Migration: The Path of the People

A presentation from 2022–2023 Joy Foundation Fellow Tsitsi Dangarembga

Tsitsi Dangarembga is a writer and filmmaker whose work centers the African experience, with a focus on Zimbabwe. Her 2020 Booker Prize–shortlisted novel This Mournable Body (Faber & Faber, 2020) completes her Tambudzai Trilogy, which traces the life of a rural girl from her childhood in colonial Zimbabwe to her adulthood in a country repressed by political elites. Dangarembga lives and works in Zimbabwe, where she is the founding director of the Institute of Creative Arts for Progress in Africa (ICAPA) Trust.

Interrogating the ongoing repression and oppression in her home country—which includes torture, abduction, rampant corruption, and vote manipulation in a nation of largely immiserated, acquiescent citizens—Dangarembga’s research explores answers to the question, “What kind of people behave like that?” This question applies not only to power elites but also to enablers of systematic national oppression and to those who allow themselves to be oppressed. Her work is premised on the assumption that when a given population generates people who wield power destructively on an ongoing basis, the source of this tendency lies within the construct of that population.

Radcliffe Fellow Tsitsi Dangarembga Discusses the Consequences of Colonialism on Zimbabweans at Virtual Event (Harvard Crimson, 10/20/22)

Event Video