Nostalgic nuggets in our memory banks
Old timers like me might swear that primary school education, before the ascendance of the Rhodesian Front party and the changes that party subsequently made to “African education”, was solid and profound. It could all be nostalgia, of course, but some st
IAM going to be deliberately provocative in order that together we indulge in a bit of imagination. Let us for a moment imagine Grade 7 children as school-leavers. I can already hear the creaking objections and the loud condemnation. What could be the reason for our protests? Are we perhaps saying that on average Grade 7 children are too young to be expected to carry the burden of decision-making where they might make decisions to last them a lifetime? Some Grade 7 children are at most 11 years old at the end of their Grade 7 examinations. Most people will argue that they are at this point too young to take on such huge responsibilities. True enough, but what are some of our reasons for saying this?
Teacher trainees, social workers and sociologists are familiar with the ideas behind what is known as chronological age and what is known as mental age. They will also tell you that it is not unusual to have a situation in which the mental age is well ahead of the chronological age or well below it. Some might ask what we mean by chronological age. The word chronology reminds me of a bombastic friend of mine, long ago and far away, who used to talk about his chronometer and mystify us all. However, if I have lived for 90 years, that is my chronological age, the number of years I have lived on earth. My bombastic friend was talking about his wrist watch.
Different people try to impress in different ways. I remember growing up in Bulawayo’s eMzilkazi Village and sitting or crouching in the dust as part of a very captive audience. Abraham or Monday as his mother preferred to call him was dazzling us with talk about the Russians and the sputnik. It was all Double Dutch to me at the time, but I was fascinated nevertheless. His silky talk made my young and impressionable mind wonder about a lot of things. This was something that I did without prompting and quite frequently too. Allow me to whisk you away from the noisy environs of our urban environments with their smoke and smog, their vile smells from polluted rivers and the fiendish noises from loud appliances that play everything and anything and call it music. A far cry from the sweet melodious sounds of the legendary Sonny Sondo and the City Quads (the first ever group in Zimbabwe to do an album or long player as we called it then)!
But I digress a little. I wanted us to situate ourselves in the country — kumaruzevha or emaphandleni — and take in the open skies, the rivers and the valleys, and the herd boys cracking their whips to drive the cattle back home with the sun beginning to slowly sink into the horizon.
It was things like this that made me want to follow a river just to see where it ended. In such moments the sky was alive with imihlambi yenyoni in isiNdebele, that is, a flock of birds in graceful flight.
Birds look absorbing and determined to get to wherever it is that they go to at the end of a day.
I am convinced that the inventor of the submarine may have been influenced by the whale in the ocean, dipping and surfacing at will. Similarly, modern air forces in some ways ape bird formations in the sky. In my view, whatever we do is a copy of something in nature. For example, the dragon fly is, for me, the prototype of the helicopter.
Whenever I look up into the sky I cannot not help, but sing the classic folk song, “Shiri yakanaka unoyendepi?” I find its timeless lyrics fascinating, not just as a fanciful flight of the imagination, but also as a kind of charm to unlock closed doors. In my mind’s eye I see an enchanted singer begging the birds to take him with them to their destination somewhere in the misty distance. Enigmatically, the birds say they are on a journey to blend with the clouds and be like them. The singer says it is his wish to go there too. The effect of the sounds and the images created is devastating and fresh like the taste of the juice of exotic, but sweet fruit on one’s palate.
Abraham must have been about 14 or 15 years old and still at primary school at a time when very few blacks in the townships (what we now call the ghettos) owned radios or were able to buy a daily every day. Yet there he was, talking about rockets and the sputnik. As I recall it took me quite a while, some years in fact, to relate to what he described so effortlessly. It was not until 1963, when Valentina Tereshkova of the Soviet Union aboard Vostok 6, became the first woman cosmonaut to travel that space travel and exploration took on an attractive new meaning for me. I could now talk about supersonic speed (travelling at a speed that breaches the speed of sound).
In time the enterprising Abraham was playing the penny whistle like the legendary Spokes Mashiyane and 16-yearold Lemmy Special Mabaso (now with the brass section of the Soul Brothers of South Africa who are still to recover from the demise of David Masondo, the lead vocalist with the silky voice and slick dancing skills). When Abraham began to play electric lead guitar in a band called The Pirates with famous jazz trumpeter Paul Lunga on the drums it was another notch up for him.
If we return to our hypothetical Grade 7 school-leavers, the drift of this article becomes clearer. Can you see them in a teachers’ college as student teachers?
Do you think they have enough in their arsenal content-wise? Perhaps not, but we are likely to have some exceptions here and there. Maud Chifamba, for example, the orphaned and underprivileged girl from Chegutu, who attained 12 points at A-Level and was enrolled at the University of Zimbabwe at the tender age of 14. According to Wikipedia, as of 2012 Maud Chifamba was the youngest university student in Africa. Now the holder of a Bachelor of Accounts degree attained at 17, Maud can equal the feat of Dr Musawenkosi Sauramba, who at 23, became Africa’s youngest PhD degree holder. Wind the clock back a little, say to up until 1967, and you see that things were somewhat different. After eight years of primary schooling many of those who had good passes at Standard 6 began their vocational training in agriculture, carpentry, domestic science, nursing and so on. An aunt of mine who trained as a nurse at Nyadire Mission was, in addition to her general nursing skills, a capable midwife and dentist of sorts — at least where tooth extractions were concerned. Among some of the amazing feats from the old days is the story of national hero George Bonzo Nyandoro who for some time worked for City Stores in Harare and is credited with being the country’s first qualified black book keeper. All that just after standard six. Add to that his incredible ability with language and expression in both Shona and English and you have a well-accomplished person all round.
Old timers like me might swear that primary school education, before the ascendance of the Rhodesian Front party and the changes that party subsequently made to “African education”, was solid and profound. It could all be nostalgia, of course, but some still swear by the Oxford English Reader. The thinking is that it was this “prestigious” reader that so grounded many primary school leavers that in terms of vocabulary and expression they stood out and even excelled in their chosen careers.
Buxton (God bless him where he may be), a boyhood friend, after only Standard Six knew so much about so much. I had neither heard of opera, nor of the enigmatic tenor, Mario Lanza who by the 1950s had become a superstar, but Buxton had. He practically drooled when he spoke about Mario Lanza’s exploits in opera and on film.
An uncle of mine in Manyene, just outside Chivhu town, is an unusually literate and erudite peasant after only Standard 6.
Recently, he quoted to me from a comprehension passage in the Oxford English Reader, part of a defence lawyer’s statement in the murder trial of a noble man. Defence counsel sought to mitigate his client by calling the man a splendid slave and a reasoning savage “vacillating between the dignities of an intelligence derived from God and the degradation of passions participated with brutes . . .” Rookie law students are likely to struggle with the import of this learned counsel’s words, but my peasant uncle recites them with ease and perfect diction, 50 or more years after first reading them.