On pages 58 through 59 Tambu clearly states her expectations upon arriving at Babamukuru’s. She writes, “at Babamukuru’s I expected to find another self, a clean, well-groomed, genteel self who could not have been bred, could not have survived, on the homestead.” Upon her departure, though not yet aware of what this new world she would soon be entering truly had to offer, she did know that it would be something significant—something that would greatly work to her advantage.
She recognizes herself, as she steps into her uncle’s car, as a mere peasant, able to point out all of what she believed to be her flaws that were a result of her upbringing on the homestead. Describing the new person she was anticipating herself to become, it clearly was not the first time she had dwelt upon the subject of hoping to rise above her circumstances or improve her conditions. Though never excessively making complaints concerning her situation and childhood, it is apparent that she did in fact yearn to achieve something more—the kind of something she had vaguely imagined from hearing Nhamo gloat on and on about the new life he had himself attained at the mission. Of course she had always longed to further her education, but it is at this point that her material desires are both awakened and brought to light as well. “At Babamukuru’s I would have the leisure, be encouraged to consider questions that had to do with survival of the spirit, the creation of consciousness, rather than mere sustenance of the body.” More than anything it would seem that she is most grateful with the realization that she will no longer have to struggle and be coerced to take care of her physical being, but rather a type of provision associated with the attaining of knowledge to sustain her intellectual being. This of course, she begins to realize, would come as a result of the almost mentally intangible materialistic provisions she knew she would soon be offered, of which she would soon find herself inconceivably overwhelmed by.
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Her transplatation to this heavenly bliss of affluence will remake her into a new person, but probably nothing close to the fantastical reality she dreamed of in those first moments sitting in the car. She will trade one set of distractions for another, but the others she knew, she was born with those. These mentally intanglible materialistic provisions so shiny and new will provide an even more daunting obstacle to that which she thinks she wants so bad.
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