Education

Education

Education in Nervous Conditions.

Education is often regarded as beneficial for people and necessary for

advancement where people willingly accept to get educated. However in

the case of Africa, education was forced on the population, especially

western education. Although the Africans had an established medium of

education, western education came to replace it and this education

under the façade of benefiting the society was there to exploit the

people. Western education destroyed the people’s culture exploiting

their intellect and their labor. The African’s medium of education was

there to inculcate the values and culture of the tribes and this way

of educating people was seen as inferior and the Europeans believed in

an eradication of that type of education: “The traditional African

educational systems, in their various forms, served the needs of the

African people much more than the colonial educational system ever

could.”

Colonial education brought forward by missionaries was intended to

make the local people westernized and follow or corporate with the

western government: “colonial African education was not based on a

desire to educate the African people, but a desire to have the ability

to control the African people.” Students who follow colonial

education are torn between the western world and their own African

world and they have this feeling of not belonging to either culture.

They don’t want to follow their own culture as they feel superior to

it and the white world does not accept them either. The Africans have

adopted alongside with the colonial education, the values of the

western world and this makes these students move away from the

traditional world of Africa. The young generation would feel that

through this education they had acquire too many skills to be able to

get a proper gob in their society which they consider as backwards and

when they leave their country for the colonial empire they are

rejected.

In Dangarembga's Nervous conditions, we are presented with the

westernization of various characters through education. British

education plays a great role in the novel where Tambu, Babamukuru,

Nhamo and Nyasha, all bear the impact of this education. Dangarembga’s

gives weight to Kachru’s ‘alchemy of English’ where: “Tambu tells us

that "white wizards" from the south who were "well versed in treachery

and black magic" educated her uncle Babamukuru (18-9)” Tambu knows

that the British education is an important way to enable her to evade

her two major biological roles, that of being a woman and of being

black, which have imprisoned her in her culture. When the novel starts

Tambu is seen as being happy at her brother’s death as this is

enabling her to go to a western school where the colonial education