By Shepherd Manhambara

WHILE part three of my submissions acknowledged Zimbabwe’s success story in education thanks to efforts by the ZANU PF Government from 1980, it also be-mourned the conspicuous absence of an indigenous frame meant to anchor that education.
Indications on the ground point to a situation where our education system is now producing ‘O’ and ‘A’ Level, college and university graduates who may be good in most subjects of their liking, but have no common memory in regard to where Zimbabwe is coming from and the direction it is taking and why.
These days, one is surprised so few of our graduates have a sense of history to anchor them in their own country let alone on the African continent.
To these young men and women, history is extra-luggage which has to be dumped quickly so that one can learn ‘more useful’ subjects like accounting, engineering, sciences, law, maths, biology, medicine and the so-called modern languages.
While there are very good reasons why our curriculum allows for the study of all these useful subjects and disciplines, a problem arises when it becomes obvious that all these areas of study by themselves do not necessarily produce a Zimbabwean, who is committed to his or her country or to Africa for that matter.
It is ironic Zimbabwean students know a lot about those subjects one can think of, but hardly much about themselves, their country and the African continent!
Also alarming is that most of our graduates have no idea that once upon a time Western Europe led by Britain and France embarked on enslaving Africans on an industrial scale for over four centuries and dutifully followed up on this by colonising the African continent so as to continue enriching themselves with the abundant African labour and resources.
If indeed African professionals such as medical doctors, geologists, architects, surveyors, company CEOs, scientists know little or nothing about this African past, it is obvious that they are also singularly ill prepared to relate to the so- called global village, more so when that village is in reality a jungle of competing interests.
During the last 15 years, Zimbabwe has paid heavily for hosting a supposedly educated people but whose grasp of their history remained perilously defective.
One here is thinking of ambitious and power hungry lawyers like Welshman Ncube, Tendai Biti, Obert Gutu, Douglas Mwonzora –the le de crème of the Faculty of Law of the University of Zimbabwe.
The whole lot of them are highly educated people, but they could not carry out a simple auditing exercise to identify genuine friends and enemies of our country.
This misguided lot embraced Rhodies like Roy Bennett, David Coltart, Iain Kay and Eddie Cross as their bosom buddies in their alleged struggle for democracy and freedom — yet history tells us that all these die-hard racist Rhodies fought hard and long against African liberation!
Our educated brethren even went further to embrace Britain as the founder and funder of their party, forgetting that the British, up to this day, have never bothered to apologise for the slave holocaust they inflicted on Africans and for their subsequent colonisation of Africa based on genocidal wars of conquest!
For some strange reason our educated brethren came to regard Britain as a land of born again missionaries determined to donate human rights and democracy to Zimbabwe!
Such naivety borders on the criminal and is dangerous to the whole nation.
In fact the surrealist alliance between Rhodies and MDC black intellectuals is akin to Jews suddenly embracing Hitler and his Nazi henchmen as their allies.
Had these educated guys possessed a solid sense of African history and its implications they would have spared us of the economic sanctions which were imposed by the West at their behest, sanctions which inflicted intolerable levels of misery on the whole African population in Zimbabwe for over 15 years.
What all these observations amount to is that Zimbabwe has a formal education system good enough to impart high levels of literacy, but the system does not have a cohesive centre strong enough to hold things in place.
What is missing is a compulsory national studies course seeking to define Africans and their world view vis-a vis the global context in which we live, a course which embeds collective memories of the origins of people and all those struggles they have always waged in their quest for complete emancipation.
One senses some aspects of such a course in the current National and Strategic Studies programme, but what is needed is a course whose content and orientation starts at pre-school level and remains a constant guiding presence right up to college and university levels.
Such a course should be instrumental in giving meaning and purpose to our being Zimbabweans who see and relate to the whole world but from an African point of view.
If the current education system is left the way it is, it will continue to churn out alienated generations always desperate to escape from their being Africans and anxious to embrace their erstwhile colonial white masters as shamefully exemplified by current black intellectuals of the MDC.
Such generations will always be at war with their inner selves and, as such, will never be dominant subjects of greatness in areas of creativity, inventiveness, originality, imagination and vision for the simple reason that they will always be suffering from a deficit in self-confidence and always mimicking others for the rest of their lives.
While it is prudent and necessary to make use of knowledge which mankind has garnered from all the four corners of the world, one area which any self-respecting people should never sub-contract to outsiders lies in the area of identity formation and nationhood—all existential processes which cannot be borrowed from outsiders, but have to be experienced from the inside!
In other words, we have to author and nurture our own identities at many levels of our existence and one way of doing so is to underpin all our areas of study by introducing a national course at all stages of our education which links us to each other, to our culture and environment, to the rest of the world and to the cosmos.