By T.K. Tsodzo

MY brief stay in Britain in August 2013 also enabled me to get into direct contact with three cases of racism practised by the British and their allies and mostly against people from Africa and Asia (generally referred there as non-whites).
The first one of these cases involves a ruling that was passed by that country’s Ministry of Education while we were there.
The second one is about a measure called STOP AND SEARCH that is already being implemented by the police in that country and the third case involves people from Zimbabwe (some of them quite prominent) who are on a campaign of some sort to denigrate their own country in every way they can.
In the first case, after I had heard about a meeting that was being held by Britain’s Minister of Education in London I ventured to travel there from Huntingdon, near Cambridge.
As I also carried a letter of recommendation from a member of Cambridge University, I was allowed to attend the meeting.
The measure that he had called the meeting to explain was a new ruling that his ministry had made on the age at which secondary school education would remain compulsory (at the equivalent of our ‘O’ Level).
The age was being extended from 16 years to 18 years to give students who have not obtained good passes in the two key subjects, English and Mathematics, to rewrite them.
This measure had been taken because too many children were failing to get jobs on completing their ‘O’ Level equivalent as they did not have full certificates.
At question time, my friend asked the minister how the ruling would affect students from other countries.
The minister answered that this was something he had not thought about and my friend could contact him later for an answer.
In my later discussions on the matter with people from outside Britain, I got confirmation that the new ruling on education in Britain would mostly disadvantage foreigners who would not get opportunities to rewrite their English and Mathematics; and would, therefore, remain unemployable.
In our further discussions on the matter we found out that unemployment would also expose non-Britons to the STOP AND SEARCH exercise that the British police was already implementing.
And fortunately for us the matter became the subject of a press conference that was held about a week before my return home.
The press conference, which had been requested by 17 young men who had fallen victim to it, was screened live on BBC.
The questions were something like:
What will the police be looking for when they stop and search people?
Would the police be looking for specific people who might have escaped from custody somewhere?
Why was it that mostly (if not only) non whites were the victims of the STOP AND SEARCH ruling?
What if someone who was stopped refused to be searched or just bolted away?
I can summarise the answers the police officer gave in one sentence as: The police will be looking for people with drugs or other illegal possessions, who do not need to have escaped from anywhere and they will not be targeting people by race or origin but if someone tries to run away they will shoot him down with the revolvers they carry.
Obviously the answer the officer gave concerning the skin of the targeted people was not true because it was mostly black or non-white people that were being victimised.
This was also very clear from the appearance of those at the press conference.
It even reminded me of the colonial era in Africa when us blacks were always treated like animals by mostly British, French and Portuguese colonialists.
The third and last issue that greatly surprised me in Britain was the attitude of some of our fellow Zimbabweans, who are resident in that country.
Nearly all of them expressed their great disappointment at Tsvangirai’s losing to President Mugabe by such a big margin in the last elections. Although none of them could give any concrete reasons for thinking like that, they just wished ‘kuti dai Mwari waIzraeri akangovakomborerawo’.
After trying to make some of them see sense but in vain, I just stopped arguing with them and wished them well in their endless job-seeking occupation.
I instead occupied myself browsing the internet for items of general interest.
Only to come across another even more puzzling to me.
These were the views of two fairly prominent Zimbabweans, Chenjerai Hove and David Coltart.
Of the two, Coltart is not specific about what he dislikes in Zimbabwe.
All his articles are about how indispensable he thought he was to Zimbabwe’s education system and how he was going to discourage the study of Ndebele and Shona as key subjects at ‘O’ Level for some flimsy reasons.
Obviously he believed that he was going to be retained as the minister of a ministry he knows exactly nothing about even if his own party lost the last elections.
In his many articles he clearly indicated that Zimbabwe could not do without him.
Chenjerai Hove, on the other hand, is not very clear about what he does not like about his own country.
He just wishes that white people could return and take over everything because blacks are failing in every respect.
For example, he would have liked to see English remaining the main language in his home country because local languages are too undeveloped to serve common languages.
Although he also expresses his dislike for President Mugabe, he does not make clear exactly what he dislikes about him.
Knowing Chenjerai as I do, I could not help concluding that he only expressed the above views in order to get funding for his next publication.
Finally, I was shocked to see a former classmate employed as a domestic.