adminMorris Mtisi
Tomorrow is Zimbabwe’s 35th birthday.
All fair-minded Zimbabweans have good reason to celebrate the independence of their country from the dark history of colonialism.
As we all celebrate and commemorate this historic landmark, it is important not to forget that it took a fierce protracted bloody war to break the chains of slavery to usher in a new dispensation of political freedom and self-determination.
It is also important to remember that when the hour of liberation came, it came to break even the chains of slavery colonially embedded in the education systems of Sir Roy Welensky, Winston Field and Ian Smith’s governments, captains of the colonial titanic.
There is nothing comical about this part of our history.
Is it possible to appreciate the gains of independence without honestly reflecting on the reality of the past?
The answer is NO.
Indeed all historical journeys begin in the past, pass through the present on their way to the future, the rest remaining to God and the strengths or weaknesses of men and women who control the science of governments.
There is no other order of historical metamorphosis in any process of human development.
What was education like in our country before the dawn of independence in 1980?
The valuation or evaluation begins, but not before defining what that valuation entails. We also cannot sustain an intelligent and accurate discussion of the education system in pre-independent Zimbabwe without zeroing in on the debate of aims and interests.
All white colonial education ministers like Maurice G. Mills and Arthur Phillip Smith, their permanent secretaries and directors of education had one mandate: to uphold the aims, interests and specific values of the colonial regimes such as imperialist utility, culture, information, preparation for social efficiency, all for political and economic disenfranchisement of Africans as calculatedly enshrined in or sub-served by specific subjects of the colonial curricula.
The colonial systems of education were designed to set up different or segregated types of life experiences, indeed each with isolated subject matter, aim and standard of values.
These barriers based on a deliberate apartheid political philosophy meant glaring absence of fluent, meaningful and free academic intercourse. The colonial education systems upheld several antithetical conceptions deliberately designed to defy and undermine the theory of knowledge and knowing.
These unpardonable systems of education opposed a rise to some meaningful transcendental realm, making African education a mere thing of appearance and inaccessible essence of reality.
These systems opposed empirical and higher rational knowing, and produced ordinary working classes or individuals with no specialised intellectual pursuit but to bring some kind of connection with the immediate working environment. Such education was depreciated and indeed despised as purely utilitarian.
It was deeply lacking in rational knowledge and cultural significance, not touching reality in real intellectual fashion, but an education pursued for its own sake and essentially designed to terminate in purely theoretical insight.
The colonial education system separately developed intelligence used by an African working class on one hand, and intelligence used by a learned white class on the other.
For all practical purposes, the colonial education system represented two different worlds characterised by widely different interests, concerns and aims.
Colonial education was not a necessity of life, a social function, a direction, a form of growth, preparation, unfolding and formal discipline.
It was all remote and dead, abstract and bookish, if not foolish, to use the ordinary words of political disappointment and frustration.
It was an affair of “telling” and being told, not an active constructive purpose of intellectual intercourse which directed ability to useful ends.
In one word, education before independence was designed to achieve internal control of the African people.
It achieved this by feeding them books and conversations which directed them away from a social and intellectual sense of their own powers and independence.
Those who resisted this systematic oppression through a sweeping but unstoppable spirit of African nationalism and sense of revolution of the late fifties and sixties, were arrested en masse and thrown into the settlers’ stinking restriction camps and jails.
That, too, is not a comical part of the struggle for independence which we take for granted today.
Enough about the content and isolationist agenda of the colonial education system!
Away from the explicit discussion over the colonial content and illegitimate body of knowledge, you only need to remember how many primary schools, secondary schools and high schools, colleges and universities were in Zimbabwe before independence and the iniquitous bottle-necks which were part of the system.
The separate executive administrations and salary scales of teachers and other education officials between blacks and whites in Rhodesia is another unforgettable and unforgivable part of this dark history of education in our country.
Though we can live out of our grudges and imagination, we cannot live out of history. And our history cannot and will never skip or ignore celebrating our independence which too many take for granted today.
When armed struggle broke the chains of slavery it also broke the chains of educational slavery. Lest we forget!
The only question we must ask ourselves is: “Have we in our independence done enough to make education what it was not during colonialism?”
Don’t miss another explicit discussion of the politics of our education values, post independence, next week
Online Reporter