Writers’ hope lies in education

Beaven Tapureta Bookshelf
As the clock strikes midnight tomorrow, 2015 will be history but there is a lot of unfinished business which the book sector will carry over into the brand new 2016.

One such unfinished business is piracy. Piracy hurts so much because it is difficult to gather its actual data or statistics. It is an underground activity. However, there is hope for writers and part of the hope lies in the education sector.

Memorable highlights of 2015, include the ZIBF’s curriculum review workshop involving local book sector players and the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education in October. The workshop came after the Ministry’s presentation at the ZIBF regular writers’ workshop in August which titillated writers appetite to want to know more about the curriculum review process.

The Ministry’s curriculum review is a very important peg in the writer’s field as it leads to the recognition of their creative talents as well as contribute to national development. This remains a dream unless piracy is curtailed. Generally, the review is more or less a continued effort to “decolonise” the knowledge sector.

At the October workshop, the Ministry presented that the curriculum framework prepares graduates of the education system to have critical thinking, problem-solving and leadership as their exit profiles. This obviously entails moving away from an examination-oriented curriculum to a practical one. The writers for literature that will be studied under the new curriculum cannot be fiction writers only but also non-fiction authors.

For instance, the new framework organises the curriculum into three learning levels including infant school. Infant school now starts from early childhood development (ECD) to Grade Two and emphasises the acquisition of the foundational skills.

Among other learning areas that the framework outlines for the infant school are visual and performing arts (expressive arts), family/heritage studies (social studies), mass displays and indigenous language as medium of instruction.

The junior school starts from Grade Three to Grade Seven and secondary school is from Form One to Four. Again, secondary school has learning areas such as heritage studies, literature in indigenous languages and in English, humanities (history, geography, family, religious studies, et cetera) and others.

All these are areas which the local writers can explore. If we heard the Ministry correctly, religious studies will not be limited to Christianity only. In that case, a book such as Luta Shaba’s “The Way of the Light” (2013) can fall under religious studies as it is located in the ‘spiritualism of indigenous African Bantu people before colonisation’. Shaba is also a svikiro/spirit medium.

Religious studies in the previous curriculum framework were mainly limited to Christianity but by broadening the religious studies, students can develop connections and disconnections between traditional and other religions.

There are different areas which present opportunities for writers to create content for readers in the infant, junior and secondary schools, content that will eventually contribute to the ultimate accumulation of useful skills and knowledge.

The manuscripts that the education sector needs as material for study are already there, some of them stocked in the drawers of individuals and organisations, waiting to be assessed by experienced readers who at times need a certain reading fee!

Through a few “free-the-creative-imagination” and research workshops for writers and capacity building for organisations, the new writers can produce manuscripts that can be masterpieces and the CDU will be spoilt for choice! All this leads to the point that the relationship between the ministry, publishers and writers’ organisations must be stronger in order to harness the writing talents of Zimbabweans.

The curriculum review makes new writers want to know more about their country, particularly their cultural history and heritages. These new authors are found in organisations such as Zimbabwe Women Writers, Writers International Network Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe Academic and Non-fiction Authors and Zimbabwe Writers Association and in writers’ clubs in schools and universities.

As mentioned earlier, it is a very progressive step that the ministry took this year when it met with authors and publishers and raised their awareness on the curriculum review process.

Writers need now to see where they fit in but, unlike in the past when certain learning areas were limited or ignored, they now have a wider base from which to create for the local education sector. All things being equal, writers have an opportunity to explore their own imaginations and generously pass on critical knowledge and wisdom to next generations.

In dreaming about this glorious situation, piracy comes as a devil shutting writers in a prison of suffering. For writers and publishers to be motivated they need a certain “originality” to their identities, they know they do not embark on short-cuts when writing.

This writer sometime back accompanied an established writer to a school outside Harare where five schools had jointly arranged a meeting with the said author whose book they were studying as a literature set-book.

It was uplifting for the students to meet the writer and had the opportunity to ask him those burning questions about some of the hidden secrets in the text.

However, only their teachers had copies of the book and the copies were disappointing! Photocopies. There were chances that the schools were waiting for few more pirated copies from Harare.

When our Curriculum Development Unit people read and select books that go into the school system, do they know that they have tigers outside their doors waiting for the approved list?

Is it also not a combined responsibility of the Ministry and the school development committees to follow up on how and where schools acquire learning materials? Is a small budget for book purchasing ever put on the overall school budget? These are the questions which can be solved by the existence of an organic relationship between the Ministry, school authorities, writers and publishers.

The now non-existent Literature Bureau had its limitations and successes. One of its successes was managing to get its books to the readers. In those days, a Shona novel which students were reading at school and which sometimes they took home to read at night ended up in the hands of a brother or sister or uncle.

The characters stopped living in the book and started living among the living! And the original coloured cover would create dramatic images in the mind — sometimes one read with the hope and excitement of arriving at a scene illustrated on the cover!

Reading culture was contagious. The community, through the schools, knew about the value of an original novel. Perhaps book piracy had not yet become as “grievous” as it is today.

Now because of the sprawling book piracy business, the text comes in unreadable white and black ink, the cover is faded and the characters also seem to complain of having been ground by an illegal apparatus!

The hope is there but sometimes the book sector only needs to work together with Government ministries that consume their works.