Bougainvillea

I'm going to deviate from the prompt a little bit to discuss one of my favorite characters that we never have time to talk about: Bougainvillea. Like many characters in the novel, Bougainvillea seems to have a very intellectual background; she is constantly quoting and discussing the ideas and actions of the French existentialists. However, it becomes quite apparent early on that her seemingly high minded talk is just pseudo-intellectual banter. Her idea that disorder and chaos are the marks of a highly developed mind are praised by all the girls in her hall, but they all realize that it is an excuse to not keep her room tidy for Miss Otto's inspections. She is appalled that the smokers got kicked out of school, rallying that it is the "principle" that offends her, without really elaborating what principle she is standing up for. Unlike Nyasha, whose search for knowledge leads to a personal revelation and a different worldview, or Tambu, who wants education to have material things, to discover her personhood, or to purge her imperfections, Bougainvillea does not contemplate these issues. For her, education adds a little bit of excitement to her otherwise dreary life, but nothing more.
The scene were Ntombi asks for a bit of chocolate demonstrates the shallowness of Bougainvillea's views. Her language obviously reinforces her racial dominance over the black students by the continued use of the word "them". This act excludes the black students from the conversation and makes it clear that she is speaking only to the white students at the table; the conversation is about the black students, but not with them. Ntombi, who decides to play Bo "tit for tat" ups the ante by innocently requesting some chocolate. She "uses the diminutive (Bo) easily" to refer to Bougainvillea- whereas "Bo" has otherized her and not even called her by name, Ntombi has made this an intimate affair by using her classmate's nickname. The sensitivity of the situation is heightened a few pages later when Tracy attempts to use the nickname and is corrected by another student.
The question of identity and relationships seems like something that should be interesting to someone who is a self expressed existentialist and a thinker, but Bougainvillea resorts to old, worn out ideas about race to frame her answer. She continues to refer to the black students, her classmates, as "they" and makes the act analogous to a handout to a beggar instead of a favor for a friend. A couple chapters later, our ideas about Bougainvillea are reinforced as the starts qouting Heathcliff's tirade in Wuthering Heights about his desire to crush the worms under his feet and that the more they struggle, the more he wishes to destroy them. Bougainvillea then oppressive elements of education for the African students in a way that is very clear in the novel: the more they struggle to become Europeanized, the more the educational system and people like Bo try to convince them that progress for them is an illusion.