ABSTRACT
Despite the numerous potentially prohibitive factors at the school level and the social and familial levels of the enabling environment, the participants in my study were all enrolled in school and they were not withdrawn; they did not drop out, and their academic performance and grade level attainment was good, exceptionally good for some, as was evidenced in the previous chapter, which focused on the women’s school environments. Here, the analytical interest is in factors related to the social and familial levels of the enabling environment, elaborating the research participants’ familial arrangements and everyday life practices, on the one hand, and the views and attitudes of their parents regarding the relevance and value of education and schooling of their children, on the other. I am not postulating that the sets of capabilities in the women’s familial environments did not entail problems and barriers to the education and schooling of the children, particularly girls. However, given the level of attainment and education that the women have achieved, I am presuming that there were more supportive practices and ideas towards education and schooling of children in their families than in many other families around them. However, before embarking on a closer examination of the research participants’ narratives on a ‘typical day’ and their familial attitudes towards female education, I wish to give voice to Amisa and Hanifa to tell their stories to depict some of their familial experiences concerning schooling. The reason for starting by listening to their stories is that a great deal of the women’s significant school memories addressed human relations and relationships with others. Indeed, the most intense memories of school were intertwined with their teachers and peers. At home, understandably as children, the most intense memories were associated with their parents: with Amisa, her first and worst, and for Hanifa, her best and worst school memories were associated with their fathers. A couple of times, Amisa mentioned how painful it was for her to go back to such bad memories, but even so, she told her story:
My first and worst school memory is not very good. I don’t want to remember, but I have to share it with you. That time we were still with our father, and my father, in my opinion, was very bad man. I don’t want to even remember… My father was very harsh, very rude, who didn’t
want to see you. I mean like ‘traditional African man’ who are like, when they are coming, you have to run and hide, because Dad is around. I was joining Std I. Then you are just telling him, you know, ‘Dad, I’m
going to school, are you going to buy me a uniform?’ You are like a kid and he didn’t speak anything to me. I remember that and I was six years old. My mother was cooking and she said ‘yes, yes, you are going to school’. Then my father came and sits and said: ‘I’ve told you, I don’t want to see you (the mother) to go to work, but you said no (she wanted to work); and now you tell your daughter to come and tell me to buy her a school uniform. I’m not going to buy anything!’ And because my mother knows this guy, he’s going to beat her, so let’s
just keep quiet, but you know what he did? He just took a big bowl, glass bowl, and threw it to my mum. It cut my mum here (shows her head) and then suddenly my mum just dropped and fainted. I can’t forget that because my mum was bleeding […] I had blood in my clothes, it was terrible (Amisa is crying). I shouted and then neighbours came and picked my mum and took her to the hospital. Till today, my mum has an injury in her head.
