Abstract:
This article addresses issues of the mnemonic space of the literature classroom by
interrogating a classic text of African women’s writing, Tsitsi Dangaremnga’s Nervous
Conditions (1988) for the ways it speaks about education in 1960s and 1970s late-colonial
Rhodesia. The article suggests that the novel reviews and critiques a number of memorial
strategies that were crucial to the colonial educational system, thereby facilitating a reflexive
application of the novel’s concerns to the contexts in which it is often taught, that of today’s
postcolonial classrooms. The article seeks to place Dangarembga’s novel in the context of its
present moment, contemporary South Africa – that of the present critic’s site of practice, both
pedagogical and scholarly, and that of many of this article’s readers. This present moment, in
turn, is made up the many sites, successive and simultaneous, in which the novel’s work of
memory is being re-activated in the minds of students as readers and writers. Via a dialogue
between the textual past and the pedagogical present, one which is often subject to critical
amnesia, the article seeks to inaugurate a debate on the nature of pedagogical memory in the
space of the postcolonial university or high school literature classroom.
