Education as Alienation
Ousmane’s character of N’Deye Touti serves as an extreme example of the negative effects of the colonial educational system on the African people. N’Deye is a product of the formal education system, and her involvement and interaction with her fellow Africans in the novel reflects just how alienated she has become from her own people and culture. N’Deye’s alienation from her community is an extreme case because she not only has been educated in the European system, but attended the teacher’s training school prior to the strike (Ousmane 57). This insight is significant because not only has N’Deye been educated by the French, but now she, an African woman, will help spread this same education that alienated her from her very own people. N’Deye herself recognizes her alienation. In fact, she is aware that “[s]he lived in a kind of separate world; the reading she did, the films she saw, made her part of a universe in which her own people had no place, and by the same token she no longer had a place in theirs” (57). N’Deye is consciously alienating herself from her own community. She no longer thinks “her own people [have a] place” in her life (57). It is not as if she is being ostracized by her community for being educated, rather N’Deye does not feel as if she is part of the community, and so she is turning her back on it. N’Deye’s impression of her people slowly begins to change when she starts noticing their so called inadequacies, as Ngũgĩ talks about in Decolonising the Mind. N’Deye begins to see her people as “…polygamous…and this, in turn, had made her recognize what she now called the ‘lack of civilization’ of her own people” (57). Just from her language, it is evident that N’Deye is gradually assimilating with white culture. The fact that she uses the word “polygamous”—and labels the people she lives among with this term—shows the influence white education and culture is having on her. Prior to her education, the word “polygamous” would not have been a part of her vocabulary because it is a term steeped in white culture. Furthermore, the reader can hear the colonization of her mind when she uses the phrase “lack of civilization” to describe her people. These ideas are not something N’Deye picked up at home or from other Africans, but they were formally taught to her in the classrooms of the French schools set up in her village. She is assimilating with the ‘other’ and in the process is alienating herself from her community.
N’Deye does not simply remove herself from her community, but begins to look down at them and find fault with those that raised her. N’Deye is doing what Ngũgĩ describes in his text when he says: “Colonial alienation takes two interlinked forms: an active (or passive) distancing of oneself from the reality around; and an active (or passive) identification with that which is most external to one’s environment” (28). N’Deye is actively alienating herself from her culture and associating herself with the Western culture when she makes this observation as she leaves a movie theatre:
Real life was there; not here in this wretched corner, where she was confronted with beggars and cripples at every turning. When N’Deye came out of the theatre where she had seen visions of mountain chalets deep in snow, of beaches where the great of the world lay in the sun, of cities where the nights flashed with many coloured lights, and walked from this world back into her own, she would be seized with a kind of nausea, a mixture of rage and shame. (Ousmane 57)
