Carrying the burden of being a girl and a woman in Southern Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe), Tsitsi Dangarembga, in her three novels – Nervous Conditions, The Book of Not and This Mournable Body - depicts the life and saga of a female character from the time she’s a girl, till she becomes a mature woman. The three novels demonstrate the turbulent and tortuous path towards self-development and emancipation of Tambudzai, the girl yearning to receive an education; Tambudzai, the teenager struggling to have a voice at the Young Ladies College of the Sacred Heart, mostly attended by white students, and Tambudzai the woman, whose white male co-workers are being credited for her achievements. In the last novel of the saga, Tambudzai is craving to find a job in a society suffused with patriarchal domination, a colonial spirit and her frustrated prospect of finding a place in the post-colonial world. The radical content of the voice of Tambudzai, the protagonist and narrator, represents an innovative way of advocating a social change of the women in Zimbabwe, and metonymically of the women of Africa. Gayatri Spivak claims that any system, any discourse, inevitably excludes something. The aim of this paper is to ‘hear the whisper, [or even the silence], of what cannot be said’ through the life of this girl/woman, Tambudzai, to trace aspects of her identity, subjectivity and experience in the colonial/post-colonial, Southern Rhodesia, today Zimbabwe. Key words: subjectivity, women, colonialism, post-colonialism, hybridity.