HomeOld_PostsThe education frontier ...whites never slept on the job

The education frontier …whites never slept on the job

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Tinofa tichienda kuZimbabwe
Kudzamara tinosvika, kunaZambezi
Kudzamara tinosvika kuZimbabwe

Nehanda komborera vari muZimbabwe
Nehanda komborera vari mumamokomo
Nehanda komborera vari mumapako

THE struggle for liberation in Zimbabwe was fought for 16 bitter years.
By 1979, the British were ready to offer terms of surrender and these were thrashed out at the arduous and contentious Lancaster House Conference of 1979 and on December 21 of the same year, an agreement was reached between the liberation forces, ZANU and ZAPU as well as the British armed robbers.
Since then, the British armed robbers have been trying to wrestle our country out of our hands, an intention they nursed as they signed the Lancaster House Agreement, even insisting on a constitution with so many booby-traps to make it so easy for them to reverse what they had just committed to paper.
The British and their European relatives and American friends have since tried many things to derail us.
ESAP was one such gimmick.
Refusal to fund the purchase of land from their kith and kin so that we could settle our people was another.
Illegal sanctions to punish us for taking our land which had already been liberated by the blood of our people and which they had refused to pay for in contravention of the Lancaster House Agreement was another big trump card.
Furthermore, sponsorship of illegal regime change through Chatham House personified in Morgan ‘Tsvangson’ Tsvangirai and the recent trailer including Evan Mawarire and Joyce Mujuru is their latest.
So we have never been allowed to rest, we have been fighting from the day we put our signature to the Lancaster House Agreement to this very day.
The British and their allies have been so desperate to repossess our land that in 2000, they tried to get the then President of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, to be their front for the military invasion of Zimbabwe.
They had no compunction about repeating their crime of 1890, but President Thabo Mbeki and South Africa would not betray their kith and kin.
This is the true nature of our enemy, the British armed robbers, they never changed their mind about their robbery of everything that is ours.
But mukoma sabhu haina hurukuro, ukaiona waiziva, they had to surrender when the guerillas had turned up the heat and the white racists had no intentions of throwing in the white towel.
This is why after they defeated us in 1897 in their wars of aggression to rob us of our land and wealth, they did not sit on their laurels.
The settlers immediately set out to consolidate this victory, to ensure that no means whatsoever could be employed to reverse this armed robbery of our land.
They knew they had to challenge the conscience of our people and align it with the armed robbery of the land and this was done through various means, but education was of fundamental importance.
Thus their very first education ordinance (Ordinance no. 1 of 1899) pre-scribed manual labour as the core school curriculum for Africans and in the same breath for the Europeans, an academic standard consisting of; proficiency in English, Latin, Literature, History, Mathematics, Geography, Science, Music and Shorthand.
Such a curriculum was clearly meant to prepare the Europeans to exercise socio-economic and political control of both the Africans and the country. (Mungazi: 1993).
The Education Ordinance of 1903 did not depart from this basic position, it amended the curriculum for Africans to include four hours of manual labour per day as core curriculum as well as rudimentary skills in the English language so that, as servants, they could understand instructions.
Throughout the early years (up to 1923) what was consistent was that while an academic education of a certain standard was required as a condition for educational grants for Europeans, for the Africans, the condition was that it be restricted to practical training and manual labour lest academic education awaken and cultivate in the African the intellectual skills of critical thinking and logic.
Africans were the labourers and the Europeans were the thinkers who were in charge, because the Europeans had stolen the land and were now in charge and the Africans had been reduced to paupers who worked for a wage.
In building, blacks were the bricklayers and carpenters, not the architects nor the quantity surveyors.
Such was the division of labour. The political relations were faithfully replicated in the education curriculum.
Later, when academic education was extended to the Africans, it was severely limited of critical thinking skills, analysis and logic.
It was theoretical and divorced from practice and production.
The aim was to produce clerks who kept track of the accumulating wealth of their white ‘masters’.
Africans were never permitted to think that they could compete with the Europeans in any way, in whatever field. White supremacy was to be etched in their psyche.
In addition, African education ensured blacks were denigrated, humiliated, and felt belittled when they faced the whiteman. This curriculum was designed to make it appear natural for the whiteman to rule blacks.
Thus it was argued that education had the important role of civilising the Africans who were dirty, evil and barbaric.
As such, Africans also had to be taught ‘habits of hygiene and cleanliness’ as stipulated in the Education Ordinance of 1903.
Africans had to be taught a new religion, the whiteman’s religion, because they had no religion. Theirs was all witchcraft and black magic.
And so every African who died became an evil spirit, but when whites died they went to heaven and became saints; the ‘passport’ to heaven was race.
And so Europeans were superior and favoured by God, all special truths were opened to them, but for the Africans it was all darkness and their salvation lay in ensconcing with the whiteman.
Children had to read books such as Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines where the heroes are those Africans who showed the whiteman where the ancestral treasure was hidden and those like Gagool who protected the ancestral treasures were cast as the vilest villains, and she had to die the most horrific death.
She is referred to as ‘an evil, impossibly ancient hag’.
All those books were carefully selected so that no-one would ever think it normal that they were Africans let alone rule themselves.
The libraries were bursting at the seams with Mills and Boon novels, all about European lifestyles, habits of courtship, morals, values and aesthetics.
Every book was about Europeans, even as the whites annihilated the ‘Red’ Indians and robbed them of their land, cattle and horses, all their wealth, they were heroes.
It was all calculated to ensure that no African child could think there was anything wrong with the whites doing the same to them.
There were books about Australia and New Zealand all about their ‘conquests’ of the Maoris and Aborigines, and not surprisingly no-one mentioned it was genocide, it was all correct.
Europeans had a right to everything non Europeans owned, they were the lords of the earth.
This was the menu for African children; they still were the heroes, the armed robbers.
And then there was Benny and Betty.
Why Benny and Betty?
Why not Ranga and Chitsidzo?
African children were taught to read King Midas of Greece, Widow Mazana and her pot of unending porridge, London Bridge is Falling and Piccadilly Circus, among others.
The British armed robbers were unequivocal, they did not waste time in aligning education with the new situation of their triumph against the Africans and their need to retain this robbery in perpetuity.
If this is what the British armed robbers did and we leave it like that, what does it mean?

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