi’s name
- 08:41 Tsitsi speaks on her childhood
- 09:51 Tsitsi’s first enemy
- 11:47 What inspired Tsitsi to write?
- 14:01 Tsitsi on the ‘African imaginary’
- 15:16 European investments in African art
- 16:45 The state of the film industry
- 18:20 Do people want African stories?
- 19:50 The craft of storytelling
- 21:20 Which stories are able to be told?
- 23:16 The cost of being a truth teller?
- 27:29 How do you approach your creative work?
- 27:38 Childminder's stories deserve to be told
- 31:46 Our personhood has been challenged
- 33:21 Tsitsi’s opening lines, the craft of arresting and entertaining writing
- 34:49 Themes of death, spirituality and African cosmology
- 37:02 Do you think a nation can have a soul?
- 42:08 Tsitsi's African icons and influences, Chinua Achebe
- 46:50 What do you hope young girls inherit by reading your books?
- 47:22 How do I become a writer?
- 49:36 AI, authorship and writing
- 54:29 Outro