Abstract
This paper explores the role of multi‐racial education in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s The Book of Not. Focusing on the “engulfment” of protagonist Tambudzai Sigauke at the Young Ladies’ College of the Sacred Heart in colonial Rhodesia of the 1970s, I argue that Tambu is so battered and overwhelmed by the racist environment as a black pupil in a multi‐racial school that she succumbs to the very forces that threaten her existence. At the novel’s end Tambu wonders about her future in a racist postcolonial Zimbabwe that she finds personally disappointing. The paper, then, aims to locate Tambu’s personal development in the social context of multi‐racial colonial education in 1970s Rhodesia. The existential philosophies of R.D. Laing and Frantz Fanon are employed to show the extent of her “divided self” within a threatening environment.
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