Nervous Conditions is set in the 1960s and 1970s in Rhodesia. British colonizers forcefully settled Rhodesia in 1889. Both the Ndebele and Shona peoples resisted the British colonizers, but the Ndebele entered into a peace treaty with Cecil Rhodes, a wealthy British politician, and the Shona fighters were defeated. Rhodesia became a settler-colony, which resulted in segregation, land seizures, and a governmental and social bias in favor of white settlers. While the colonizers forced many Africans into low-wage labor or enslavement, some subsisted on homesteads on reservations, meaning they had less direct contact with the colonizers. The settlers then voted in 1922 to become ruled by the British Empire. Resistance to British rule increased in the 1950s, with a war between Rhodesian and Zimbabwean forces erupting in 1966 and intensifying in the early 1970s. Zimbabwe won independence in 1980 (“Zimbabwe.” South African History Online).

Nervous Conditions depicts multiple impacts stemming from British colonization. Tambu’s family, who once lived on fertile ground, was forced to move onto a reservation because of land seizures by the colonizers. They were one of the small percentage of African families who lived primarily segregated from the colonizers as opposed to working for them or being enslaved by them.