THE debate on curriculum review has been raging for a while now and there seems to be no official acknowledgement of implementation of any specific recommendations, at least yet.
The latter has implications for tailor-making the mind-sets of the reviewers themselves.
Hence this sermon speaks to reviewers who are doing the noble task of reviewing the curriculum.
In our conversation last week we focused on returning schoolchildren.
We talked about the importance of embracing the appropriate mind set in all their approach to their studies.
We were basically asking them to introspect, establish who they are and persuade each other to see reality from an Africa-centred point of view.
That is as good as saying they must embrace a Zimbabwean perspective in whatever they do; but to be able to demonstrate that they need to understand unequivocally what Zimbabwean-ness entails.
This is also possible if the different disciplines they pursue invariably have been structured and imbued with a Zimbabwean sensibility.
First and foremost I want to unpack the entire process of curriculum review.
It is a process I describe as iterative; meaning it is both backward and forward-looking.
The curriculum itself is a menu; an educational recipe for preparing the young for their prospective roles in society.
Although people think of school subjects and tertiary courses when they hear the term ‘curriculum’, its correct interpretation extends far beyond these.
These are only but the hard staff the reviewers should deal with, but even more fundamental than these courses is the informing philosophy.
Reviewers must be painfully aware of what philosophy they are advancing.
I appreciate most reviewers are trained, but they also need to introspect.
They must know they were not trained for universal fitness.
They were trained for a particular worldview, so if they are to be useful to the Zimbabwean process they must begin with self-introspection as well.
That is to say that the same questions they ask stakeholders about the Zimbabwean review process must be directed to their own predisposition first. Put simply, they must pass the test of local sense and sensibility.
As one Achebe puts it: “An African writer must be a person who has some kind of conception of the society in which he is living and the way he wants the society to go.”
The point Achebe makes is key to qualifying as a legitimate architect let alone reviewer for the Zimbabwean curriculum.
It comes down to saying: do the reviewers themselves embrace the Zimbabwean sensibility/mind-set.
Do they embrace unhu/ubuntu as their informing philosophy, ideology and worldview?
Remember this is the most important aspect of the curriculum.
It is what they call hidden curriculum in modern parlance.
As I have said before the principal purpose of any education is to create and advance humanity.
We should be people (vanhu) first before we pursue other hard-core subjects. Put plainly, reviewers should be accountable to the people who are the main stakeholders.
Hence the African sensibility must be mainstreamed across all learnt courses and reflected in all the objectives, content and methodology of each and every course.
Of particular note in the sensibility of the curriculum reviewer is an effortless willingness to reverse the distortion of African history and lore by colonial influences which included the colonial education system, colonial religions and colonial ideologies.
Let me single out History and Literature as sites of active content and sensibility renewal.
Renewal is what I consider the principal task of reviewers in their bid to align knowledge, skills and values of the curriculum to the people.
The long history of Africa’s lost civilisation records is easy to clarify.
Diop offers an incisive historical account of a whole series of subjugations the black Africans went through in history: pointing out that when Herodotus visited Egypt, she (Egypt) had already lost its independence a century earlier, conquered by Persians in 522 BC (Ibid.p.10).
From then on Egypt was continually dominated by foreigners, a fate it shared with the rest of Africa.
After the Persians came the Macedonians under Alexander (333 BC).
The Romans under Julius Caesar (50 BC) also controlled Egypt as part of its reign over the then Greek empire. (Ibid.p.10).
Thereafter the Arabs invaded the greater part of Northern Africa in the 7th century, the Turks in the 16th century, the French under Napoleon and finally the English at the end of the 19th century (Ibid: 10).
Ruined by all those successive invasions, Africa and Zimbabwe in our case would no longer play a political role even though it had contributed immensely to the new civilisation dotted around the world.
All this long history of Africa, its wealth and its relevance, its heroic march from time immemorial to the present struggles against distortion which reviewers should labour to straighten can be summed by a brief look at Langston Hughes’ poem, ‘The Negro speaks of Rivers”:

“I’ve known rivers
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and
Older the flow of human blood in human veins
My soul has grown deep like the rivers
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young
I built my host near the Congo and it lulled me to
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above
I heard the surging of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
Went down to the New Orleans, and
I’ve seen its muddy bottom turn all golden in the sunset
I’ve known rivers
Ancient dusky rivers
My soul has grown deep like the rivers”

Hughes makes a mythic unity between the souls of the black people and the timeless rivers of life.
Thus the persona declares that his spirit is godlike and antecedent to the birth of the human race.
The ‘I’ is metaphysically situated in real history.
Reference to Euphrates introduces the reader to actual history which evokes the image of the universal ancient black humanity that actively contributed to the building of civilisations.
Later, the poet leaps forward into modern history where after slavery the black soul is baptised in the Mississippi (the mightiest and the most legendary river in the continent of North America).
Thus the tradition of Afro-American spirituals maintains a continuity which extends backward into the ancient past where the rivers were older than the flow of human blood in human veins.
The poem traces the history of Africa through the nebulous, mythical and distant past.
It attempts to re-draw the map of Africa, a necessary step towards the rescue of Africa from the negative conception painted by the West.
That is the role of curriculum reviewers: to restore African values in processes of the review.