WE went to secondary school, it was a rural mission school. When we started Form One, all teachers were nuns, most of them of German origin.
For the duration of the first term, we hardly understood what was going on. Their accent was totally alien and unintelligible to our rural African ears. It was only in the second term that we began to understand what they were saying and it was possible for us to learn something.
The teaching was so impersonal; the nuns were more interested in controlling us than in relating with us and the feeling of anomie left us listless. They did not accept us as who we were, they did not make us feel special, they treated us like things to be controlled and that irked us. We longed to feel normal, it was hurting us to be so regimented always under the hawk’s eye, it was disconcerting. We always felt as if we were about to do something wrong even though in actual fact nothing like that existed in our minds.
We felt more like an unruly herd that had to be kept in check by so many rules, as if we were so bad.
But what came to our defence was our humour, we laughed off many things, dismissing them so that we would not feel hurt. Still the end result was that we did not fall in love with our learning.
Whenever we complained about maggots in our cabbage, about mutuvi with skimmed milk, we were dismissed on the grounds that at home we ate sadza with roasted pumpkin seeds for relish.
Whenever we came with tuck from home we were always told that the food made us sick, but how could we fall sick on food we had been raised on? We knew we were being insulted, denigrated.
There were many restrictions, many sins, thankfully venial or we all would have been destined for Hell, we were perpetually sinflul.The confession ‘…mukufunga, mukureva, mukuita, nomukuzengurira…’ became sinister. It haunted us, no matter how much we confessed, we always felt sinful.
But our robust cultural heritage helped us to see the racism in all this, and we disengaged. Things were hard under colonialism so we had to concentrate on our work or we could never get anywhere but it was not easy.
When we told our mothers about the cruelty at school, they told us we should not be surprised, if any of them had ever had children, they would have known how precious we were. This bolstered us, our mothers’ love and understanding.
But thankfully our fate changed dramatically with the first African teachers. There was a male history teacher, a graduate from the University of Rhodesia (UR), a male history and geography graduate of Gweru Teachers’ College, and two females, both graduates of Gweru Teachers’ College, one in Mathematics, and the other in English.
The advent of these teachers had a magical effect on us. The transformation was unbelievable, suddenly we were literally transported from the Antarctica to the warm bosom of Africa. We were so happy.
For the first time we felt normal, they treated us as their brothers and sisters. There is no greater motivator like love. Anyone who is loved feels at peace.
They made us feel that we mattered and we had to make it. They did not have to tell us in black and white that Rhodesia was hard and we had to work extra hard to make it. We understood each other and there was no problem.
The critical difference between our African teachers and the nuns was in the way they related with us. Our fellow Africans treated us with love and respect, they accepted us as who we were, they treated us normal beings and it is that which opened the doors not only of our hearts but of our minds as well, learning ceased to be a chore and we were able to do our best and joyfully so.
The nuns were very true to their colonial mission, making us feel inferior, we would take it as normal to have the whites rule us.
Having thus been browbeaten, having thus been diminutivised, demeaned, and denigrated, one would never be in a position to challenge the white armed robbers.
Rhodesia’s education ordinance of 1903 prescribed for Africans four hours of manual labour per day as core curriculum as well as rudimentary skills in the English language so that as servants they could understand instructions. The Africans also had to be taught habits of hygiene and cleanliness.
The nuns treated us in consonance with the colonial prescriptions of 1903.
They were obsessed with harassing us about taking baths when no-one was resisting. The issue of our taking a bath in the morning and evening was so dramatised we felt so dirty these were drastic measures to make it possible for us to inhabit the same space with them. It felt like we could never be clean enough.
The colonial pathos that the indigenous languages were barbaric languages was manifest in the way it was almost a cardinal sin to speak Shona at school.
A word of Shona earned you a piece of card board around your neck inscribed: ‘I spoke Shona today’ in addition one would do time at the mission farm over the weekend. For this and many other venial sins one did time at the mission farm. The 1903 prescriptions were thus more than fulfilled.
The strictness, sternness and regimentation was testimony to the colonial insult that Africans were barbarians, wild, unruly, needing to be tamed. A word, the slightest whisper at a time when you were supposed to be silent brought down the ceiling on you.
Sometimes we were dumbfounded at the cruelty of it all. Of course we were not privy to their colonial mission but we felt it.
Dr Mahamba is a war veteran and holds a PhD from Havard University. She is currently doing consultancy work.