Anxious about her prospects after leaving a stagnant job, Tambudzai moves to a widow's boarding house and eventually finds work as a biology teacher. But at every turn in her attempt to make a life for herself she is faced with a fresh humiliation, until the painful contrast between the future she imagined and her daily reality ultimately drives her to a breaking point. As a last resort, Tambudzai takes an ecotourism job that forces her to return to her parents' impoverished homestead. An act of betrayal reveals just how toxic the combination of colonialism and capitalism can be. -- adapted from Amazon.com info.

"In Black and Female, Tsitsi Dangarembga examines the legacy of imperialism on her own life and on every aspect of black embodied African life. This paradigm-shifting essay collection weaves the personal and political in an illuminating exploration of race and gender. Dangarembga recounts a painful separation from her parents as a toddler, connecting this experience to the ruptures caused in Africa by human trafficking and enslavement. She argues that, after independence, the ruling party in Zimbabwe only performed inclusion for women while silencing the work of self-actualized feminists. She describes her struggles to realize her ambitions in theater, film, and literature, laying out the long path to the publication of her novels. At once philosophical, intimate, and urgent, Black and Female is a powerful testimony of the pervasive and long-lasting effects of racism and patriarchy that provides an ultimately hopeful vision for change. Black feminists are "the status quo's worst nightmare." Dangarembga writes, "our conviction is deep, bolstered by a vivid imagination that reminds us that other realities are possible beyond the one that obtains.""--Publisher marketing.

Two decades before Zimbabwe won independence and ended white minority rule, thirteen-year-old Tambudzai Sigauke embarks on her education. On her shoulders rest the economic hopes of her parents, siblings, and extended family. and within her burns the desire for independence. She yearns to be free of the constraints of her rural village and thinks she's escaped when her wealthy uncle sponsors her schooling. But she soon learns that the education she receives at his mission school comes with a price.

In The Book of Not, Dangarembga reintroduces a lot of her old characters, including Tambu's detestable mother, her misogynistic uncle, her bitter aunt, and her intelligent and ever-questioning cousin Nyasha. It is the family we have all wanted to run away from at some point in time. For all connoisseurs of African literature, The Book of Not is an important new read. The story of Tambu surprises with its poignant commentary on a still painful Zimbabwean past. Dangarembga's authorial voice delves into the educational system, the liberation struggle and attitudes of contemporary Zimbabweans in an insightful and incisive examination of a system calculated to poison and destroy the African sense of self.