THE publishing journey of Zimbabwean writer and filmmaker Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions wasn’t easy. Yet the novel is today considered by many as one of Africa’s 100 best books of the 20th century and is studied at universities around the world. TINASHE MUSHAKAVANHU, Junior Research Fellow, University of Oxford When she submitted the manuscript to publishing houses in Zimbabwe in the early 1980s, they all turned it down. Dangarembga felt at the time that it was “very difficult for men to accept the things that women write and want to write about: and the men (were) the publishers”. It was…