ONE of our children from creche at Matenje Base in Mozambique showed its defence capabilities at the Nyamapanda Border Post when the schoolchildren were being repatriated following independence in 1980.
On seeing the Rhodesian soldiers stationed at the post, it confronted them:
“Ndimi maihayasha povo kaimi.” (So it is you who were harassing our people).
It meant, we ZANLA have come back triumphant let us see you dare to continue to misbehave.
No ‘Peace Studies’ can derail such a child, the child would send such peddlers of treason packing.
Promoting and perpetuating Rhodesian education is a dead end exercise.
It is to accept to maintain the net that has been cast around us.
It does not matter in which direction we swim, we are already caught.
The state of Midlands State University (MSU) ‘Peace Studies’ students is shocking, but it should not surprise.
We have maintained Rhodesian education and those results are accurate in terms of what Rhodesia is about.
We have not made the study of the Chimurenga War of Liberation a compulsory foundation course for all our levels of learning.
So-called ‘Peace Studies’ would never have been able to penetrate.
Our young students would have been our first line of defence, they would have told those who peddle the ‘Peace Studies’ agenda in the classroom, that Zimbabwe can never and will never be a colony again.
Had we educated our young correctly, ‘Peace Studies’ would not have taken off, it would not have succeeded in getting a foothold among our young, it might never have found a home in our universities, at least not the state universities.
We Zimbabweans continue to claim in different fora that we are so educated, more than so many others kupi, kupi?
Zvinoshamisa; how can we be educated when we continue to feed our children the poison that killed us yesterday, that poison which continues to disable us?
The insistence by ZIMSEC, supported by so many of us, that education is ideologically neutral is not as innocent as it seems.
It is a deadly poison, it is Rhodesia in its most lethal state, we will not make it as long as our children do not know who they are and who they are is not defined by whether they are Shona, Ndebele, Ndau or that they live between the Zambezi and the Limpopo.
There are many who live between the Zambezi and the Limpopo who are not Zimbabweans.
Morgan Tsvangirai sold his own mother (Zimbabwe), but the deal did not go through, he is more Rhodesian than some Rhodesians of British descent.
That which teaches our children who they are is what ZIMSEC rules our children should never learn because it is not ‘examinable’.
That our children should learn that Zimbabwe is their country, they own it, down to the very grain of sand, every drop of water, every blade of grass; that they should love and cherish this land and commit to work for it, to do everything for it, even unto death.
The ethos of Zimbabwe that we are a people in our own right, defenders of what is right, we are noble, we are moral, we are ethical, and we embody the human values of compassion, forgiveness, and we are brave and courageous, are not permitted according to ZIMSEC.
This is Rhodesia’s power, as unadulterated as Ian Smith ever wanted.
It is deeply disturbing that in the corridors in which fundamental decisions about the education of our children are made, such a fallacy as the unmeasurability of attitudes, values and feelings, or the affective should rule the roost.
It is unbelievable.
What is measurement?
Such a myopic of defining of measurement is chosen because it supports the Rhodesian agenda.
Each subject, learning area, discipline has three components, its ideological axis, that is the moral ethical and aesthetic attitudes values and feelings which undergird it, the scientific axis which is the body of knowledge that defines the discipline, and the pedagogic axis, which defines the methodology, the vehicle of the discipline.
Thus to teach any subject without taking aboard the ideological axis is moribund, that way it is not possible to get a correct understanding of the discipline and this is what is evident among MSU ‘Peace Studies’ students, they never got the ideological axis of education in Zimbabwe.
School Curriculum from 1990 has denied Zimbabwe’s ideological axis.
This denial is enshrined in the Nziramasanga Commission Report, and ZIMSEC has been the perfect midwife.
The curriculum for each school subject has to spell out its ideological axis and this should draw from Zimbabwe’s ideological axis.
This is the foundation education each of our children needs for them to be Zimbabwean.
We cannot build Zimbabwe with non-Zimbabweans.
It is not only MSU ‘Peace Studies’, students who have gone off the rails.
If students are not taught right, these are the results, it is a wake up call we have been fortunate to get, but as long as we do not unseat Rhodesia in our curriculum, we will be caught in the net.
Chatham House and their friends in Western Europe and America have long cast the net, today it is ‘Peace Studies’, it is scholarships, yesterday it was Tsvangirai, currently they are on a crusade to insist we are unable to raise the girl child nor protect it and if it chooses to become a prostitute, they insist protect it, it is a sex worker; it goes on, the net has been cast wide, ‘Rhodesians don’t die’ they swear, is it us who are going to die?
Dr Mahamba is a war veteran and holds a PhD from Havard University. She is currently doing consultancy work.