Education as Alienation
Clearly, education is being associated with money and status. At the missionary, along with learning the white man’s history and literature, Nhamo is also learning how to be “civilized.” He is learning that his life on the homestead is below standards, and now that he is educated, Nhamo feels as if he is above this poverty. Nhamo is being taught at school that “Africa…needs Europe to rescue it from poverty” (Ngũgĩ 28). He now has to be “forced” to go home to visit his own parents and siblings. To him the homestead represents a backward and unprogressive village, where he must eat with his hands and not utensils, and bath in the river, not in a tub as he did in the mission. “All this poverty began to offend him, or at the very least to embarrass him after he went to the mission, in a way that it had not done before” (Dangarembga 7). Nhamo is seeing the inadequacy in his home. Ngũgĩ warns that education leads people to see what is “wrong” in their previous lives. Once one is influenced by the white education system, soon one begins to judge things according to white standards. Nhamo is pulling away from his home and his family because his new education has taught him that what is African is wrong and uncivilized and, what is white is proper and as things should be.
Nhamo’s alienation from his family seems almost conscious at times. According to his mother, when Nhamo did come back to the homestead, he would not even speak his own language: “He had forgotten to speak Shona. A few words escaped haltingly, ungrammatically and strangely accented when he spoke to [his] mother, but he did not speak to her very often anymore…you could see he was no longer the same person” (Dangarembga 52). He lost the ability to use his mother tongue or perhaps he consciously shoes to speak English over Shona. It almost seems as if the missionary school erased much of his knowledge regarding his culture in their pursuit to “educate” him. Nhamo’s mother accuses Babmakuru, her brother in law that made Nhamo’s education possible, of changing her son for the worse with the education he instilled in him.: “First you took his tongue so that he could not speak to me and now you have taken everything, taken everything for good…You bewitched him and now he is dead…You and your education have killed my son” (54). Her harsh words actually describe exactly what Ngũgĩ believes the European education system does to the Africans. The education system took away Nhamo’s “tongue,” creating a separation between himself and his family. Ngũgĩ’s text Decolonising the Mind explains this beautifully. Ngũgĩ says, “There was often not the slightest relationship between the child’s written word, which was also the language of his schooling, and the world of his immediate environment in the family and the community…This resulted in the disassociation of the sensibility of that child from his natural and social environment, what we might call colonial alienation” (Ngũgĩ 17). Nhamo’s mother accuses education of killing her son because to her, education “divorced [Nhamo] from his spoken language at home” and divorced him from his family and culture (Ngũgĩ 17). In other words, the son she had once known became completely foreign and alien to her, so even though the family was surprised when he physically died, he was already figuratively dead long ago. Thus, the story begins with what seems like cruel words from Tambu regarding her brother’s death, but to her, Nhamo “became a stranger” and had already died when he first became educated at the missionary school (Dangarembga 55).
Tambu’s story regarding her cousin Nyasha’s experience is a bit different from her brother Nhamo’s but is still troubling nonetheless. Nyasha, educated in both England and Africa, pays a high toll for her education. Not only does she completely alienate herself from her family and culture, but she ultimately ends up physically and mentally harming herself. Tambu soon notices that being educated in England has changed her cousin, and perhaps for the worse: “I missed the bold, ebullient companion I had had who had gone to England but not returned from there. Yet each time she came I could see that she had grown a little duller and dimmer…” (Dangarembga 51-52). Tambu is suggesting that a different version of Nyasha returned back home to Rhodesia after studying in England. Nyasha returns from England a more reserved girl, who needs to re-familiarize herself with a family and a village that was once part of her everyday life. Nyasha was often “silent and watchful, observing [the family] with that complex expression of hers – what we said, what we did, how we said it, how we did it…” (52). Nyasha is taking on the role of an observer within her own family structure. She is an outsider, observing the mechanics of a family that no longer seems like her own, but something foreign. Studying and living in England has definitely alienated Nyasha from her African culture. Her own parents even recognize this change in her when they say she is “too Angelicised” (74). Nyasha has spent her childhood divided between two very different cultures, and this causes much confliction within her. Even Tambu “sensed the conflict that she was going through of self versus surrender and the content of sin” (118). Nyasha is having a conflict of identity. The two cultures she was educated in teach her very different ways of acting. In her missionary school in Rhodesia, the other girls did not like Nyasha. They would say, “Nyasha thinks she is white…She is proud…She is loose” (Dangarembga 94). The Africans perceive her as white, but in England, Nyasha feels very black. Neither England nor Africa feels like home to her. She feels alienated in both worlds. Her education in England has alienated her from her culture in Africa, but at the same time, the English will never accept her as one of their own. Nyasha deals with a constant feeling of being an outsider and foreigner to all the worlds she enters.
