Zimpapers Logo

Some of us have been thirsting for knowledge in one direction only and not looking back. Like many of my friends here and in the Diaspora, I am a creation of colonial education, missionary conversion and post-independence identity confusion. My father had something to do with my present situation.
Many years ago my father got help from the Anglican missionaries to open Mufudzi Wakanaka School along the Save River Valley behind the Hwedza Mountains. It was the first school in the area. He said we should always thirst for the calabash of knowledge, mukombe weruzivo. That thirst would drive us far away from the village to Salisbury and possibly Malawi, Zambia or South Africa. It never occurred to him that we might even go as far as England or America, let alone Australia.
Even after he left teaching to work for the Grain Marketing Board in Salisbury, he still sang the same tune, thirst for knowledge. For my father, the knowledge he wanted us to drink was European knowledge given to us by the Rhodesian education system. 
At St Columbus school our teacher, Miss Rwodzi, also told us the same thing; thirst for the calabash of knowledge written in books. We looked mostly the same at the village school, barefoot, shaved heads and skinny. Others had no uniform and they had scabies. Still they came to school. That is how strong their thirst for knowledge was. But there was one girl who was so different from all of us.
Abigail Madhikauzi. She lived with her grandmother because her mother worked as a maid for a white family in Salisbury. She went to Salisbury with her grandmother during school holidays. The white Madam and her husband, murungu wavo, said Abigail could stay in the boys’ khaya, the servants’ quarters. Sometimes Abigail was even allowed to play with the madam’s two white daughters and inherit their old clothes.
At the end of the school holidays, Abigail and her grandmother came back loaded with groceries. They left most of their luggage at Muzorori & Sons Store. For the price of tea with bread, Panichi and other herdboys went to pick the groceries the following morning.
They gave us a whole breakdown of all the groceries in the cardboxes and bags. Sugar, bread, flour, cooking oil, soap, floor polish, Vaseline and other things. Abigail had everything nice. She told us about Salisbury, what white people looked like, what they ate and how they dressed. Most of us had never seen white people.
Abigail was the picture of a modern city girl. She dressed in a clean uniform, wore a blazer, shoes and socks. She brought fried buns, mafetikuku, to school. They were oily and we watched her eat them while we ate boiled maize with peanuts, mangai. We envied her and wanted to look like her.
One time, I hit my toe against a stone when running to school. It bled and took forever to heal because the busy black ants, mhamhatsi, took nibbles at my open wound. Abigail was so kind. She said in Salisbury such a wound would be dressed at the clinic. There were no clinics anywhere near the village. Abigail helped bandage the wound with a rag and bark from a tree.
Some time during the war, Abigail moved to Salisbury and we did not see her until after independence.  Her thirst for book knowledge had not gone very far. She fell pregnant to a cinema usher at Kine 400. 
That was long before that cinema became a church. Since staff and their spouses did not pay to get in, Abigail was able to increase her knowledge of American movie stars. While Abigail was busy nursing her fifth child and selling vegetables in Harare, I continued with my longing to drink from the calabash of knowledge. It took many years of drinking from this European calabash.
That is the only one I looked for because I believed it to be superior to everything else. I got as far as confidently walking into a conference room full of white people as an invited guest, go right up there on to the podium and speak proper English to the English. Kutsenga chirungu chavo.
I really wanted people to look at me and say, “That one is educated, that one has money, that one knows what she is doing, that one, ah, she is big. Her hair, her clothes and even the way she speaks tells you she is someone. And just look at her car. She has been to America, Australia, England and many places in the world.”
That is why I wanted to come back from America with a Hummer, the big American car designed soon after the Iraq war because the Americans wanted a spacious car for people who liked to be high up above everyone else on the busy freeways.
In America, I worked  for three years with a team of high-powered professional business consultants, some of them graduates from the top universities in the world, like Harvard, Stanford and Cornell, all with Masters in Business Administration.
Day after day we sat together to design strategic ways to end global poverty, especially African poverty. Here I was, VaMandirowesa’s very own grandchild, muzukuru waMbuya, working alongside some of the best and brightest business consultants in America.
During coffee breaks, we took turns to walk in pairs and buy coffee for the team from Starbucks. 
Then one day, a new consultant called Simon Jennings was paired with me for the 10 minutes caffeine walk. Simon was big and tall, still working on his MBA. He was in our team to study poverty and understand how poor people in Africa and other parts of the world lived.
During one of our walks, this tall American casually mentioned that he came from five generations of soldiers. He said he was on a one-year break from his duties in Iraq in order to complete his MBA then he was going straight back to his job as a sniper.
During our walks, I learnt a lot about the war in Iraq and what snipers do. A sniper was a lance corporal, an expert rifleman who operated alone maintaining visual contact with the enemy while concealed in bushes. He had many skills and ability to use cover, concealment and camouflage. A sniper was also an expert in using maps, sketches, aerial photos and the compass as well as recognise enemy personnel quickly. In Iraq, Simon could move without detection and endure long periods of waiting for as long as it took to get at his target. One time he said he sat in one spot for three days.
He was armed with an extremely accurate rifle capable of killing an enemy with just one shot. Although he did not give me any details, I could tell that Simon had done quite some damage in Iraq.
After a few months with the team, Simon Jennings was ready to return to the business school then to Iraq.  We had a farewell lunch for him. During his speech, Simon thanked everyone for their support and then he specifically singled me out and said he had learnt a lot about Africa by talking to me. With misty eyes, verging on tears, this big American sniper said the knowledge he received from me about the village, the people and poverty was inspirational. 
Simon said he wanted my knowledge of Africa and of the village where I came from to enrich his own. Here I was, yet another African “brain drain” helping to enrich the minds of the Western scholars, including an American soldier from Iraq. 
Simon composed himself and still looking at me, he said it was incredible that I had travelled that far from the village to seek knowledge. “You should always treasure the experiences of the past because they are important to help guide you into the future,” Simon said. 
Then he ended his farewell speech by showing pictures of all four of his grandparents and his father.  They were all soldiers. He said it was their bravery, vision and their sense of duty that inspired him to remain first and foremost a professional soldier.
I sat there, taking notes of what Simon said, drinking knowledge from the calabash of an American soldier. What does one do with such knowledge, especially when it forces you to think, reflect and see how much you have allowed darkness to cover your own past like it was nothing?
Simon was fighting a war he should not have been fighting. But what struck me, zvakandibata, was his belief in his ancestors and how they inspired his vision of the future. For a very long time now we have been on a journey to become more and more like other people who live in Europe and other technologically advanced countries.
The journey is a movement away from the village towards the city and beyond. Tiri parwendo. This journey does not seem to end. We face the challenge of recognising and writing our knowledge systems because for many years we have been denigrating it ourselves, thirsting only for the knowledge from the Western world.
Over the years, we have continued to seek knowledge from the value systems and belief systems and language not our own, then we forgot to open our minds to other knowledge systems.
Our colonial and current education continues to perpetuate cultural and intellectual servitude to Western modes of knowledge, denigrating and devaluation of traditional African systems of thought.
The European-centred knowledge we received from our colonial masters was not the only knowledge. There were other knowledge systems to look at like the Indian, Korean, Chinese knowledge systems, native American and many others.
Today, we know little or nothing about Aboriginal people, Maori, Aztecs. And yet there are other religions to know like Buddhism, Hinduism and other religions and cultures of the world similar in many ways to ours. 
Women like Abigail are stuck with the knowledge they received at school and in the movies. There is no time for them to read or learn new things. What then do they teach their children about the past? Sure, African traditions rooted in the past cannot be reclaimed as they are in order to make them useful in the present global context.
The problem is that we are not recreating enough of what is new to enrich our world. Instead, we are copying and drinking from the Western calabash other than our own. Ko mahewu acho akaipei? Calabashes of knowledge are everywhere, only if we look and drink from each one, discard it if it is not fulfilling the taste and spit it out quickly if it promises to get bitter.
The Akan of Ghana and the Cote d’Ivoire have calabashes for us to drink from.
The Sankofa system of knowledge teaches us to reach back into the past for the wisdom of our ancestors, pick out what is of value, renew and refine these traditions because they help define who we are. Like the Sankofa bird, let us look back and collect it in order for us to move forward. Sankofa.
Dr Sekai Nzenza is a writer and cultural critic. She holds a PhD in International Relations and works as development consultant.