Clearly, Tambu envisions, from having seen her brother's physical good health acquired at school, an opportunity for becoming a new person all together. While education and living with Babmukuru led to good health, simple cleanliness and good health - mentally and physically had the greatest appeal to Tambu.
We remember Nhamo's disgust with the smelly bus, and when Tambu recalls herself stepping into Babmukuru's car, she knows she was a peasant , but "This was the person [she] was leaving behind. At Babmukuru's [she] expected to find another self, a clean, well-groomed, genteel self" Of particular insight is Tambu's anaphora of "This new me would not be enervated [...] This new me would not be frustrated...." It seems to Tambu at this point that she has a remedy for the Nervous conditions in the cleanliness now available to her.
However, the tone shifts in the middle of 59, as Tambu as narrator interjects that such benefits were only "temporary and not continuous." Yet, at the time she was complacent to what this could mean for her, because "in the language [she] understood at the time meant well."
Knowing that her language is shona, and recalling her counsin's and brother's loss of shona after starting their formal educations, it seems that maybe she fears or even secretly hopes for this lingual shift, but foreshadows that there "would be reason to regress on the occasions that I returned to the homestead"
I feel you brought up a good point by expressing that Tambu was also seeking mental reprieve from the Homestead. I imagine that the pressures of gender stereotypes and being overshadowed by another sibling wrecks havoc on your state of mind and who you envision yourself to be. Before she travels to the mission, she is introspective and thinks of the future, which in its own sense, is a kind of intellectualism. I think she hopes that going to the mission will relieve her from the stress of all this and give her brain something scholarly to focus on. Tambu's going to be in for a big surprise, though, when she discovers that a formal education will only blur the lines between her old self and new self some more, instead of providing clarity.
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