PART One discussed the success story in education which has catapulted Zimbabwe into hosting the most literate population on the African continent!
With a literacy rate of 93 percent attained in less than 35 years of its existence as an independent country, Zimbabwe has scored a groundbreaking achievement which other countries in the world are beginning to examine as a possible model to follow.
What is often taken for granted to a point of it being overshadowed by the success itself is the bold and single-minded character of the kind of leadership it took, the imaginative character of such a leadership, the impressive amount of self-belief in a cause dedicated to eradicate illiteracy of the majority population on a continent in which literacy levels have remained relatively modest for long.
One can argue, however, that the success story in education remains a paradoxical achievement in so far as it scores well on literacy numbers, on number of disciplines, on issues of accessibility and affordability, inclusiveness etc, but the downside of this success is equally troubling and in need of urgent attention.
And this is critical, if Zimbabwe is to make good progress towards becoming a developed industrial country able to hold its own in a world that has become highly competitive!
No country in this world has succeeded in becoming developed and advanced unless its people are organised and disciplined and believe in themselves.
It is a deep rooted sense of self-belief which generates confidence which in turn promotes the kind of creativity and inventiveness that go on to characterise a great people!
The key question is: Does the current curriculum nurture such attributes?
Here is how a leading novelist, Charles Mungoshi, described one of the elites produced by our education system year in year out.
The description is in the form of a confessional soliloquy from one of the main characters in Waiting for the Rain:
I am Lucifer Mandengu.
I was born here against my will.
I should have been born elsewhere — of some other parents.
I have never liked it here, and I never shall and if I leave this place, I am not going to come back.
I have been born here, but is that a crime?
That is only a biological and geographical error.
A deeply alienated people raring to leave their country and start belonging elsewhere, preferably in Europe or the USA, is what our current curriculum is dutifully producing, especially in the so called ‘A’ schools!
This phenomenon of producing students who may physically remain here, in our country, but who are mentally if not spiritually living elsewhere outside the country, is as widespread as our curriculum has been devastatingly effective in propagating colonial values throughout the country!
Mungoshi made observations about what colonial education could turn us into in the 1970s — tourists of sorts raring to abandon their country in order to go overseas.
Such characters are hopelessly ill-suited to develop a country!
Forty-five years later on November 28 2014 an ex-combatant and Harvard University trained graduate, Dr Irene Mahamba, wrote this about Zimbabwean pupils pitilessly over- whelmed in our schools by foreign content often studied from a non-African point of view:
These children get hurt when they are forced to be foreign to themselves.
They cannot get over the feeling of anomie which results from a systematic contradiction with oneself for years.
It is therefore not surprising at all that today Zimbabwe is teeming with professors and lawyers etc who are automatically committed to any programmes deliberately designed and sponsored by some Western countries to undermine Zimbabwe’s economy and sovereignty, professors who are singularly incompetent to identify and handle accordingly Africa’s well documented enemies who have not only enslaved its people for centuries but colonised it and looted from it to enrich their own Western countries.
In other words our institutions are dutifully reproducing imperial cum colonial values as Zimbabwean values and paying those who are doing so handsomely both in monetary terms and in kind!
Is it surprising therefore that some in our midst are working day and night to promote Western agendas in Africa in the hope of receiving foreign awards for betraying their own to the same West?
Is this not what Ian Smith, daft as he was, unwittingly meant when he vowed that there would never be black majority rule in Zimbabwe in his lifetime, “not in a thousand years!”
Put differently, the curriculum review that is underway should assist all of us to define clearly what type of person we want our education system to produce. Surely no sane person both at home and abroad would regard our current curriculum as normal and viable when it is producing people who dislike themselves intensely, people who feel white inside while remaining black outside, or what some have labelled as “coconut characters”!
Our current education system is producing people who are not necessarily committed to their country because they have been trained for years, first and foremost, to look down upon themselves as blacks.
They do not believe in themselves, they do not believe in anything done by blacks in general, unless whites are part of the same project and or programme!
To such people any achievement by blacks only becomes legitimate and fit for celebration when approved by the West!
This backward attitude partly explains why some in our midst could not embrace the Land Reform Programme, groundbreaking and epical in its scope and implications as it is!
Surely such negativity and self-hatred cannot be a viable basis on which to generate the kind of confidence, originality, creativity and inventiveness–all qualities that could assist us to build a nation whose achievements we can all be proud of?
It can therefore be argued that one of the biggest challenges which the curriculum review should tackle head on is the belated, but necessary indigenisation of our current curriculum.
We need to learn about ourselves and the world from an African point of view. We need an education system which promotes an African character and personality which remains deeply anchored in our environment while at the same time being open-minded and critically receptive to the needs and demands of the larger world.
We need a curriculum containing many pathways designed to empower our children with knowledge, skills and expertise, a curriculum underpinned by values which enable them to master the local as part of their racial and cultural background while at the same time relating profitably and with ease to the larger world that has become ruthlessly competitive.
In light of the above, the review exercise should be regarded as a key moment in our history to lay the foundation for the creation of a more advanced society which flourishes on its God-given resources and on its ethical values of Unhu/Ubuntu!
It is vital that Zimbabwe ends up with a curriculum that is both original and groundbreaking in so far as it will depart from the one we inherited from the British.
We need to move beyond being mere caricatures of the British, from being copycats good at imitation and mimicry of the British at the expense of our cultural realities.
The Chinese, the Japanese, the Malaysians, the Indians etc have all done it and progressed far beyond what their inherited colonial curricula could ever deliver. We do not need to de-Africanise ourselves first in order to develop as a people as the current colonial based curriculum is obliging us to do.
It is also not necessary for our new curriculum to simply echo neo-liberal clichés in the same way certain sections of our new constitution do.
To go beyond such clichés we need the same kind of boldness and single mindedness that has not only enabled us to carry out our Land Reform Programme against all odds, but also to achieve the highest literacy rate in Africa with modest resources at our disposal.