PART three dramatised the fact that our becoming Zimbabweans in terms of our outlook and values is not something that happens on its own, something that can be left to chance or accidents of history.
We have to author that national identity, step by step, bit by bit starting from the nursery world, right up to the elementary school and beyond, construct it and promote it using our educational curriculum as a tool.
For instance, becoming an American is, for most Americans, a phenomenon originating from and generated by the school curriculum in the USA.
A more specific example is in order. In South Dakota under the rubric of Social Studies Grade One pupils are expected to recognise one or two commemorative national holidays of the USA and listen to and or present a story about such holidays!
They are also expected to identify one or two American symbols, more so the national flag as a national symbol.
The same applies to American landmarks and to some of the founding fathers of the American Republic.
In a sense, social studies is relied upon as only one of the many tools used in elementary schools to bond the child to American national symbols, to American geography and to American history and society thus inculcating in them a deep rooted sense of belonging and identity.
The same applies to the British, the Germans, the French etc.
The outcome of such a well-thought out and thorough investment policies are obvious: very few Americans or Europeans are prepared to disown their countries.
Our curriculum should be designed to achieve similar results.
The current situation where someone morphs from being Zimbabweans into being South Africans soon after crossing the border, or from being Zimbabweans to being British, Australian or Canadian citizens says a lot not only about the state of our economy which has been under Western economic sanctions for nearly two decades, but about what is lacking in us as well.
It is a tragedy when most of us want to be regarded as Zimbabweans in good times only and quickly metamorphose into something else for opportunistic reasons associated with our material welfare.
We start apologising for being Zimbabweans in order to curry favour with those who, throughout history, have always made fortunes from our resources and labour at our expense!
People in the world do not respect those who do not respect themselves:, people who loathe themselves in a futile attempt to endear themselves to their historical enemies.
Such people harvest mountains of contempt wherever they are and wherever they go.
Far too many of us have earned that kind of contempt during the past 14 years and we should not condemn our next generations to a similar fate.
One way of addressing this curse is to come up with an education system which entrenches us in our soil firm enough to insert roots, deep enough to nourish our growth, but a kind of growth which allows us to move in all directions befitting our dreams both at local and global levels!
The Chinese have done it, the Malaysians, the Koreans, the Indians and so on, all these have become modern and successful not because they surrendered their primary cultural identities as the colonial curriculum in Africa is forcing us to do, but largely because they have built up all their successes on those very native identities and characteristics which Western colonials used to look down upon.
l To page 14
l From page 5
Most of us have noticed how a sizeable chunk of our population automatically regards visits to Europe, especially to Britain as being akin to some kind of arrival in a heaven of some sort!
In fact most of us are keen to regard our arrivals and brief stays in either Europe and/or the USA as constituting a lifetime achievement, something that our kinsmen should never forget!
Call it innocence, naivety or an illusion bordering on complete self-deception, the point is most of us are prepared to gloss over the racism and pathological hatred for blacks-that is ever present in Western populations!
Why?
To convince those at home that we have made it in life!
One way to address this sickening syndrome of worshipping countries and people whose societies are riddled with gross imperfections and prejudices of their own is simply to introduce a curriculum some of whose sections define the historical relationship between Africa and the West.
In fact no curriculum in Africa worth its salt would fail to delineate with clarity and purpose the chief characteristics of African slavery as carried out by Europeans for over four centuries, and how that slavery constitutes the foundation of Western prosperity as we see it today and conversely African poverty and destitution.
In fact enslavement of Africans by Europeans between 1450 and 1863 and the subsequent colonisation of the mother continent itself, again by the same Western culprits, provides for all African generations to come the real framework from which and about which any discussions on human rights should be carried out.
Any human rights discourses in Africa, more so those conducted by non-governmental organisations (NGOs), which avoid mentioning this slave holocaust as a starting point are fake and going nowhere!
To teach our children about slavery and colonisation is to insist on African self knowledge, encompassing both our defeats and weaknesses as well as our heroic struggles for freedom and independence; it is to empower our children with knowledge about what we should never allow other races to do to us as a people, to arm them with knowledge about the epic battles and wars which Africans have won against all odds; it is to empower them to relate to other nations in a more realistic manner so that they are, never again, taken advantage of the same way our ancestors were.
Failure to teach the history of African slavery and that of struggles for our liberation up to secondary school level, regardless of subsequent areas of academic specialisation and or training, is a gross dereliction of duty which amounts to self-betrayal.
And this is regardless of whether one is studying nuclear physics, chemistry or medicine etc.
We need to study and master our history of slavery and struggle for freedom and independence.
To study anything in this world without having such a point of view is to condemn oneself to become a perpetual academic tourist.
It is like Jews talking about Israel and its history without ever mentioning the holocaust.
Likewise Africans need to use their tragic history to best advantage.
No Western education consultant will ever recommend this to us; we have to do it ourselves for the sake of safeguarding our liberation.