Novel Characteristics

Characters:

• Tambudzai: The novel’s narrator and protagonist. An intelligent fourteen-year-old girl, Tambu strives for an education and desires to escape her life on the homestead. While she is sensitive and kind, she is also often harsh in her evaluations. Tambu wishes to be loose from the limitations placed on her gender.  
• Nhamo: Tambu’s brother. Nhamo is the oldest son in the family. He is mean and annoys Tambu over the fact that he is getting an education. After he leaves for his education at the mission, he grows superior and lazy. He doesn’t help his family with the daily burdens when he visits them on vacations.  
• Jeremiah: Tambu’s father and Babamukuru’s brother. Jeremiah is immature, ignorant, and superstitious. He appears hardly worried with the future and achievements of his children and grows ever more apart from his family. When Babamukuru is around, he is submissive, praising his brother’s accomplishments. With his immediate family, however, he is uneducated and does not do much to encourage his children’s determinations.  
• Maiguru: Babamukuru’s wife. Maiguru is a strong, educated, and successful woman and stands out from the rest of the women in her family. Life in England has transformed her, and she prefers her children to behave and perform like the Western society. She later dreads the fact that they have become too Anglicized. She is caring and gentle and acknowledges her position in her marriage and the sacrifices she must make to keep Babamukuru happy. Though she protests and departs from him, she returns out of obligation and her devotion for her family.   
• Nyasha: Tambu’s cousin, daughter of Babamukuru. She does little to make the other girls at school like her. At times she is easily aggravated, unpredictable, and determined. She likes to dispute with her father. She is a result of two worlds and becomes confused of her personality because of the influences of England and Rhodesia.  
• Babamukuru: He is Tambu’s uncle. Babamukuru is the highly educated and a successful headmaster of the mission school. A patriarchal and authoritarian figure, he uses his power and position to progress the lives of his extended family, but he does it out of responsibility, not love. He is an unkind and distant father and has no problem hiding his disappointment in and growing dislike for his daughter, Nyasha. 
• Chido: Nyasha’s brother, son of Babamukuru. Chido is tall, athletic, handsome, charming, intelligent, and highly educated. He has little concern in his family or in visiting either the homestead or the mission. He is educated amongst the white colonists. He becomes familiarized with a life of luxury. He later has a white girlfriend. 
• Ma’Shingayi: Tambu’s mother. Ma’Shingayi is seen as a hardworking character that has worked and sacrificed so that her son can have an education. After Nhamo’s death, she becomes mean, angry, and jealous of those around her.  

Summary:

• The protagonist, Tambu, desires to be educated at the mission. However, they need money because they are of low status, and the family is already sending Tambu’s brother, Nhamo, to school. Babamukuru, the uncle of Tambu, provides for his entire family, and pays the fees for his nephew, Nhamo. Nhamo always gets on Tambu’s nerves because he brags about the education he gets and his high status in the family. One day, during the vacation, Babamukuru returned to the homestead without Nhamo; Nhamo dies of a sickness. Tambu now gets the opportunity to go to the mission school. However, Tambu’s mother becomes distressed because she thinks that what happened with Nhamo will occur to Tambu. When Tambu goes with her uncle and arrives at the mission, her bond with her cousin, Nyasha, grows. Tambu and Nyasha are very successful in school, but there are many problems that arise from Tambu’s family. The family problems that arose are resolved through the legal Christian marriage of Jeremiah, Tambu’s dad, and Ma’Shingayi, Tambu’s mother. Tambu’s success paves the way for her opportunity at the Sacred Hearts, the covenant. She goes to the covenant, how she starts to question the world and the influences of the whites. 

Major Conflicts:

• Tambu fights against the poverty and lack of opportunity in Rhodesia. Once at the mission school, she is delayed by sexism and the sacrifices she must do to satisfy her uncle and achieve his expectations of her. 
• Nhamo dies because of a sickness, and another person must take his place to bring honor and success for the family. Tambu is decided to take his place at the mission school. 
• Babamukuru is saddened by the fact that Takesure and Lucia are still at Jeremiah’s homestead.  Also, Lucia is pregnant with Takesure child. A family meeting is held to discuss the situation and is resolved that the couple remains under Jeremiah’s homestead.  
• Babamukuru then decides to fix Jeremiah’s domestic status by giving and providing him with a legal Christian marriage.  
• Maiguru quarrels with Babamukuru over the lack of respect that she gets, and the fact that her economic part to the family is not acknowledged. She departs the next day and stays with her son, Chido. 
• When Tambu leaves for the Sacred Hearts covenant, Nyasha turns physically ill by becoming extremely thin and suffers an eating disorder. Her problem eventually gets solved by going to therapy.  

Five Important Quotations:

1. “I was not sorry when my brother died.
• This quote is significant because it shows Tambu’s feelings and attitude toward her brother, Nhamo. This quote could relate to the gender inequality Nhamo pushes forth onto Tambu. He symbolizes everything she is denied because of Tambu’s gender. With his sudden death, Tambu’s life takes a dramatic turn for the better. She is offered his place at the mission school.  
2.  “And these days it is worse, with the poverty of blackness on one side and the weight of womanhood on the other. Aiwa! What will help you, my child, is to learn to carry your burdens with strength.” 
• The quote stated by Ma’Shingayi highlights the severe reality faced by mainly African women. Ma’Shingayi bickers that being black and female is a double load. Rather than urging her daughter to be strong and rally in counter to the existing conditions that plot to keep her down, Tambu’s mother pushes her to recognize the forces she feels are too powerful for her to control. This quote shows the differences not only between the two women but between the older, more traditional beliefs and the new attitudes emerging in a more modern Africa. 
3.  “What it is,” she sighed, “to have to choose between self and security.” 
• Maiguru’s words concisely sums up the sacrifices she has made in order to raise a family and give to a more traditional idea of a woman’s responsibility in African society. Maiguru goes on to tell Tambu of the options she observed while living in England. She senses that there is no appreciation of the cooperation she has made and endures her burdens in silence. 
4. “It’s bad enough . . . when a country gets colonized, but when the people do as well! That’s the end, really, that’s the end.”
• Bit by bit, Tambu becomes pulled in by the contact with the colonialist “new ways.” The colonialism and the whites eventually change her traditional ways and later her identity. Although Tambu is against to the embarrassment her parents will suffer by having to go through a Christian wedding ceremony, she agrees with Babamukuru’s claim that the ritual be performed. Nyasha disagrees with Babamukuru’s opinion, forewarning Tambu of the dangers of supposing that Christian ways are progressive ways.
5. “Quietly, unobtrusively and extremely fitfully, something in my mind began to assert itself, to question things and refuse to be brainwashed, bringing me to this time when I can set down this story. It was a long and painful process for me, that process of expansion.”
• She has desired advancement through education, however she starts to question what it has cost her sense of self and her ill mother, distressed at the thought of another of her children being changed by their need for Western education. Her use of the word brainwashed means a radical shift in her thinking. In this quote, Tambu seems to be speaking for Nyasha, who is also depressed and ill, stating the words that Nyasha can no longer say for herself. Tambu urges herself to no longer be passively swayed by the people and traditions around her. She is definite in her decision to question.

Interesting Features:

• Themes:
• Gender Inequality
• Influence of Colonialism
• Tradition vs. Progress
• Foreshadowing:
• Nyasha and Chido returning from England, having lost most or all of their native tongue, Shona, foreshadows the same linguistic dislocation that occurs to Nhoma and then to Tambu.
• Nhamo's growing dislike of returning home for vacations foreshadows the growing gulf that develops for Tambu between life at the mission school and life at the homestead.
• Symbols:
• Garden Plot: It symbolizes Tambu’s tradition and escape from her tradition.
• Mission: The mission symblizes hope and ambition.
• Ox: Meat is rare to eat, thus the ox symbolizes wealth and status of Babamukuru.