Book hails Scholarship Fund

Zimbabwean students who are studying at universities in South Africa.
The book, A Cowries of Hope, is back in the news following the departure of the latest group of students that left the country in February.
The process that has always been in place for the selection of deserving students is an open secret.
The background of some of the students who have benefited from the scholarship fund is what has been missing.
People who listen to Radio Zimbabwe now understand what some of these students’ backgrounds have been before they became the recipients of the benevolent fund.
The chairperson of the selection panel, Manicaland Governor and Resident Minister Chris Mushohwe, has been telling listeners from Mutare what some of the graduates had become.
He described how President Mugabe found out that one of the students did not even have a pair of shoes.
The President told the relevant authorities to see to it that the student was well shod.
When she finished her studies, the student came back to Zimbabwe and gave President Mugabe a pleasant surprise.
That student, who is attached to a leading accounting house, drove her Mercedes Benz to show it to the President at State House.
The young woman went with her sole surviving guardian – her grandmother – so that she too would savour the golden handshake.
That accountant is a typical product from the pages of The Cowries of Hope.
The scourge of poverty plaguing students battling to improve themselves through education is unmasked.
Weaver Press has made available in Zimbabwe the second edition in which Binwell Sinyangwe documents in 140 pages the deplorable conditions prevailing in Zambia.
There are many similarities with the status in Zimbabwe in connection with students struggling to raise school fees.
The author is at pains to point out that not all people have all the things that they would like to have in life.
There are some people who have nothing to call their own. In some instances they are forced to endure grinding poverty through faults of other people.
They, too, have their own hopes, they have their own desires and they have their own aspirations which are being muzzled.
Nasula, one of the main characters in the book, is a young widow who is anxious to give her only daughter, Sula, a decent education, that would enable the two of them to stand on their own feet.
Gender activists have convinced mothers that total emancipation of women from oppression by men can only come through education.
Her daughter should get the best education that the family can afford. But, the family can afford absolutely nothing.
Nasula does not want Sula to be at the beck of the man who would marry her.
That was what her late father had been doing to her mother.
Nasula is pragmatic enough to admit that she would not be able to find the money that Sula would need to enroll for her secondary education.
“I am poor and a woman, but you do not stop being a human being when you are poor or a woman. Pride is the only thing I own in the world.
“What shall become of me if I lose even my pride?”
Nasula, which means the mother of Sula, has what it takes to face the world with a clear conscience. She is imbued with the desire to see her daughter succeed.
People who should shield Nasula and her daughter from grinding poverty when her husband dies are the very people who rob her and strip her naked.
They refuse to support Sula claiming that she does not look like her father.
Nasula does not give up fighting for her daughter’s inalienable right to education.
However, she has to content with the unpredictable hazards that nature unleashes at the wrong time altogether.
El Nino, the gale which devastated the southern hemisphere in the nineties, has not spared the neighbourhood of Kasama either. That is where the book is set.
The family of Chiswebe, which is reeling from the effects of drought, should have been responsible for educating their grand-daughter, Sula.
Nasula had snubbed their other son Isaka for wanting to make her his fourth wife.
This puts her on collision course with the people holding her aspirations in their hands.
All this happens at precisely the time when Sula needs a whopping 100,000 kwacha to enroll at St Theresa Girls’ High School.
She has sailed through her Grade Seven final exams with flying colours.
Nasula arrives at the farm of her in-laws in Magamo to ask for help. That same night Isaka Chiswebe joins his two wives who died from HIV and Aids-related illnesses. The third one is set to follow them soon.
Misfortune has wreaked havoc in the family. There has been no labour to work the farm and the bank has taken what it could to make up for the loan that it had advanced.
Nasula comes to terms with her misfortune. However, for her there won’t be good news until Sula has gone to boarding school.
Binwell Sinyangwe has a message to make in his psychological novel. People should understand the plight of others and go out of their way to give them a helping hand.
The author has rolled out the theme very well: Nasula has to go to secondary school at whatever cost.
Her proud mother is set to harass the insensitive landed gentry in a bid to have them pay fees for Sula.
Excessive flashbacks aside, A Cowries of Hope makes you want to assess your attitude towards the poor.
One has to always bear in mind that what happens in their home does not necessarily happen in other people’s homes.
There is an age old adage that says “Chakanaka chakanaka, mukaka haurungwe”, literally meaning that what is nice is nice, you don’t add salt to milk.
President Mugabe’s Presidential Scholarship Fund on university education has helped many people realise their dreams.
People from poor families have managed to improve their standards of living through the fund.
Binwell Sinyangwe, who was born in Zambia in 1956, studied with the Academy of Economic Sciences at Bucharest in Romania.
Baobab Books in Zimbabwe published his first novel, Quills of Desire, in 1993.
Sinyangwe has published a number of short stories, poems and articles in newspapers and magazines in Zambia.
Chemist Mafuba is a Harare-based freelance journalist and can be contacted on 0773 651 080.