adminONE day I was taking a breather on the street. My work often exerts enormous pressure on my mind and brain. When this happens, as it often does, I leave office, walk around to float in the fresh air, and regain intellectual stamina.
It was on one of these days that I heard one of the school-girls behind me say to her friend, “Shaa, hatidi zvekumbonyeperana, school is not cool! Chinobhohwa chikoro zvinotofemba zvokuti fee!” My friend, lies aside, school is not cool! It’s boring … boring beyond denunciation.
One of the girls, the more beautiful of them, and the one evidently more disgusted, was wielding a novel quite sizeable in volume. I managed to take a swift and accurate glance at the title.
It was how o manage heartbreaks. Eich! But I was not surprised. ‘Ahaa, no wonder school is not cool,’ I said to myself and stood, rooted in one place, thinking.
Why do these beautiful girls go to school then, if school, like Illich’s famous book, school is dead? Why are they wasting time and their parents’ hard-earned money kana chikoro chichibhohwa kuti bhoo nokufemba kuti fee?
I continue to stand there absorbed in the scenic train of girls passing by with satchels on their backs.
What is carried in those heavy satchels?
I begin to invade the privacy of the school girls with my periscope X-ray mind, obviously on the old-fashioned side but thoroughly accurate.
All of them are smartly dressed, clean and presentable.
The smaller ones, most likely the Form 1s or 2s, are easily distinguishable in their plainness and innocence: short hair and unaided facial looks.
The senior ones are outstanding in their trendy hairstyles, kinky skin-tight skirts, struggling to neatly envelop the freshly blooming puberty-stimulated buttocks in one place. Some have coloured lips, crimson lipped, cherry and chocolate lipped and their ears plugged with tiny cables emerging from their breast and side pockets.
Others evidently worry more about what they look like than the whatever is in their satchels.
Their uniform is clearly more of a fashion statement than symbol of identity and sense of belonging.
If they belong, they belong to a new generation of girls, going to school, at the same time going to some Hollywood of their imagination where “school is not cool.”
The group among which the beautiful girl with the novel on how to manage heartbreaks has long passed by. I remain rooted on the street pavement. They continue to flow to their various bus termini to catch the popular matatu home.
Here in Zimbabwe they are called kombis.
They all know Nyasha who drives the kombi labelled Po Po Po which goes to Dangamvura. They call him Nyale and he seems to like it. They overcrowd the front seat and tell him which songs to play.
He faithfully plays hihihiii — A, a mhai; Tocky Vibes, Soul jah and whoever-it-is, at full volume, ear-splitting every passenger except the school girls enjoying dancehall and Nyale the driver.
Peter does the same thing during the dancehall queens to Sakubva and killing them with his driving antics and good looks. They call him Pitsalo. He too loves it.
You look at it every day of the week and say, “Indeed school is not cool”. But it better be cool; because Nelson Mandela’s words, “Education is the best tool with which to continue to echo with frightening truth to fight ignorance and poverty”.
Online Reporter