HomeOld_PostsHow to teach our children to be heirs of Zimbabwe

How to teach our children to be heirs of Zimbabwe

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LAST week I shared an experience I had over this past Africa Day which continues to haunt me.
How I offered to assist my nephew in Grade Two with his assignment about the uses of silkworms and how at the end of our discussion, he, together with his friends failed to understand anything about the topic.
I ended up writing sentences he was to copy into his homework book later.
He did not do a good job of copying them and I did not have the heart to cost him, but the mother took over and sat on him to copy them in his best handwriting, it was a bit of a battle, he did resist.
I guess she had to do it so the child could survive the teacher or else, I also had a disconcerting sense that these teachers have so much power over the parents even, perhaps their leverage is that they can cost the child so much.
This experience haunts me for so many reasons.
Our children are being force fed topics they cannot relate to, that are meaningless and totally irrelevant to their lives and so they cannot relate to them.
Children are not passive recipients, they are active meaning makers, they seek to construct meaning in whatever they encounter and this includes their class experiences.
When they cannot make sense they disensconse as these four children did, instead they created their own lesson based on what they knew and could relate to, the uses of cattle, which I was quite pleased about.
To the very end they totally rejected the meaningless lesson on silk worms.
My nephew would not even apply himself to copy the sentences in his best handwriting except under duress, it took a few strikes to the head with a ruler from his mother for him to do it.
Secondly it broke me that the children have no mastery of the mother language so I could not use it to assist them when they could not go on with the English they seem so comfortable with.
This was compounded by the fact that the subject under discussion was totally irrelevant.
The English language which has been superimposed on a mother language that is poorly formed was not advanced enough to sustain conversation.
The question then is what really happens in their classrooms, how much do the children understand and learn?
And to what extent is this monitored?
Some of these schools were predominantly white in the colonial era, today though almost all black, the practice, the culture is still predominantly Eurocentric, very English.
Children should be taught exclusively in the mother language for at least the first three years, literacy in the second language should only be introduced after this but these friends I attempted to teach about silkworms and many other children, are under the scourge of the English language right from crèche and it is crippling them, they are getting nowhere with it, they are not making it and if they seem to be making it, it is as broken vessels.
The homes are not helping the situation because they too use the English language, and they undermine the formation of the mother language, leaving the children stranded, incapable of using either language effectively.
I later learned from the mother that the child’s teacher is white and that both at pre-school and Grade One his teachers had been white.
“So where does he learn his Shona?” I asked.
She said she’s trying to engage a private teacher for this purpose, that at the school they do not do Shona as L1, but as L2.
“Oh my God!
“An African child learning his mother language as L2 in his country of birth? “Kozvaitasei?”
That in a Zimbabwean school a child learns its mother language as a second language and that if it must learn the mother language as its first language then the parents must make private arrangements for it is preposterous to say the least.
These children are Zimbabwean first and foremost.
It is their birthright to be availed optimum conditions to learn as who they are; Shona, Ndebele, Shangaan, Venda, whatever it is they are, no-one has a right to take this away from them, not even the parents!
The right for us to be who we are as Zimbabweans was taken away by colonialism.
People gave up their lives so that we could be ourselves once again in our land of birth, this right should not be taken away from any Zimbabwean child.
It is hard to imagine the trauma of a child torn from its home at three or four years and sat in front of a teacher who does not understand its culture or language, and perhaps who does not honour or respect them, the child has to make sense of the world through foreign eyes, language and culture, never to hear the consolation and reassurance of its mother language from its teacher.
What happens to all of it that is African, its culture, how is it rated in this situation? How does the child understand itself from this moment on, is it with the same self-esteem it was born and raised with, where does it hide its true identity at the onslaught of this strange new identity, how does it juggle the two worlds, who it is and who it is supposed to be and still remain the best it can be, without being broken?
Our children should never be so upset that they are not correct as who they are.
Kodzero dzavo dzakafirwa namakomuredhi, navanamai, vanababa, vanambuya, vanasekuru, vasikana navakomana, navadiki navacheche.
Our children need to be protected from schools that do not follow the national syllabi and force our children to learn about silkworms, schools which to this day 34 years after independence still use readers from England, written for English children in England, for use in England, readers with no trace of Africans, African life, names, values.
It is not true that there are no good readers by Zimbabweans about Zimbabweans in this land.
The children need to be protected from schools whose main mission is to befuddle their minds and hearts about who they are and what their purpose is as Zimbabweans.
Can such decontextualised teaching and learning give us heirs of Zimbabwe?
Can children who learn their mother language as a second language and English as their first find it so easy to identify with the rest of Zimbabweans and with the goals of Zimbabweans?
Can children groomed in this curriculum milieu so successfully drive Zim-ASSET, can they be the best drivers of entrepreneurship, and empowerment, can they be truly Zimbabwean?
Is this the way to make them feel special about being Zimbabwean?
Is this the way to make them fall in love with Zimbabwe?
Is this the way to make them so passionate about Zimbabwe that they can give their life for it if necessary?
Let us not renege on the responsibilities left us by those who died for Zimbabwe.
Let us teach our children to be heirs of Zimbabwe.
Iwe neni tichine basa guru!
Dr Mahamba is a war veteran and holds a PhD from Havard University. She is currently doing consultancy work.

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