adminDavid Mungoshi Shelling the Nuts
In my last instalment, I lamented the fact that today’s children enjoy little room for creativity and self-generated adventure. Everything is more or less planned and even choreographed for them in terms of vision and objectives as well as in terms of content and strategies.
This was painfully brought home to me a few years back during my tenure as a communication skills lecturer in the Faculty of Law.
A few weeks into the semester, a couple of students came to bid me farewell.
I was taken aback, and even saddened a little to think I might have been the cause of their change of mind. Luckily for me on this occasion, I was not the culprit. The students told me openly that they were going to miss my lectures, but they unfortunately had to follow their hearts.
On further probing, one student said she had only enrolled to read law because her mother had insisted on it.
She had her own preferences, she said, and was now going to do what she herself had always thought she should do. The other student had apparently been prevailed upon by his father to do law. But he said it had become abundantly clear to him that although law was a riveting discipline, it was not his cup of tea, so to speak. He was keen to do industrial psychology if he could.
The episode I have just described reminds me of the experiences of a certain couple in town. Both were academics and both were in the arts. When their daughter attained splendid results at O-Level, they suggested to her that she did science subjects.
The girl refused to do this and was adamant that if her parents were that keen on the sciences, they should have gone that route themselves. She chose to do Management of Business and two other related subjects instead.
It is clear from these experiences that children know what they want and do exercise responsible choices when the need arises. This, of course, is not a uniquely Zimbabwean phenomenon.
In the era of flower power, hippy culture and music festivals, Albert Hammond recorded the phenomenal “The Free Electric Band” whose lyrics sounded like a Bohemian anthem – a cry for indulgence. In part the song said:
My father is a doctor; he’s a family man
My mother works for charity whenever she can
And they’re both good clean Americans who abide by the law
And they both stick up for liberty and they both support the war
My happiness was paid for when they laid their money down
For summers in a summer camp and winters in the town
My future in the system was talked about and planned
But I gave it up for music and The Free Electric Band.
It is, of course, the duty of all conscientious parents to do their very best for their children by loving them and being good providers. This, however, does not mean stifling the children’s own preferences, especially if they make sense.
The tongue-in-cheek and suppressed chuckles in Albert Hammond’s song must have set the Americans thinking. Hammond’s words were even more caustic in the following lines:
Well they used to sit and speculate upon their son’s career
A lawyer or a doctor or a civil engineer
Just give me bread and water, put a guitar in my hand
The family is a sacred institution, but has, nevertheless, been under constant attack from a throng of alternative social forces. And in some societies, the norm has been that children should be heard, not seen. In other words, children are tolerated as long as they keep their distance.
The problem with such an arrangement, however, is that even the spaces that the children can safely be in at any given time tend to be prescribed by adults who sometimes behave as if they emerged from their mothers’ wombs as full-grown adults.
There are, of course, exceptions to some of these practices around the matter of children. I belong to an era in which every child was everyone’s child and any competent older person could chastise you if you strayed.
There was never any doubt what values were preferred by the community.
In these days of democracy, the individual has become supreme. This is a concept that many people in Zimbabwe might find debatable.
Kahlil Gibran in “The Prophet” has this to say about parents and children:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you, but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.
The view expressed by Gibran’s prophet is in direct opposition to the kind of socialisation described by Albert Hammond in “The Free Electric Band”.
He portrays a society in which children have the freedom to follow their hearts and their dreams and develop in certain specific ways according to their inclinations and abilities. I am sure that we can argue till kingdom come about some of these things, but I am also sure that consensus would escape us.
Anyone familiar with the City of Bulawayo and its environs will know about the Barbourfields Swimming Pool. That facility was not always there.
I can proudly say I was one of the street urchins of Bulawayo, the intolerable “born-locations” whose venturesome spirit led to the construction of the pool that is now a landmark that marks many a football commentary on radio.
It is convenient for describing the lay of the land to listeners elsewhere.
That way they understand which goal is being defended by which team.
The commentator will say: “They have their backs to the Barbourfields Swimming Pool end. They are attacking the Mpilo end.”
What happened was that the boys in Mzilikazi began to use the murky water near the rubbish dump that everyone in Bulawayo calls “Emara” to this day.
The word means “rubbish dump”. Water came out and filled the quarry next to the rubbish dump. This is the water that we swam in. The gods must have been with us because no one died in that dark collection of water from underground. However, the parents soon got to know about this place where naughty boys gathered to swim and they sent persistent complaints to the amenities department.
A certain Dr Ashton, a quite liberal man, was in charge of amenities and agreed with residents that something had to be done. Within a year or so, the swimming pool had been built and surrounding schools were given weekly slots in which pupils could use the facility and even be trained. I still have my swimming proficiency certificate.
To earn the swimming proficiency certificate, you had to satisfy the examiners in a number of manoeuvres and tasks.
These included free style, breast stroke, back stroke and butterfly. You also had to stand in one place at the deep end of the pool with your feet touching the ground for a set number of minutes.
What was for me the most challenging task was the exercise in which they threw a coin at the deep end and you had to dive in and retrieve the coin. When it was my turn I did the task with trepidation, sure that I would fail. Somehow, I managed the task, although my lungs were bursting for air by the time I re-surfaced.
Born-location children did many things. We went to the bioscope at Stanley in the mornings on Saturdays.
Stanley Hall is probably the oldest community hall in Bulawayo’s high density suburbs.
To go in, you paid the princely fee of one tickey (roughly the equivalent of three cents today). Once inside, you became one of the screaming, cheering boys. Naturally, there would be no girls here. We leapt for joy and punched the air as Buster Crabbe or the Durango kid beat the hell out of their opponents.
Peter Tanyanyiwa
Online Reporter