By Maidei Jenny Magirosa

AT Christmas Pass in Mutare, if you look up as you drive along, you will see a statue of Kingsley Fairbridge, standing next to a black man.
The statue represents Kingsley Fairbridge at the age of 12 with his ‘African companion-servant called Jack’, and a little dog.
The statue was built and placed there in memory of a most colonial minded man who envisaged a place for orphaned British children in the empire.
He had the dream which led to the creation of the Fairbridge Farm schools for British child immigrants in Australia and Canada and the Kingsley Fairbridge Memorial College in Rhodesia.
Kingsley Ogilvie Fairbridge was the founder of a child emigration scheme to the colonial territories and the formation of the Fairbridge Schools.
Fairbridge was born at Grahamtown in South Africa in 1885.
He was the son of a land surveyor to the Cape government.
The Fairbridge family came to Rhodesia in 1896, during the First Chimurenga.
Kingsley was only eleven when the family settled in Mutare.
He went with his father on survey expeditions and got to know the vast landscape of the Rhodesian bush.
At the age of 13, he worked as a clerk for the Standard Chartered Bank in Umtali (Mutare).
During that time, he contracted malaria and never really got over the impact of it on his health.
In 1903 at the age of 17, Kingsley went to visit his grandmother in England.
Over there, the young Kingsley was struck by the filthy and ironically, the lack of civilisation of the British.
He saw big cities, the dirt, the poverty, the slums, ‘crowded workhouses and orphanages’.
He was touched and troubled by the poor conditions of desperate and neglected orphans living in squalid, cold places with little to eat.
It was a situation that had earlier been described by Thomas Barnardo as a place where “young men and women are crowded together in pestilential rookeries without the least provision for decency and in such conditions of abominable filth, atmospheric impurity and immoral association as to make the maintenance of virtue impossible, is almost enough to fill the bravest reformer with despair.”
One year later Kingsley returned to Rhodesia.
In comparison to England, Rhodesia was beautiful, the climate was also good and there was plenty of space.
Kingsley then started working on what he called his ‘Vision Splendid’. In one of his writings, he said,
“I saw great colleges of agriculture springing up in every man-hungry corner of the Empire.
“I saw children shedding the bondage of bitter circumstances and stretching their legs and minds amid the thousand interests of the farm.
“I saw waste turned to providence, the waste of un-needed humanity converted to the husbandry of unpeopled acres.”
He then approached Cecil John Rhodes for a scholarship so he can go back to England and study at Oxford.
Kingsley failed to qualify four times.
He finally got the scholarship and went to study forestry.
On October 19 1909, Kingsley addressed 49 fellow undergraduates at the Colonial Club, on the subject of Child Emigration.
In response, the students were enthusiastic.
That very night, the foundation of the ‘Child Emigration Society’ was formed.
Later on it became the Fairbridge Society.
Fairbridge’s charity aimed to give British ‘waifs and orphans’ a new life with the aim to provide the Empire with white agricultural labour as opposed to black labour only.
They were also going to be domestic servants for the wealthy colonialists.
This process of child migration to populate the Empire was approved under a British Act of parliament.
The Empire Settlement Act of 1922 provided authority for the British government to work with colonised territories like Rhodesia.
Approved private organisations were given permission to manage migration schemes through assisted passages, allowances and training.
The idea behind child migration was also seen as bringing economic benefit both to Britain by relieving the government from its duty of caring for children.
In addition, these children were going to be potential colonial settlers who would rule the natives.
As such, there was a very strong racist objective in the importation of children to the colonies.
They were also seen as ‘good white stock’ who will increase the population of settlers in the British colonies.
According to The Child Migrants’ Trust, “child migrants were used as a way to preserve white managerial elite in the former Rhodesia”.
One man who went to Australia as a child, John Hennessey told reporters working on a recent documentary that on arrival in Fremantle, Australia, he and the other children were welcomed by a senior church pastor, who said, “It’s nice to see you children here.
“Australia needs you.
“We need white stock.
“We need this country to be populated by white stock because we are terrified of the Asian hordes.”
When Kingsley asked for funding to begin his work in bringing British orphans to live here and populate the Empire, Rhodes’s British South Africa Police refused.
In 1912, Kingsley received land in Western Australia.
He settled there with his wife Ruby.
They commenced the first Fairbridge Farm School at Pinjarra, 50 miles south of Perth.
Initially they received 13 orphan children from Britain.
But later on the number increased.
Some of the children were told that they were orphans because they had been born out of wedlock or they had been placed in orphanages by impoverished families.
Sadly, many of the children left school illiterate and were often subjected to forms of slavery and sexual and physical abuse.
They lived in large isolated institutions and were given harsh, “sometimes intentionally brutal, regimes of work and discipline, unmodified by any real nurturing or encouragement.
“The institutions were inadequately supervised, monitored and inspected.” 
The report estimates that 150 000 child migrants left Britain, of whom about 100 000 went to Canada, and the remainder to Australia, New Zealand, Rhodesia and other colonies of the British Empire.
These children were usually between the ages of three and 14, the majority being between seven and 10.
 Apart from the effects of malaria suffered in Manicaland, Fairbridge had severe back pain and general ill-health.
He died at the age of 39 on July 19 1924 in Perth leaving so much still to be done for a full realisation of his ‘Vision Splendid’.
After his death, the Kingsley Fairbridge Trust was formed as a bursary fund for white university students.
In 1957, the University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (UCRN) was established and three British students were awarded bursaries in 1958.
After that, four students received a bursary from the trust each year.
The bursary scheme was stopped when Ian Smith declared Uilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) in 1965.
Thus ended the legacy of the colonial orphaned child settlers.
Next time you go past Christmas Pass in Mutare, look up and you will see the statue of a man whose dream was to populate Africa with orphans that Britain did not want to keep.