Education :: English Literature

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 faà §ade 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: â€Å"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: â€Å"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: â€Å"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