Education, what education?

Lovemore Ranga Mataire
ONE of the central themes that Charles Mungoshi tackles in “Waiting for the Rain” is the alienation of the individual from the collective through colonial education.
Set in the Tribal Trust Lands of Manyene, the story gravitates from realism, dream, childlike confession, spirit possession and reminiscing.
Its focus is on Lucifer Mandengu, the son of Tongoona, who has been to a mission school and is considered elite.

He is considered very educated and has just been offered a scholarship to study abroad as an artist. Before Lucifer leaves, he goes back to Manyene to bid his people farewell.

His return becomes a moment of stock-taking and he vows never to return because of the dire situation of Manyene. Manyene is a dry, barren land, with infertile soil that makes it difficult to eke out a living out of it.

This dry arid land contrasts sharply with the vagarious adjacent Hampshire Estates. The atmosphere in Manyene is deplorable as people live in cramped spaces limiting their creativity and interpersonal relations.

It is through Lucifer that the effects of colonial education and land deprivation are mostly apparent.
While the community expects so much from Lucifer in improving their lot, he sadly becomes alienated from the collective and looks down upon his people instead without appreciating and understanding the dynamics that forced them to be in Manyene.

Lucifer seems angry with his people for being victims of colonialism.
His major problem is that he fails to go back into history to understand the predicament that confronts his people.
He wants to go away and rightly so Mungoshi calls him Lucifer — the Biblical allusion to a snake or betrayer.

Although Lucifer is accurate in saying that Manyene no longer has a “tree big enough to sit under”, he is not conscious of how settler colonialism forcibly moved his people from fertile to barren lands.

When white settlers created the reserves for the Africans, the intention was not to create a comfortable space.
As was the norm, colonialists locked people in spaces that did not allow them to relate creatively with the environment and other members of the community.

This was the first stage of colonialism.
Lucifer is thus wrong in thinking that all the poverty around him and Manyene is God-given and private.

Lucifer is disabled in so far as he cannot define what has happened to him and his people in history. This is the most debilitating effect of colonial education in that it tends to defamiliarise the victim from his/her own history. It obscures the individual from understanding the origins of victimhood.

His education is only meant to enable him to serve the system and not to allow him to move forward with the community. It is thus not accidental that some people in Manyene like Japi have burning desires for the white man’s things like sweets, sugar, tea, Salisbury and London. As Frantz Fanon explains in “Black Skin White Masks”, “the white man’s world and its glitter is the Blackman’s envy”, because it presents the visible symbols of power.

Fanon reasons that for many blacks, being white is a destination. Matandangoma, the sangoma, is therefore right when he says Lucifer is not going anywhere as he cannot meaningfully “arrive ‘in a set-up that is only meant to exploit him as it pretends to benefit him’”.

Lucifer clearly represents the idea that the community puts resources into the education of people who still never bring home their share of knowledge.

His source of alienation is the missionary and colonial education which is meant to produce subservient, docile African workers who would buttress the colonial system loyally.

This is echoed by George Lamming in “Pleasures of Exile” when he says; “This school had one intention — separating me from the things that Papa was; peasant and alive.”

In the words of Walter Rodney in “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa” (1972) colonial education created individuals with divided loyalties and confused allegiances and split personality.

“Colonial education was education of slavery, the creation of mental confusion and development of underdevelopment,” Rodney noted.