A few days ago she was still in court in Zimbabwe, now she is reading in the Haus am Dom.
Having performed in Oslo and Berlin since leaving Harare, Tsitsi Dangarembga is now back in the city where she received the Peace Prize in October 2021.
And her readers want to see her, want to know that she's okay.
The hall is sold out, the applause is strong.
Not a word about the process, instead Dangarembga talks about Tambudzai, the heroine of her novels, first energetically, later weakly.
Contact with white society is to blame, says the author.
At home in the village she was allowed to think of herself as a whole person, then she encountered an environment that explained to her that this was not the case.
But it is also about the codification of black jurisdiction in Natal and other colonies since the 18th century.
feeling of "emasculation"
What white people wrote down had little to do with traditional laws: "Only with a 200-year reaction to an attacker." Only men were interviewed: "Their understanding of masculinity was attacked anyway." Which has been considered genuine since then African is filtered through the feeling of "emasculation" on the part of the interviewees and their projection of these feelings "onto the women".
Dangarembga thinks carefully and against the grain.
She draws a parallel between the migration of the first people from Africa and the European voyages of discovery and conquest since the 15th century: “They came back to the African continent.” After colonialism, there is something “that we would not have learned if if he hadn't existed".
Hopefully she can feel the same way about her trial.