Education as Alienation
Tiémoko’s experience with the French education system is very different from N’Deye’s. Tiémoko taught himself and learned from other’s who were educated in the community. Tiémoko exemplifies the ideal goal of the European education system. Even though it is not realistic for all Africans to go to school, the colonists hope that by educating a few within a community the white beliefs and ideology will spread. N’Deye and Tiémoko both had their minds colonized in slightly different ways, however the results are more or less the same. Both of these characters have alienated themselves, it seems willingly, from their families, communities, and cultures. Education has led them to point fingers at others in their community and find fault with their traditions and culture. The European culture and mindset have been introduced to their lives only to make them shy away from their African traditions and crave to be more European in their thinking.
This theme of education leading to alienation is seen in other African novels. Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novel Nervous Conditions also deals with many of the same thoughts about education discussed in Ngũgĩ’s Decolonising the Mind. This novel, set in Rhodesia in the 1960’s, may have a different setting and timeframe compared to God’s Bits of Wood, but the two novels share similar educational attitudes. Nervous Conditions tells the story of various children in an extended family and their reactions to the British education system. Like N’Deye and Tiémoko in God’s Bit’s of Wood, the characters of Nhamo and Nyasha in Nervous Conditions ultimately alienate themselves from their families and communities due to the education they receive.
The very first line of Nervous Conditions opens with Tambu (the narrator) admitting, “I was not sorry when my brother died” (Dangarembga 1). Tambu uses this novel as a method to show how education not only changed herself, but the lives of both her brother Nhamo and her cousin Nyasha. This opening line of the novel, while it may sound callous, is fully explained as the story unfolds. In fact, the reader later realizes that Tambu does not mourn her brother’s loss because the Nhamo that died no longer resembled her brother. The missionary education that he devoted all his energies to transformed Nhamo into a boy barely recognizable by his own sister. However, Nhamo’s education is initially seen as a blessing to his family. With his family living in near poverty conditions on a homestead, Nhamo’s education would help his family rise out of their economic pitfall. However, as the novel shows, the price of education is often times alienation from the family and culture that once served as a support system. Nhamo’s change in character is shown very early on when he moves to the missionary. In fact, “[v]ery soon after going to the mission [Nhamo] stopped coming home to stay during the short vacations…he came back home only once a year” (6). Nhamo never dealt with homesickness, and the novel never suggests that he ever missed his family or his home. Instead,
…Nhamo was forced once a year to return to his squalid homestead, where he washed in cold water in an enamel basin or a flowing river, not in a bathtub with taps gushing hot water and cold; where he ate sadza regularly with his fingers and meat hardly at all, never with a knife and fork; where there was no light beyond the flickering yellow of candles and home-made paraffin lamps to enable him to escape into his books when the rest of us had gone to bed. (Dangarembga 6)
