Stephen Mpofu
Features Writer
A look into what constitutes Zimbabwe’s number one literacy rating in Africa is like a journey into the human body.
As a system the body comprises structures in the form of vital and other organs and other body parts that play independent roles but which ultimately contribute to the life and sustenance of the whole body.

Similarly, the educational system has structures — pre-schools, primary schools, high schools and colleges and universities that boast hierarchical, functional importance in the same way as body structures do with governmental and private organisations and the public feeding into the survival and growth of the system with material and human resources.

A retired schoolteacher at Jerera Growth Point in Zaka, Masvingo Province, has probably singularly contributed to Zimbabwe’s high literacy standing in Africa more than anyone family, pushing six of his children through university.
But not only does Mr Sungai Stratford Mateko (76), a widower, feel good about his rare feat; he says because five of the six graduates are girls they are an eloquent statement to other families in Zimbabwe that educating the girl child is just as critical to the country’s development as empowering the boy child with education.

Girls are shunned in communities, Mr Mateko observed and added: “Because five of the graduates are girls, I wanted to demonstrate to our community the importance of educating women.”

Three of the Mateko girls and an only brother studied at the University of Zimbabwe. The fourth girl went to Solusi University and the sixth is currently reading for a degree in religious studies at Great Zimbabwe University.
Their degrees vary from sociology to food technology to business administration to engineering. All the five graduates are employed with one of the girls in the  United Kingdom and their brother in South Africa. The undergraduate is the second oldest of Mateko’s surviving children      and has her own family like most of her siblings.

But she resolved this late in her life to                enter university “because I do not want                       to be left behind by the other family members”.
Her older sister is a schoolteacher, like her father and her husband. The story of the Mateko family should be a wake-up call to parents elsewhere in the country who are content with seeing their children, both boys and girls, herding cattle or making a beeline over the border where they are employed on farms, or as cheap labour in commerce and industry, or as domestic workers for lack of adequate education.

Mr Mateko is also a unique person in his own right.      
The man is such a consummate environmentalist, has domesticated altogether 32 different wild fruit trees.

The fruit trees preserved at his homestead include some which probably have already vanished from the earth’s face elsewhere.
Yes (yes, you) think of any wild fruit tree known by a particular name in your own district, which has disappeared or survived the axe, and chances  are Mr Mateko has it under his protection.
“People are decimating these trees, so I decided to preserve them here at home,” Mr Mateko said by telephone from the homestead, sounding  ecstatic  about his conservation effort.

Environmentalists have repeatedly warned the public to refrain from destroying forests with  wanton disregard for their preservation. Wild fruits are known to contain medicinal properties, so that their destruction leaves Zimbabweans more poorer since those trees are unlikely to become extinct.
Not only that. Medicinal plants that thrive in thickly wooded areas also disappear for good as a result of deforestation.

It is also known that  trees migrate or relocate from areas where they are endangered to safer zones,  thereby depriving communities, and indeed, the whole country, of the role of trees in the fight against global warming.
Trees absorb and sink from the atmosphere carbons which are blamed for heating up the globe, resulting in devastating drought and floods. Trees also bind the soil together and prevent erosion in the process.

It is possible that should the worst come to the worst environmentally in the future, Mr Mateko’s homestead might                                                                       become a nursery for wild fruit trees that communities might wish to transport to their own homes for their restoration.

Perhaps concerted efforts should begin now to have the planting of wild fruit trees in homes across the country as an integral part of what has become a tree planting ritual each year in December.

When educating girls to give them a greater, societal role to play in a post-modern Zimbabwe and regreening the country are considered, the wider  public might find it not only necessary but imperative to take a leaf out of Sungai Stratford Mateko’s                            book.
It is not yet too late to make a fresh start in those two very important areas in Zimbabwe’s present and future as for instance the destruction of forest cover causes desertification with concomitant food shortages for a rapidly growing population.