Education as a Cross-Cultural Theme: A Look at the Education System in Zimbabwe as Compared to the Education System in America Through the Lens of Nervous Conditions

Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novel Nervous Conditions tells the story of Tambu, a young teenage girl, as she lives a life of hardships, twists, and turns in the colonized state of Rhodesia, which is now present day Zimbabwe.  In the large picture the novel deals with how a negative, colonial influence can place a control over people causing them to develop illnesses, side effects, and mindsets that can last for many years.  However, the themes of the book go above and beyond those conditions in regards to freedom, identity, and the importance of education.

The idea of education was one that struck me as interesting because I believe it is a concept that is easy for many American readers to connect to while reading the novel.  Education is taken for granted in the United States because everyone is given free public education and many students continue at the university level because they have the financial means and opportunity to do so, but education in Zimbabwe is a different story, as the country suffered from years of colonial control that caused their people to have fewer opportunities in the field of learning and becoming educated. 

Nervous Conditions helps set up the idea that the importance of education is a universal theme because when readers from other countries see how much Tambu works in order to go to school they will be able to connect her journey to how hard they work in order to be successful in school.  Education serves as a way to gain a voice, an identity, and a place in the world in both societies, but a difference in opportunities makes it difficult for many people in Zimbabwe to continue to become educated as they don’t have all the resources that the people in America do.  I believe this novel offers a look into the worlds of both education systems in the United States and Zimbabwe showing that education is valued in both societies, but democracies have more opportunities for their people to continue their education as postcolonial countries are still suffering from years of being ruled and the transitions that have come after that colonization.

In the novel, Tambu’s brother, Nhamo, is the only member of the family that is being educated because most families could only afford to send one person to school at a time, and their parents raised funds for Nhamo being that he was the male of the family.  Even though it wasn’t fair that the system was set up that way being that Tambu didn’t get a chance to immediately go to school because she was a woman, education was still a whole family ordeal.  Babamukuru, the children’s uncle, is the head of the family because he is the most educated and successful.  Therefore, it is his job to make sure that he sets up the rest of the family with everything that they need in order to have productive and plentiful lives.  He does his part by offering Nhamo to come to his missionary school as it would be a better education than regular schools in Zimbabwe.  Meanwhile, Tambu is stuck at home wishing that she too could have the education that her brother was getting from her uncle.  Tambu works as hard as she can in order to reach this goal as she plants corn and tries to sell it at the marketplace to raise funds for school.  The selling process doesn’t go over too well, but eventually a white couple gives her enough money to pay for her education because they felt sorry for her.  However, she didn’t get her chance to go to school until Nhamo reached a sudden death because she was able to take his place for her family being that Babamukuru wanted to keep his promise of educated at least one person from each strand in his family.

The fact that Tambu was given the chance to have this education was quite shocking during this time period in this country because women weren’t looked at as equal to men.  When Tambu initially expressed her aspirations to attend school her father said, “Can you cook books and feed them to your husband?  Stay at home with your mother.  Learn to cook and clean.  Grow vegetables” (Dangarembga, 15).  His views go along with the common ideal that education was a man’s institution.  Her father believed that any education that she received would just benefit her husband’s family in the future and not hers, so he saw no use in providing money for her to learn when it could be allocated elsewhere in more useful ways.  Luckily, education was an “inherited tradition and a patriarchal investment in which it allowed the man to play the primary bread winner” (Nair, 133) because that allowed Tambu the privilege of attending the missionary school under the guidance of her uncle, Babamukuru, who is the headmaster of the school.

            This educational opportunity sets Tambu up for lifelong learning since Babamukuru’s devotion to his family overrides society’s view on women being educated.  It was rare for women to be highly educated at this time, but that didn’t mean that it didn’t happen.  Bababmukuru’s wife, Maiguru, holds a master’s degree, and she serves as an inspiration to Tambu throughout the story.  Tambu hopes to one day be as educated as her aunt, but she hopes that when that time comes she will have the ability to use that education.

            Although Maiguru is highly educated, she doesn’t have the privilege of using that education because she still has to play the role of a woman in society.  She is expected to cook, clean, and wait on the men of her household while at the mission and while at the family homestead.  This causes turmoil for her as she is trapped in this society where she can’t let her true identity show.  Literary theorist, Janice Hill, states, “colonial education, and the drive of the entire Sigauke family to educate themselves and each other through the colonial system, drive and complicate much of the action of the novel in ways that are directly connected to silencing…” (Hill, 79).  Maiguru is a character who is connected to that silencing as her role in society causes her to not be able to use her degree.  A person’s education is what defines who they are, and the fact that she doesn’t have that right leaves her as a silent character in this novel.  She conforms to her role of mother and wife and just lets her degree go to no use.  She was fortunate to have the opportunity to earn that degree in England while her husband and children were studying abroad, but back in the state of Rhodesia, she doesn’t have the opportunity to put the knowledge she gained to use. 

Tambu is aware that her aunt’s lifestyle could very well be her outcome in the future as the society she lives in is relatively static, but she hopes that through education and with time opportunities will arise for her.  Therefore she takes every chance she can get to keep learning.  When given the chance to possibly attend an esteemed mission school near the end of the novel Tambu says, “If you were clever, you slipped through any loophole you could find.  I for one was going to take any opportunity that came my way….going to the convent was a chance to lighten those burdens [of the women in my family] by entering a world where burdens were light” (Dangarembga, 182).  Although Tambu uttered this statement near end of the book, this seemed to be her motto throughout the novel.  She was aware that educational opportunities were scare for her people, especially women, so she took any chance that she could get to learn and, therefore, gain her own identity.

This educational adventure starts right after Tambu’s brother dies and she is offered his spot at Babamukuru’s mission school.  This step offers a whole new world for her as she goes from a simple school in her village to this mission school that is towns away.  Originally mission schools weren’t used to educate as much as they were to bring Africans to Christianity (Summers, 117), but they also served as a more effective form of education as their teachers were paid more than government schools (Summers, 132) because they held higher degrees and were educated in faraway lands just like Babamukuru. 

While at this mission school, Tambu is offered a variety of opportunities that wouldn’t necessarily be available to someone of her status, but because she has the connection with Babamukuru she is allowed the privilege to step inside his world.  She lives with Babamukuru’s family right on the mission grounds, and she is treated as if she were a daughter in the household.  The family gives her food, provides her with clothing, and sets her up with a bed.  Coming from a homestead where she was expected to wait on her family members and play the role of a woman in the home, this was a drastic change for her.  She was able to focus on her studies for once in her life while also forming connections with her cousins that had been educated in England.

Being that her cousins, Nyasha and Chido, had been educated in England they were different than most of her peers.  Living in a mansion that was as furnished as Babamukuru’s, and having a life as privileged as they had was very rare in Rhodesia at this time.  In fact, Tambu had mistaken Babamukuru’s garage for his house (Dangarembga, 64) because she had never dreamed that her uncle would be living in such an extravagant place as his white-walled mansion.  There had always been a since of disconnect between Tambu and her cousins because she was very used to her lifestyle on the homestead where things weren’t westernized at all.  However, once Tambu started living at the mission, she too started to become westernized just like her cousins.  She found in the mission a place that she didn’t want to leave.  It offered her a transformation and step into the direction of becoming the person that she wanted to be.  She said, “Babamukuru was God, therefore I had arrived in Heaven.  I was in danger of becoming an angel, or at the very least a saint, and forgetting how ordinary humans existed—from minute to minute and from hand to mouth” (Dangarembga, 70).  Through her time spent at the mission, Tambu was able to learn from scholars in a variety of fields while also living in this dream-like land so different from what the rest of her family was experiencing, and then one day she was offered an opportunity to attend an even higher esteemed mission school ran by nuns.

The day when the nuns came to the mission, Tambu tested high enough on her test that they administered that her next level of schooling could be taken at the covenant school that the nuns ran.  Originally, Tambu didn’t want this to happen because he feared that she would become too educated for her own good, but in the end he allowed her to go.  Tambu continues with her motto by taking any opportunity placed in front of her and jumping on it.  She finds it hard to leave her cousin Nyasha behind, but she knows that she has to do this for her in order to break out of the uneducated stigma that women are placed under in society.

The story ends with Tambu coming back to the mission school to visit Nyasha who is suffering from an eating disorder due to the control that she has been under from her father, her people, and the colonized government.  Nyasha’s issue is a separate theme within itself in the story, but it in fact connects with education because when Tambu comes back she sees what the colonized system has done to Nyasha, and she is able to reflect.  Tambu states, “I told myself I was a much more sensible person than Nyasha, because I knew what could or couldn’t be done.  In this way, I banished the suspicion, buried it in the depths of my subconscious, and happily went back to Sacred Heart” (Dangarembga, 208).  Tambu was able to see what a colonized system can do to a person who isn’t rebelling and taking chances to get out of it.  Tambu chose education as an escape from this system, and her reflections on how Nyasha turned out allowed her to write about all the aspects of this story in hopes that people could see that she had not gained the freedom to be a strong, independent woman who wasn’t going to let anything stand in her way.  She was given opportunities unlike so many other people during this time, but she took them and allowed education to be her ticket to escape, freedom, and identity.
 

American readers should be able to connect with this idea that education can offer an escape because that is a very similar concept in The United States.  Students are told to stay in school because they can achieve their dreams with degrees.  High school diplomas used to offer a variety of job opportunities, but now it seems as if people have to have a college degree if they want to make a decent living.  Therefore, people are finding means of going to college to escape from the world of financial hardship in order to become the person they want to be.  This is similar to Tambu’s journey because in the end her education started to give her an identity and a voice. 

American readers should also be able to connect with the way education is set up in Zimbabwe.  Students who have the opportunity will attend a primary school for seven years, and then they will move on to secondary school consisting of six forms which are closely related to high school and college in The United States (Embassy of The United States).  The years are a little different as it only takes three years to earn a bachelor’s degree and five years to become a doctor, but their system is very much set up like the one that America has today. 

Both societies offer a variety of schools for their students to attend.  Whereas Tambu could attend a government school or a mission school, students in The United States have the chance to attend public school, private school, or charter school.  Although it is hard to associate the class system in America with the hardships that the people of Rhodesia suffered from, there can be a connect between the two systems.  Just as opportunities arose for Tambu to get a better education because of her family connections, schooling in America is related to income and success as well.  Although it is free to attend public school in The United States, many parents believe that private and charters schools are the better route to take, and they cost money.  There is much debate in America as to which school system is the most effective way for children to learn, but the connection to opportunity, financial opportunity, is still there.

This idea of opportunity is what divides the two cultures as well though because in America everyone has the chance to attend school through public school, but in Zimbabwe (or Rhodesia) a student’s chance of being educated is in the fate of how much money their parents have to spend, who they are related to, and the chances that they take.  Tambu lucked out because she was given the chance to be educated by her uncle after her brother, unfortunately, passed away.  However, many people, especially girls, wouldn’t have gotten that chance because the colonized land offered many hardships for families—Tambu’s situation was a success story.  People had to worry about living from day to day.  Money was used for shelter and for food first off, and if any was left over then maybe one child could be supported to go to school. 

Education in America is taken for granted, but books like Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions help change this status.  This cross-cultural theme about the importance of education helps students from America relate to those in Zimbabwe, but it also helps them open their eyes to the hardships that take place for people living under colonized rule.  America was once a colonized state many years ago, but the way history turned out they became a democracy.  History could have taken another route though, and Americans would have been in the same situation that those in Rhodesia were facing.  Therefore, it is important for readers in America to read books like this in order to reflect on the life that they have and to connect with others as humans in this worldwide society.

Works Cited

• Dangarembga, Tsitsi. Nervous Conditions. Banbury:  Ayebia Clarke Publishing Ltd., 2004. Print. Embassy of The United States. “Education in Zimbabwe.”
• Hill, Janice E. “Purging a Plate Full of Colonial History: The Nervous Conditions of Silent Girls.” College Literature 22.1 (1995): 78-91. EBSCOhost. Web. 10 April 2011.
• Nair, Supriya. “Melancholic Women:  The Intellectual Hysteric(s) in Nervous Conditions.” Research in African Literatures 26.2 (1995): 130-140. EBSCOhost. Web. 10 April 2011.
• Summers, Carol. “Demanding Schools:  The Umchigwe Project and African Men’s Struggles for Education in Southern Rhodesia, 1928-1934.” African Studies Review 40.2 (1997): 117-140. EBSCOhost. Web. 10 April 2011.

The Best of Both Worlds: What Happens When Anita Desai Sets Up Fasting, Feasting in Two Parts?

     Anita Desai’s novel Fasting, Feasting looks at the consumption of food between families in both India and the United States.  The first part of the novel is focused on the life of Uma, a daughter who is tied to her parents’ every want and need in India, while the second part of the novel looks at how her brother, Arun, in how he adapts to life in the American suburbs.  It’s interesting how Desai chose to put one family member, the one who has the most freedom to try new things, in American society to compare and contrast the two social systems.  Food is a central issue in this novel, and Desai does a remarkable job in showing how in both societies food takes precedence over everything else.  The way in which she set up her novel shows that the societies are both very different although the importance of food remains important in both.  Her formatting of the novel is up for interpretation though.  Does the dual structure of Fasting, Feasting allow for an easier comparison of consumption in India and the United States since they are separated in such a manner?  I believe that in separating the narratives written about India and America, Desai has made it easier for her readers to see how consumption takes place in both societies.

     Desai has her novel divided into two parts with the first part taking up almost three-fourths of the entire book and the last part taking up just one-fourth.  The way in which she formats the two sections helps her set up the distinctions between the societies that are worlds away from each other.  When it comes to the first part that is focused on India, the chapters are very long and drawn out, and overall it moves very slowly.  The second part, however, is quite the contrary.  Its chapters are very short and it seems to flow a lot quicker than the beginning of the book.  This is symbolic in the way that the two societies run.  America is a very fast paced society that never slows down while India seems to be a calming land with a flow of its own.  I believe that in separating the novel into two parts, Desai was able to focus more on each country at hand to develop a more detailed description of how life takes place there.  Literary scholar, Angelia Poon, agrees with my point here.  She says:

Thus, rather than interspersing Uma’s story with Arun’s narrative or splicing both stories, Desai realizes her insistence on an unequal world by literally dividing her novel into two parts. This bifurcated and bifocal narrative structure, part of the novel’s transnational politics, shows us two fairly circumscribed worlds where there is little room for border-crossing, seepage, and hybrid identities (Poon, 37). 

Poon believes that in focusing on the narrative as two separate structures, the readers are able to see Uma’s story and Arun’s narrative for themselves.  Although they are occurring simultaneously, their separation allows for no confusion as to which ideals belong to which society.  The reader is still able to juxtapose Indian society and American society in terms of consumption by reading the stories separately.

     It is a justifiable case that Poon states here as India and America do differ very much in regards to politics and power.  India was recently under control by the British colony while America has been a free country for many years.  It is important for readers to keep this in mind as they look at each part of the novel because it is easier to understand why people act a certain way in society due to how they are ruled.  Indian society, again, seems very old-fashioned with an easy pace because they’re used to following orders and living out their daily lives in a uniform manner.  American society is much quicker and more open because they have been a free country for quite some time.  She also brings up border-crossing and hybridity as ideas that don’t really come to focus too much because the societies are so separate.  Arun physically crosses a border as he moves from India to America and he could be faced with hybridity as he tried to merge the culture of his homeland with America, but being that these two sections are separate readers don’t concentrate on that aspect of the story as much.

     It is easy  to think of Arun as a hybrid character at the start because you can assume that he will merge the two cultures together, but in fact he becomes very caught up in the society in America and starts to lose his Indian ways for American traditions.  He struggles finding food to eat in this new society because everything seems to be very raw.  Arun was used to his vegetarian lifestyle in Indian, but that food choice in America is very different.  His host mother, Mrs. Patton, tried her best to make him meals with vegetables, but they were still very Americanized with raw vegetables.  Yet, he didn’t back down because they weren’t what he was used to.  He suffered through it and ate the food that she had made (Desai, 184-5) Although he is able to point out many American ways of life that are quite foreign to him, like buying food in bulk, he still falls into living that lifestyle when he is with the Patton family.  One may argue that he does let go of his Indian culture as he gives his shawl and tea to Mrs. Patton at the end as well (Desai, 228).  These are the only two pieces that Arun has to remind him of his homeland, and he realizes he doesn’t need them anymore.  Therefore, he makes the best use out of them and gives a little bit of his culture away.  Sybil Steinberg agrees in her book review of the novel because he says, “…his final act in the novel suggests both how far he has come and how much he has lost” (Steinberg, 56).  By living in American society for just a short while Arun was able to think, act, and eat American.  Anita Poon looks at this in a more theoretical way in connecting it with the separation aspect.

     Poon goes on to say, “The attempt to capture simultaneity and coevality, in order to suggest disjunction as well as possible connections between gendered subjects and different cultures, forms part of Desai’s novelistic vision or what we may call her ‘imagined world’” (Poon, 37).  This idea of an imagined world comes from the work of Arjun Appadurai, and it looks at the combined worlds of different cultures that come together to form another world that becomes a vital part of the global economy (Appadurai, 25).  This imagined world becomes real in Arun’s America as he joins in the Indian Diaspora and his home culture crosses the border into his new country.  By creating this imagined world, readers are able to look at the two societies and easily compare them in ways of consumption and beyond.

      As the title suggests, Desai sets up a very distinct food system in both parts of her novel.  In India, they seem to always be thinking about food and what they‘re going to be eating at the next dinner, but they don’t eat besides at dinner.  In America, food is bought in bulk so people can snack on it throughout the day.  Uma is part of a society that eats to live and Arun is living in a society that lives to eat.  This imagined world that Desai sets up with the two cultures could very well change the outlook on globalization, or at least it could help establish the fact that similarities can be found in areas of difference around the world.  Although America is more consumer-minded and food seems to be held on a higher scale than in India, food is just as important in Arun’s homeland as it is in the country he is now living in, and by placing these realizations at opposite ends of the novel it is easier for readers to understand that comparison.

      Along with food, the idea of consumption seems to be a large part of this novel.  Food is made to be consumed in both societies, but a different light is cast on the way it is consumed based on how the society is run.  As mentioned earlier, America is a very consumer-minded society while Indian society is very tradition in that they don’t have supermarkets on every corner.  The ways in which these societies have been run in the global world have a lot to do with this situation.  The freedom of American society has allowed for a capitalist system to be set up with a free market.  This is why America is full of so many restaurants and businesses.  When it comes to India though, just getting away from British rule, they’re working to build back their political power in the world.  Naturally, they wouldn’t have as big of a business industry to disperse on food.

    Interestingly enough, this idea of consumption goes beyond just the quantity of places in which you can get food in each country.  Dinner time is connected with consumption in a very close manner, and because of the way each society is set up dinner occurs very differently in each.  In India, the family sits down together and eats the same meal and overall the meal seems to be healthy mix.  There is a hierarchy at the table as the women have to help the man with different aspects of his meal such as peeling his orange, but I believe experiences like that really help the family bond and connect over dinner.  It is, in fact, much the contrary in American society.  As the Patton family doesn’t even eat with each other in the book.  Everyone seems to do their own thing as they pick what they would like to eat, but there is a large disconnect between the family.  Dinner time should be a time of collective consumption between families, but this isn’t so in America and problems occur because of it.  In the novel, the Patton’s daughter only eats certain foods and she is found to be bulimic because she doesn’t always keep her food down, on purpose, after eating it.  This is one of the largest issues of consumption in the book, and it happens because society in America is so open.  Once again, if these two families were side-by-side in the novel it would be hard to see this connection while hooking each individual case back to something in that society.

     I believe that while looking at consumption in regards to each society in this novel, it helps that Desai wrote two separate parts.  In connecting the idea in a postcolonial light while looking at the power in each country, the author was able to write vivid parts that could stand alone as single stories or move together as one.  It is interesting that consumption of food although very different in each society in quality and quantity, is actually a factor in India as well as American.  Having a little universality in the book helps connect the theme across borders for the two distinct parts, but making the two distinct parts really helps set apart the idea of consumption in both societies for readers to easily compare.

Work Cited

• Aldama, Fredrick Luis. “Book Review-Fasting, Feasting.” World Literature Today 74.1 (2000): 240. EBSCOhost. Web. 20 February 2011.
• Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” Theorizing Diaspora. Ed. Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur. Malden, MA:  Blackwell Publishing, 2003. 25-27. Print.
• Desai, Anita. Fasting, Feasting. New York: Mariner Books, 1999. Print.
• Moeller, Dianna. “Book Review-Fasting, Feasting.” Library Journal 125.2 (2000): 115.   EBSCOhost. Web. 20 February 2011.
• Poon, Angelia. “In a Transnational World: Exploring Gendered Subjectivity, Mobility, and Consumption in Anita Desai’s Fasting, Feasting.” Ariel 37.2/3 (2006):  33-48. EBSCOhost. Web. 20 February 2011.
• Ravichandran, T. “Entrapments at Home and Abroad in Anita Desai’s Fasting, Feasting.” Indian English  Literature:  A Post Colonial Response. Ed. Gajendra Kumar and Uday Shankar Ojha. Darya Ganj, New Delhi:  Sarup & Sons, 2005. 80-89. Print.
• Steinberg, Sybil. “Forecasts:  Fiction.” Publishers Weekly 246.49 (1999):  55. EBSCOhost. Web. 20 February 2011.