Corporal punishment belongs to the old school

My mother said Sirika was a bargain, a beautiful cow, that hard Mashona type, jet black with shiny short hair.
She is small and compact with fine bones, beautiful symmetrical horns, short legs, and a long thin tail with a bush at the end like a lion’s tail.
I was happy to buy Sirika. Besides I owed Enifa something. Many years ago at St Columbus Anglican School, Enifa Tambe was always top of the class.

She was number one in every test throughout from Grade One to Seven. She never got her arithmetic wrong and she remembered a lot in the history lessons.
She could tell you everything about the Bantu migrations, Cecil John Rhodes, Prime Minister Ian Smith, United Declaration of Independence and all the important dates in Rhodesian history.
I tried hard to beat Enifa in at least one subject, but I never did. Nobody could. Enifa was a natural genius.
Then one morning Enifa ran away from school and never came back. And by default, I took the number one place, but I could never match Enifa’s performance.

Enifa’s village was in Manhika further down Save river. She had to trek up and down three hills and cross rivers to get to school. In the cold months when the sun came out late, Enifa left her village the same time hyenas, owls and ghosts were coming back from their night shifts.
Enifa was brave. She loved school. But she was often late for school and whenever that happened, Headmaster Zitaguru beat her. Sometimes Enifa could not sit properly in class because her buttocks were sore from the headmaster’s frequent thrashings.

At St Columbus Anglican Primary School we all got corporal punishment from the teachers in various ways depending on the type of offence. The teachers said such discipline was important to prepare us to become well disciplined adults with strong characters.
They used the ruler on knuckles or a slap on the cheek for getting arithmetic wrong. We got our ears pinched for coming to school with uncombed hair, unclean teeth, and long nails or for wearing a dirty or torn uniform.

Sometimes half the school was sent away to the bush to clean teeth with a muchakata tree, to comb hair with a thorn tree branch and to file off nails against a rough stone. For those who were really dirty or needed a haircut, the bush could not help much.
They were sent home and asked to come back home looking like students from a good Anglican school.
Rather than go back straight home, these students spent the rest of the day playing in the forests, looking for wild fruits and swimming in the river. Some of them never came back to school.

Only Headmaster Zitaguru could inflict punishment for big offences such as regularly coming to school late.
In his office, he kept a thick mutondo stick nicely polished and stripped off its bark then warmed against the fire to make it harder. It was about a metre long so he did not have to bend down too much to beat us on the calves of our thin legs.
He lined late students in front of the school assembly and hit each one of them. Five strokes for Grade Ones and 10 to 15 for older kids. Prefects got as much as 20 strokes because they were meant to lead by example. Boys and girls alike, we were beaten.

Throughout the schools in the Tribal Trust Lands from Hwedza to Dorova, Headmaster Zitaguru’s stick was respected and feared. Every student at St Columbus School had black scar marks on their calves from Headmaster Zitaguru’s stick. During interschool sports, students from other schools pointed at our calves and jeered at us.
Most slaps and pinching of ears at St Columbus School happened in class. But there was one student who never got a beating in class. Enifa Tambe. She did not get anything wrong. She excelled in all subjects.
Then during the winter of our Grade Seven, Enifa was late for school three times in one week. Headmaster Zitaguru could not contain his anger. This was St Columbus Anglican School and discipline was paramount. I remember his eyes being unusually red on that day. He ordered the head boy to get a whip from under his desk. The whip rarely came out except for serious third time offences or for fighting in the school grounds.

Headmaster Zitaguru ordered Enifa to stand in front facing the whole assembly. Then he moved a short distance from her and raised his whip.
Enifa took one quick look at all of us. She looked at him in the eye, then turned and ran like the wind.
Apart from being smart, Enifa was number one in marathon. She did not look back and kept on going and going. We all watched her run. One student giggled. What started as a muffled laughter broke into a huge uproar. Headmaster Zitaguru said he was not called Zitaguru, “big name”, for nothing.
With the whip still raised, he said he did not have the time to beat so many calves in one morning. The punishment for our lack of respect was to cut grass around the school all morning.

There was no disputing that Headmaster Zitaguru was a good teacher because most students at St Columbus School passed Grade Seven.
The fact that only two or three students in any given year went on to Form One at a mission boarding school far away was not Headmaster Zitaguru’s fault.
The Rhodesian government had not built any high schools in our Tribal Trust Land.
Headmaster Zitaguru was feared by a lot of people, even by the headman and all the other village elders.
Nobody complained openly about his excessive methods of corporal punishment. If anyone had dared to complain, Headmaster Zitaguru would have told the complaining parents to take their child home and do the teaching themselves.

Since there was no other school for a good ten to fifteen kilometres nearby, parents kept quiet. They said Headmaster Zitaguru was possessed by a cruel shavi, a bad spirit. Ane shavi rehutsinye.
I saw this cruelty once when Panganai the time keeper and bell ringer was late for school. Panganai begged for mercy saying his father had asked him to plough the whole field before school.
Headmaster Zitaguru did not listen. He whipped Panganai across the shoulder and there was blood coming from a cut near his ear. Panganai wiped the blood with the leaves and went straight into class with his hand pressing hard on the cut to stop the flow of blood.

Panganai went on to become a senior clerk in the government. We met in the village recently and shared jokes about our days at St Columbus School. The scar near his ear was still visible. That beating Panganai got from Zitaguru many years ago, was it necessary? Was that the only way to discipline a student?
While a child should not be beaten for minor offences such as coming late to school as Enifa did, some degree of corporal punishment is acceptable when a child demonstrates extreme bad behaviour. According to the Zimbabwe Ministry of Education Code of Conduct, it is illegal to beat a child at school.

However, in some situations, only a headmaster can use a light cane to discipline a male student. This should only be done in front of another teacher and the headmaster must then document the incident. Girls should never get the stick, but they can be punished in other ways.

There is a cultural difference in how we discipline children depending on who we are and where we live. For many Zimbabweans living in the Diaspora, it is illegal to discipline a child through beating, no matter how small the beating can be. You can go to jail for smacking your own child. As such, some people in the Western world have spared the rod and the child has been spoilt.

In our village a child belongs to the whole community – mwana ndewe musha wese. To discipline a child through beating is often seen as a good cultural disciplinary measure and not a human rights violation.
Any relative or village elder has the right to discipline a child behaving badly.
This week, Enifa’s twins Praise and Peace trudged eight kilometres across the river to attend Form One. With the river in flood Enifa was determined that her kids would not be late for school so she set up a camp

with her daughters near the school and will remain until the river subsides.
“I do not want them to end up like me, a village mother with no education,” she said.
Nothing was going to stop Enifa’s children from attending school everyday. Not even corporal punishment. Enifa gave the headmaster instructions to give her daughters a little beating if they misbehave, as long he

did not leave any scars on them as Headmaster Zitaguru had.

Dr Sekai Nzenza is a writer and cultural critic. She holds a PhD in International Relations and is a consultant and director of The Simukai Development Project