Schooling as Uncertainty

An Ethnographic Memoir in Comparative Education

Frances Vavrus

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350164512
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation comparative

In today's uncertain world, few beliefs remain as firmly entrenched as the optimistic view that more schooling will lead to a better life. Though this may be true in the aggregate, how do we explain the circumstances when schooling fails to produce certainty or even does us harm? Schooling as Uncertainty addresses this question by combining ethnography and memoir as it guides readers on a 30-year journey through fieldwork and familyhood in Tanzania and academic life in the USA.
Using reflexive, longitudinal ethnographic research, the book examines how African youth, particularly young women, employ schooling in an attempt to counter the uncertainties of marriage, child rearing, employment, and HIV/AIDS. Adopting a narrative approach, Vavrus tells the story of how her life became entangled with a community on Mount Kilimanjaro and how she and they sought greater security through schooling and, to varying degrees, succeeded.

Part One

Shaky Beginnings

1

Marital Misgivings

The Dobermans came racing down the driveway without warning, each one grabbing one of my calves with its sharp teeth and biting deep into my flesh. Tim’s screams and my own alerted Anthony, the dogs’ owner and my good friend from college, that something serious had happened in front of his house. Anthony and his wife, Joy, ran out the door and found me in the road, bleeding onto the shopping bags containing the food for our Christmas Eve meal that evening. Owing to the holiday, the clinics had already closed, but Joy’s aunt was a nurse, and they quickly called her and pleaded for assistance in treating my wounds. They whisked me to the aunt’s clinic, where she gently dressed my legs, gave me ample doses of painkillers and Valium for my nerves, and sent me home with a bag full of gauze bandages and antiseptic cream.

This was not exactly how our Christmas vacation in Zimbabwe was supposed to begin. It had been a whirlwind of a year: Deciding to get married in May (1992); moving in June from Minnesota, where Tim was finishing his doctoral coursework, to Wisconsin and starting my PhD program before deferring for a year; getting married at the beginning of September; and departing for Tanzania two weeks later for Tim’s year of fieldwork. Then there were the adjustments to married life, the challenges of living in economically strapped Dar es Salaam, and the scouting of suitable sites for Tim’s research in the Kilimanjaro Region of northern Tanzania. When Anthony invited us to spend Christmas with his family in Zimbabwe, we jumped at the chance for a leisurely holiday in a more “developed” country. Instead, I had canine bites on my legs and blood on my shopping bags.

*****

December 27, 1992

Dear Mom and Dad and any stray siblings around,

How do you like these fancy aerograms from Zimbabwe? These scenes of Harare look quite different from our pictures of Dar, don’t they? I still can’t get over the stark contrast between these two capitals given that they are practically neighbors.¹ Harare, with its money-mover machines [ATMs] and six-lane highways; Dar, with its banks without electricity and dusty roads. I guess National Geographic isn’t interested in running specials on take-away restaurants or pothole-free roads in “modern” Africa—huts and scruffy children get more viewers, I’m afraid …

Today the bruising on my legs looks like it is going away, and I’m able to get around a bit better, but I’m still limping when I stand up from sitting or lying down and need to use a cane. Tomorrow I go back to the clinic so that the nurse can make sure the wounds are healing properly and that there is no infection … I do hope the rest of our stay here is less eventful.

*****

Despite the dog bites, I reveled in the two weeks in urban Zimbabwe, soaking up the luxuries of constant electricity, potable tap water, riding buses with breathing room, and eating an abundance of familiar foods at the restaurants in Harare and Mutare. I had not tasted pizza or a tossed salad since we left the United States four months earlier, and I set aside my vegetarian principles for an afternoon and devoured a burger at Wimpy’s, a popular fast-food chain. Zimbabwe had only gained independence in 1980, following a fifteen-year period marked by violence after the Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Britain by the white Rhodesian government of Ian Smith. Thus, racial tensions were still acutely felt in 1992, unlike our experience in Tanzania whose transition to independence from the UK in 1961 was notably free of such turmoil. Zimbabwe in the early 1990s still had a strong economy and vibrant agricultural sector, but this would change by the end of the decade when President Mugabe, the leader of the country from 1980 to 2017, made a series of decisions aimed at bolstering his position within the party rather than ensuring economic stability.

Returning to Tanzania after the New Year, I was confronted with an existential crisis that had been building for some time though with a temporary reprieve while on holiday in Harare. I had come to Tanzania with Tim without any particular purpose other than to be a supportive spouse while he conducted his doctoral research and to work on my Swahili skills in the hopes of returning to the country in a few years for my own research. Yet I was beginning to recognize that I was harboring a false sense of certainty regarding our marriage, thinking that the joining of two aspiring academics would mean adjusting in similar ways to living in a radically different environment and becoming partners in the research process itself. Whatever Tim might need to succeed, I assumed I could provide it as we were a young couple in love and cultivating academic careers. However, the first few months in Tanzania severely tested these assumptions because we responded very differently to the surroundings, and we did not, I discovered, hold the same convictions regarding a future as professors.

I had been drawn to Tanzania initially as an undergraduate student at Purdue University, where, during my senior year in the mid-1980s, I had the good fortune to study with Manning Marable, the noted scholar of African and African American history. Professor Marable introduced me to the work of Julius Nyerere, the first president of independent Tanzania² and a champion of socialist development for Africa. I became captivated by Nyerere’s efforts to build unity across this country of more than 100 ethnic groups by promoting Swahili as the national language and prioritizing primary and adult education so that every citizen received a basic education.

Professor Marable encouraged me to apply to master’s degree programs where I could study Swahili, African history, and educational language policy. This seemed like an ideal complement to my plan at the time of becoming a certified English as a second language (ESL) teacher and spending my twenties traveling the world teaching English. I had been teaching ESL for the past three years in an adult education program at Purdue and had found it intensely gratifying. As my senior year in college concluded, I received an offer from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in their noted master’s program in teaching ESL and supported by a three-year fellowship to pursue Swahili and African studies.

The period at Illinois was a turning point not only for the intellectual stimulation the university provided but also for the unusual group of housemates I encountered during the years of living in the rambling dwelling we named the Big Yellow House. Many of the women and men who lived in the house for months or years at a time were students in the university’s ambitious MD/PhD program, meaning they intended to complete three degrees—MA/MS, PhD, and MD—when most people can barely imagine finishing one. My closest friend and roommate, Stacie, developed her own interest in Tanzania and stayed with us in 1996 in Moshi to carry out archival research on colonial public health programs (see Chapter 4). These friends and my sister, Mary, who by 1992 was living in the Big Yellow House as she pursued her doctoral degree, had hosted our modest wedding reception in the living room and had bid Tim and me farewell as we departed for Tanzania a couple of weeks later.

It was these friends and my sister to whom I turned when the doubts about my purpose in Tanzania and my worth as a future scholar overwhelmed me. Tim had been listening to me for weeks as my uncertainties grew regarding my physical and psychological preparedness for the harsher conditions of his fieldwork that lay ahead once we left Dar. It had been hard enough to cope with water rationing in the city that followed no particular pattern and with navigating the city on buses that frequently broke down or in pick-up trucks loaded down with squawking chickens and ripe produce. And I was finding the sudden shift from doctoral student to housewife very disorienting. The most basic certainties regarding my health and physical needs had been stripped away; my strong network of family and friends could not support me from thousands of miles away; and my identity as an aspiring scholar whose prospects were as promising as my spouse’s was slowly slipping away as I spent my days getting clean water and putting food on our table while Tim immersed himself in his research at the University of Dar es Salaam.

Intellectually, I knew these daily domestic tasks served as ideal language-learning opportunities. On the days when transport, shopping, and afternoon visits from the girls in the neighborhood proved entertaining and enlightening, I was able to revel in these “ethnographic moments” and felt that I might, indeed, turn out to be a decent educational anthropologist after all (see Figure 2). However, when the water truck that was supposed to arrive each morning left us dry, or when I knew I was being cheated at the market but didn’t have the vocabulary to respond, or when a man would wildly scream “mzungu” at me through the bus window, I began to doubt whether I could handle eight more months of life in Tanzania. It was as though the intellectual life that had begun to blossom for me, and which I had anticipated bearing even more fruit during Tim’s fieldwork, had withered away, leaving me with only a grim set of domestic duties from which to derive a sense of self. I could feel myself shriveling up like the passion fruit in the corner of our kitchen, its smooth golden rind now pockmarked and purple.

Figure 2 A neighbor and I practicing Swahili in our house in Dar es Salaam, 1992.

My sense of inadequacy was compounded by Tim’s opposite reaction to the conditions in which we were living. He seemed completely unfazed by these difficulties and by the repeated bouts of typhoid and amoebas that plagued both of us. Rather than being discouraged, he thrived as he confronted new challenges and adjusted to our new surroundings with great aplomb. The physical setting was a good match for his minimalist sensibilities, and his passion for running marathons meant that he flourished amid intense physical challenges and had the mental fortitude that most people, myself included, were missing. It seemed as though his doctoral research was a secondary consideration relative to the thrill of putting himself, and by extension me, through more intensive trials of material deprivation. As a newly married person, I did not yet realize how deeply these differences between us would define our relationship. At the time, they only compounded my feelings of inadequacy.

My doubts about fieldwork and marriage crystalized during my first visit to the field site Tim was contemplating on the dry, dusty plains below Mount Kilimanjaro. It was the site of one of the last remaining socialist villages called Chekereni, which had been established during the ujamaa vijijini (rural socialism) period of the 1970s. Tim’s dissertation research in the field of cultural geography sought to investigate how people had come to reside in Chekereni and the extent to which the principles of ujamaa (African socialism) still governed its social and economic life. It was an ambitious project involving archival research in Dar es Salaam, which he had by then completed, as well as interviews and observations over many months in this ujamaa village.

I arrived in the middle of December, the season of confirmation parties and weddings, and was warmly welcomed by the residents of Chekereni. That first evening I sat alone on the porch of the small house that we were to share with Tim’s primary informant, Ronald, as well as a teacher and her two children. The house was a tiny, unfinished structure with interior walls that did not extend to the ceiling and without electricity or piped water. The outhouse and space for bathing sat in a separate structure behind the main building. We had one of the bedrooms, Ronald had another, and the teacher with her two kids occupied the third bedroom. There was a storeroom for keeping bags of rice and flour as well as a small common area where we could eat our meals. The plan was for the four adults to share in the cooking, with Ronald on the roster for this particular evening.

No sooner had I gotten comfortable on the porch than two women from the shop across the way came over to find out why I was sitting by myself. They insisted I join them on the bench in front of the three shops that comprised “downtown” Chekereni, and we spent an hour or so exchanging stories about our families until Tim appeared. This initial conversation with two engaging neighbors reinvigorated my interest in learning more about how schooling affects women’s lives, and I began to imagine the questions I might ask to gain insights into ujamaa, gender, and education.

At this point, Ronald, our housemate, arrived to tell us that he would cook dinner for all of us after a quick visit to the mbege bar down the road. Mbege, home-brewed beer made of banana or millet, is typically purchased for a pittance and served in large plastic tumblers at benches set up under an awning or tree. Knowing from experience in Dar that visits to mbege bars are rarely speedy affairs, Tim and I retired to our semiprivate room in the house and entertained ourselves in the darkness by making shadow figures with our hands and a flashlight beaming the figures against the bare cement wall.

Despite a few pangs of hunger, I was content to wait for Ronald to return while the flashlight illuminated our fanciful creatures. Yet at one point, my hand slipped, and the flashlight lit up the floor below our bed, revealing a crowd of cockroaches scurrying across the cement. Upon further inspection, I spotted a few more climbing up the wall on the other side of the room and quickly lost any interest in stepping out from underneath the mosquito net tucked tightly below our mattress. But at 9:30 p.m., Ronald called for us to join him for a dinner of rice and mchicha, one of my favorite dishes of sautéed greens with onions. Hunger turned me into an intrepid warrior, and I bravely donned my flip-flops and strode out to the common area to eat with the others. However, I succumbed to my fear of large insects by brushing my teeth and peeing in the grassy area next to the house rather than going into the outhouse, which Tim had vividly described to me as the epicenter of evening activity for the roaches.

Once we were back in bed again with mosquito netting all around as a precaution against malaria, I became aware of the lack of padding below my hips. Although Tim was told at the shop that he was purchasing a deluxe foam pad to serve as our mattress, I barely felt anything between my hips and the wooden boards holding up the thin pad. I eventually fell asleep until my bladder beckoned at 3:00 a.m., when I foolishly decided not to brave the bugs outside to relieve myself. This meant spending the next three hours trying unsuccessfully to go back to sleep as the urge to pee grew greater and the scratching of cockroaches below the bed intensified.

Groggy and grumpy when dawn finally came, I helped with breakfast preparations and then got ready for services at the Catholic and Lutheran churches in Chekereni. Tim had told me about the dual services that would include a wedding and confirmation ceremonies, but little did I appreciate how involved these events would be because we had been guests of a Muslim family in Dar and had not gone to church services. I assumed they would last about the same time as a service in the United States—an hour or so—and then we would move on.

The Catholic service began at 9:00 a.m. and ran a mere one hour and fifteen minutes, giving us time to get to the Lutheran service shortly after it began at 10:00 a.m. The intense December heat and the absence of fans in the Catholic church made sitting inside the crowded sanctuary an exercise in endurance as I forced my heavy eyelids to stay open. Thus, it was a relief to see people standing outside of the overflowing Lutheran church when we arrived because it meant we could sit under a shady tree with other latecomers and catch a cool breeze. We found a few empty spots on a bench in the shade and began listening to the sermon as the pastor’s words wafted out of the open windows.

No sooner had we settled in comfortably than we began to hear murmurings from some of the women sitting near us who decided that it was not proper for Tim and me to be sitting outside. As the only white folks for miles around, they assumed we must be guests of the couple getting married or of one of the families whose children were being confirmed. Despite our protestations to stay put, they insisted that we be taken inside and given seats of distinction. This meant escorting us through the packed church to the very front pew, where those already seated pushed themselves even closer together to make room for two more bodies. Embarrassed by this unwarranted treatment based on racial privilege, I hesitantly whispered “Habari?” (How are you?) to the woman on my right, who was now pressed even more tightly against her large, matronly neighbor so that I could have a seat. The woman nonetheless smiled warmly, responded “Nzuri” (Fine), and placed her baby in my lap. After little Neema stared intently for a few minutes at the mzungu holding her, she and I both turned our attention to the long parade of girls and boys taking their first communion.

The transformation in these children, some of whom I had seen the day before playing in a vacant lot, was remarkable. Yesterday, the shoeless boys wore soiled, tattered T-shirts as they kicked a homemade soccer ball made from plastic shopping bags held together with bits of string; today, they were spotless, from the starched white collars under their suit jackets to their wel...