Zimpapers Logo

Primary and Secondary Education Minister Dr Lazarus Dokora

Joram Nyathi Spectrum
Zimbabwe’s new school curriculum has got everyone talking. Many are upset, others unsure, but there is general uneasiness. It is the equivalent of what Donald Trump has done to America, Asia, the Middle East and Europe as a whole — an emotional talking point. It’s deliberate that I have chosen to bring in the Trump dimension to the issue of our school curriculum.

Literate as we claim to be, almost everyone should know about Trump by now, and they have their view of the new American President. Few want to give him positive ratings. Others see him as outright dangerous, or trying too hard, too fast to make America too insular.

The tweeting president is not only too unconventional for a leader of the Western world, but by word and action, has so far refused to fit into tradition. He is not what is known or expected. He has bucked the norm at home and abroad.

In short, Trump is the ultimate disrupter, and has angered a world where leaders are no more than place-holders who neatly fit into the System. Such inconveniences belong to Africa and parts of the Third World where people are still far too low on the scale of civilisation, not Europe or America. Trump has been as disruptive enough to fit the appellation of an “outsider” in the American establishment.

They are angry because everyone in the Western world wants to say, “This is not who we are”. Except we know better. They gave the Mussolini before. And Hitler too, and Hirohito. Trump’s disruptive behaviour is causing discomfort in Africa and beyond. There will be need to rethink foreign policy alignments, trade agreements.

China is surging ahead as fast as it can, spreading its influence everywhere and those who poked fun at President Mugabe when he enunciated the Look East policy could find themselves playing catch up as Trump’s disruptive, “America first” demagoguery fully unfurls and manifests.

Whatever finally happens, whenever Trump will meet his premature destiny, America will never be the same again.

It’s disrupted forever, and the ramifications of that disruption are being felt everywhere, forcing all to rethink what has for long been taken for granted about Western democracy, and its limitations.

But the Spectrum is not about Trump and the ructions he has created among his own. It is about the ructions the new school curriculum has caused among Zimbabweans. Even with the cosmic disruptive impact of the historic land reform, we remain a people of inherited habits, traditions and conventions.

We remain ineluctable, enamoured and tethered to Europe in general and England in particular. Our urge to be white remains unsatisfied, not least because it will never be requited. We pine for that which repels and recoils at our endearments.

The result is that we are neither ourselves, nor the other. We are there. Very happily comfortable too. Then one Lazarus Dokora storms in to mess up the fine feather linen one David Coltart had so expertly wrapped round our soon-must-be proudly English white brains!

Well, there is a storm out there. A storm like no other. Let’s sum it as an anti-Dokora hurricane. As a result of which he has been labelled a Muslim trying to force his Islamic faith to besmirch the purity of our Christian traditions.

Let me give the objectors their due. The syllabus is not readily available. Teachers are scrambling around. Somehow, that could have been minimised.

Second, there are too many subjects for the infants. Classes are too big. A teacher-pupil ratio of more than 50 is unworkable. What is happening is that parents have become untrained teachers doing part of the work. By and large, teachers are simply passing the load. If the parents are not happy, let them speak; we are equally unhappy, if not more so.

Third, the resources appear to be limited, from teachers to textbooks and lab equipment for some schools. Subjects which were formerly voluntary have become mandatory, creating a mountain of a load if, for instance, a school had only one teacher for agriculture, or history.

The challenge compounds for institutions without electricity, mostly those in rural areas. It is leading to an unintended form of discrimination.

But the challenge, to me, is that there will never be the right time for disruptive behaviour. There will never be a time when all the resources and conditions are ideal for a national consensus.

The nature of our politics and the poisonous influence of foreign-sponsored NGOs diminish the prospects of any such consensus. We have burning examples of the land reform programme, black economic empowerment initiatives and the issue of a local currency. Yet at every stage in the life of any nation, a generation must sacrifice for the greater good of the rest; it must carry the cross.

There are numerous other challenges ahead for Dokora. But that is typical of a very disruptive intervention in a system. Independence in 1980 allowed us to continue, to thrive and to grow in an error. We have become accustomed to the error as normal. We have grown to love and admire it. We pride ourselves in the error.

Aren’t we the most literate nation on the continent?

Aren’t our skills the most sought after globally?

We are the most hard-working servants and easiest to manage.

We love our English, in language and habits.

We are the Little England.

The only authentic history we know is that of Europe. That makes us cosmopolitan.

African history is boring.

Zimbabwean history is Zanu-PF propaganda.

We can recite the dates and causes of the French and American revolutions. We can similarly recite in our sleep the causes of the so-called First World War, and why Germany was bitter with the Treaty of Versailles which “justifiably” bred a Hitler.

But believe it or not, few care to know about the causes of the First, Second and Third Chimurengas in Zimbabwe. In fact, we don’t want to know them. That is why it makes logical sense for a black African to serialise Coltart’s white-sanitising The Struggle Continues as a “bestseller” but will not touch the cover of Muchemwa’s Struggle for Land in Zimbabwe.

The struggles are different, and we have endorsed Coltart’s struggle for whites to keep land stolen through the gun and Christian Bible from our ancestors.

Even that which we have taken back we wish to return through the back door. We don’t want land; we need jobs. That’s who we define ourselves, the servants who can’t feed themselves.

Dokora has committed the sin of teaching children from an early age to know the reasons why 50 000 young Zimbabweans went to war, that the Third Chimurenga of 2000 had its seed in the occupation of this country in the 1890s.

Dokora has committed the sin of wanting young children to appreciate the dignity of labour and honesty, to use their brains and hands to produce rather than buy. Dokora has committed the sin of wanting young children to pledge loyalty to Zimbabwe, and to learn about their heritage.

President Mugabe noted recently the deficiencies in our curriculum and what the current one seeks to do and undo when he pointed out, “One of the major weaknesses of the present curriculum (old one) has been the absence of an underpinning philosophy to guide our education system. Such a philosophy must speak to who we are as Zimbabweans and our values, laws and norms must be informed by this philosophy.”

Here is the irony; the Western world is upset because Trump is seen to be disrupting their norms and traditions; Zimbabweans are upset with Dokora because he says the norms and traditions we so cherish are not our own and impair our dignity.

They are who we are but as a caricature of who we aspire to be and think we are. We must yet rediscover ourselves as a nation. Are the grumbling teachers up to this monumental task, the battle for a truly Zimbabwean mind?

To Dr Dokora, its aluta continua, the struggle continues; the Fourth Chimurenga is on.