Nyasha's Rebellion

I think that Nyasha's mental breakdown at the end of the book was a very poignant and dynamic way of bringing to the surface the issue of the Anglicization of the characters and the loss of their original country's culture, which I feel was one of the major internal conflicts for most if not all of the characters in the story. In this novel, it seems that Nyasha served as a sort of physical representation of the damaging effect that stripping an individual of their culture can have on a person: In trying to become the idealized version of herself that her colonial education taught her that she should be, she lost grip on her sanity and suffered a complete mental breakdown. Even the acts she commits in her madness are loaded with meaning: ripping up British history books, telling Babamukuru that they (referring here to the colonial powers-that-be) are trying to force her to hate her own father, who can himself be taken as a metaphor for Rhodesian culture. Her body itself is a visual metaphor; wasted away in an attempt to emulate a foreign physical ideal.