THOSE who ordered that Hunyani Waste Paper Collections should shred some of the most glorious work by the Curriculum Development Unit (CDU) in late 1988 must have remained very busy over the last 20 plus years.
It has not been possible to find any of the splendid materials by the CDU in the first decade of independence.
It seems the National Archives did not receive copies of our publications over the years and the materials have not survived.
I went there looking for the School Atlas for Zimbabwe without any success, neither could I find some of the magnificent charts we produced in social studies.
I went to the former Audio Visual Services Centre (AVS), now barricaded as if we had gone back to the colonial days where Africans were served through the window, somebody spoke to me through a tiny window and harshly told me they no longer have any of those long ago materials as if to say how dare you suggest that such should continue in the ministry, these are different times.
It seems that there no longer is any requirement that AVS should have archives of its own or any systematic record keeping.
Our charts and atlases were produced with the assistance of AVS, the distribution centre for materials produced by the CDU in the sense that teachers would come from all over the country to collect the teaching and learning materials they needed.
For this reason it was so shocking that nobody seemed to have any clue to what I was talking about.
One was dismissed as if they are a little bit mad to think that such material could be found at AVS.
At the CDU, the reception was good.
The deputy chief education officer for curriculum who joined CDU just before it was demobilised remembered what I was talking about, but he told me that none of those materials remained.
He invited me as a former CDU member who is in publishing to write and submit materials to CDU for approval as the other publishers are doing.
At least his attitude was not of gladness and relief but that of appreciation over what was done by CDU in the first decade of independence.
Is it coincidence, accident, that these materials do not seem to have been preserved anywhere in the parent institutions?
What is left perhaps is to go school by school and see if any of these materials have survived the holocaust?
Something is bound to have survived, I know for sure the School Atlas for Zimbabwe can still be found in some schools, at least a few.
I wonder if they know that they are holding vintage material?
The work of CDU in those first 10 years is a proud legacy that each patriotic, progressive Zimbabwean can and should tap into and use as a lever to leap forward.
I do not believe that it is the true ZANU PF government policy which frustrated and killed political economy, frustrated and killed the Creative Writing Series, the Chimurenga Series?
I do not believe that it is the true ZANU PF government instruction that it was wrong for Zimbabwe’s children to read about the struggle that liberated their country as it was narrated in the Chimurenga Series.
I do not believe that it was the policy of the true ZANU PF government which demobilised CDU.
I do not believe the true ZANU PF government said that it was not so special for Zimbabwe’s children to read about themselves and no more have their minds befuddled and their spirits distressed and demoralised by reading about others purported to be superior to them.
It cannot be the true ZANU PF government that said it was no longer desirable for our children to learn about their history in a manner that reveals the material forces that drives its development so that their eyes could be opened to how they could be at the helm of their country and achieve the goals they desire so.
I certainly do not think it can be the true ZANU PF government policy that had the Creative Writing Series, the Chimurenga Series among them, shredded by Hunyani Waste Paper Collections.
It would not be the true ZANU PF government that demobilised CDU so that today production of teaching and learning materials is in the hands of commercial publishers.
This is a far cry from the former situation in which the government itself took responsibility for materials production and ensured that there was consonance between what the children were learning and the goals and aspirations of the people of Zimbabwe.
It is alarming that curriculum development in Zimbabwe has gone back to the colonial days where writing of teaching and materials was by the commercial publishers and the curriculum development unit was responsible for syllabus production.
Surely it cannot be true that we have gone back to the colonial days?
But there it is, starkly before our eyes.
But of course there always are wolves in sheep’s skin and the best of inspirations are wrecked.
It has not been easy for us to sing our song in a land that was made strange for 90 years and is still strange in many ways to date.
The struggle continues and sometimes it is very vicious, but it doesn’t mean that the true ZANU PF government has reneged.
When you set government in a former enemy camp, the loopholes are many, you plug as many as you can but some things still slip through.
What is still true is that we came home and we did some wonderful things for Zimbabwe’s children, but these were sabotaged.
Ko vakafa vakagofirei havo?
Vana vangashingiswa sei?
Dr Mahamba is a war veteran and holds a PhD from Havard University. She is currently doing consultancy work.