IN Part One we discussed how the founding fathers of our Chimurenga war succeeded in liberating this land because they were well schooled in the disciplines of the School of Zimbabwe. In Part Two we contrast this to the current generations who have gone to the whiteman’s school and have as a result been alienated from their mission and their destiny.

“Simithi,
Usaona vana vamai vedu kugara musango
Vanogarira Nyika yavo,
Kurara mumba vanongokudawo,
Kuroorawo vanongokudawo,
Kusevenzavo vanongokudawo,
Asikuti vanogarira nyika yavo.” THEIR mission is no different from that of their compatriots, predecessors who fought, suffered and died to bring back Zimbabwe and succeeded.
Their mission is to safeguard the gains of the liberation struggle, by developing and steering Zimbabwe such that political power remains in the hands of the indigenous people of Zimbabwe and that the resources of Zimbabwe are owned and controlled by the indigenous people and exploited for the benefit of all Zimbabweans.
But today we educate our young so that they can get out of Zimbabwe, something for themselves, get employed, we teach them to trust that they should find a job, so they can buy nice clothes, a car, a house, and live neat ‘nice’ lives and send their children to expensive private schools.
This is the vision we give Zimbabwe’s children, heirs to this great illustrious history.
We teach them Zimbabwe is a cow to be milked, never to be tended, we tell them it does not matter whether or where it grazes, not to worry about it when it gets sick, whether it has a kraal or not.
We never teach them to sow, but to reap and we bar them from ever thinking of sowing.
We make them believe they sowed merely by availing themselves for schooling for 11+ years, we make them believe this entitles them to the best our nation can offer and we insist on this false passport to paradise.
If these neat little packages do not materialise or they disappear because increasingly no-one wants to sow, but to reap only, regime change agents and their local stooges exhort them or even pay them to chant ‘Mugabe and his cronies have robbed us of a future, Mugabe must go so that we can live like Kings’, but Kings do not float on air, someone still has to till the land somewhere so that there is food on the King’s table, but since we do not teach our children ever to sow, but to reap only, ah, there is no solution to such mantra.
This is how much we diminutivise them, these heirs of Zimbabwe, this is how we sever them from their history, from their soul and when you are severed from your soul, attrition sets in, and you die, not physically but your life force gets diminished and you never are yourself, you are quite vulnerable to negative forces, to those who want to use you to destroy your own and yourself.
When we give Zimbabwe’s children the vision that we sent you to school so that ‘ugowaridza mhasa nekamhuri kako mugotandavara narini wese’ we are severing them from their destiny.
Who will build Zimbabwe then?
Who will get shocked when they see water and sewage gushing from so many broken pipes all over the cities?
Is it not our engineering students, our engineering graduates who should be shocked and stirred to corrective action?
Is it not our architecture and civil engineering graduates, our graduates in Town Planning who should be shocked and stirred to action by the squalour in which people live, the squalour that surrounds them everywhere?
Is it not the environmentalists we have educated and capped who should be shocked by the filth and environmental degradation we are wallowing in and bring some sanity to our environment?
Is it not our law graduates who should be shocked and stirred to design systems to eradicate corruption and institute systems of effective justice delivery?
Our agriculture graduates, have they been tasked to spend sleepless study nights searching and devising methods to ensure food security, to ensure that each Zimbabwean can eat, meat, fish, sadza, vegetables, fruits?
Are these issues the subjects and focus of their research projects?
Are these the answers that their dissertations have searched for?
Or is it that on graduating they have gone and buried themselves in some moribund systems, just as long as they get a salary, and hopefully a car and some allowance for decent housing.
For how long can this go on?
It is not tenable.
Such Cinderella lives do not exist, in the long term people have to produce, people have to reclaim control of their wealth, work to institutionalise systems that ensure production and equitable distribution of wealth.
They have to fight for what is theirs, produce for themselves and determine the distribution of that which they have produced.
A cap and a gown cannot secure the future without production and its management.
The question is why are we insisting on this moribund model?
Why have we not educated Zimbabwe’s children to be the army that will change, eradicate what ails this country, to be the spanners that will correct Zimbabwe and have the machine run smoothly, effectively for all Zimbabweans?
If our children cannot take care of their own and themselves, the education system has failed, unfortunately this failure is being extended indefinitely through the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education’s ‘new’ curriculum.
The only thing new about this curriculum is that the demise of our children as the future of this country has received a new impetus, has been fast tracked.
This is why the legacy from the liberation struggle has been fought, is being fought, has been rejected, that is why today as we pen these issues, the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education, despite the disaster that the Zimbabwe school curriculum has been since 1990, is in the process of implementing a syllabus ‘Blueprint’, that does not even mention the liberation struggle to our children.
It has planned and is implementing a curriculum that from 2016-2022 ensures our children will be schooled as non-Zimbabweans, whose country was never colonised, which therefore never needed a liberation struggle, which means Zimbabwe’s children have nothing to protect or to cherish.
The Ministry is implementing a curriculum programme for our children to forget their land, never to make a difference in this land, but only to live for their nuclear selves and Chatham House.
Dr Mahamba is a war veteran and holds a PhD from Havard University. She is currently doing consultancy work.