Justification Of Inequality In American History

Douglas Baynton’s “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History” details the myriad ways disability has been applied to marginalized groups, especially racial and/or ethnic minorities and women, to justify unequal treatment and “as a marker of hierarchical relations” (Baynton 34). In Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, one of the primary hierarchies portrayed is between the white, English-speaking colonists and missionaries who live almost exclusively on the mission and in large cities, and the indigenous Rhodesian (now Zimbabwean), Shona-speaking people. Given that disability is often used as a metaphor or marker in any social hierarchy, the relationship between the white colonists and the indigenous Rhodesians is

Large-scale education and social consciousness may not be enough, though; even when the government becomes involved and offers a scholarship for Babamukuru and Maiguru to pursue higher education in South Africa, the missionaries feel a sense of entitlement to the natives’ bodies and minds and later coerce this same pair to continue their education in England. This lends itself to a description of “missionary goodwill as a form of benevolent tyranny” that works to alienate individual natives from others and prevent them from taking any sort of united stand (Paustian

In the year Tambu was set to start school, the harvest was poor and her family could not afford to send either her or Nhamo, who had begun a year earlier, to school. Tambu’s mother managed to “[scrape] together enough money to keep [Tambu’s] brother in school,” but she could not earn enough to send Tambu to school (Dangarembga 24). Instead of giving in, Tambu asked for seeds so she could grow maize to sell as mealies to other children; however, “when the cobs were ripe for eating, they began to disappear” and, a few days later, one of Tambu’s Sunday school classmates says that Nhamo gave her maize (33). She got into a fight with Nhamo, which was broken up by Mr. Matimba, a teacher at the Sunday school. He offered to drive Tambu into town so she could sell green maize to white people, who, “when the cobs are fat and heavy, [...] buy them for as much as sixpence each” (35). Though Tambu had to put a great deal of effort into convincing her father to let her go, a few days later “[she] kept [her] appointment with Mr. Matimba”