Lessons from Zimbabwe

“Good morning Mr Austin and your visitors!” The class of young, tiny, impeccably dressed Zimbabwean school children slowly and proudly shouts out the rehearsed greeting as we walk into its quaint classroom. This is Heritage School in Harare. Neither the oldest nor the most renowned of Zimbabwe’s schools, it is one of hundreds spread across a country which, despite ongoing social, economic and political pressures, continues to offer students from a variety of backgrounds a consistently high standard of education. With most schools in Zimbabwe offering a British Cambridge-based curriculum, it is perhaps no surprise that the curator of Heritage, Tom Austin, speaks in glowing terms with a relaxed English accent and infectious Zimbabwean cadence. He describes the work he has put in to establish one of Zimbabwe’s premium schools, and as we stroll around the immaculate property, Austin proudly showing it off, I note to myself that whilst financial investment varies across this Southern African country’s schools, their ability to deliver quality schooling rarely does. In fact, it can almost be argued that the less fortunate schools often produce the best performing students. And they’re not ashamed to admit it.

 

As part of a small delegation of Australian university representatives, I am in Zimbabwe promoting Australia as a potential destination for tertiary studies. How does Zimbabwe, with all its woes, continue to provide such a robust grounding for its children, which not only includes lofty academic heights but also resoundingly successful sporting and cultural programs? How important to its future, whatever course it may take, will young Zimbabweans of tomorrow be? A product of a Zimbabwean schooling myself, I have always been an advocate for the high standards I was fortunate enough to experience, but that was nigh on 20 years ago; returning now knowing the trajectory Zimbabwe has taken over the last two decades, nothing prepares me for what we discover as we journey from Bulawayo, through Gweru, to the capital, Harare.

Bulawayo’s brand new airport sparkles in the bright, hazy winter sun. It’s my first time in the nation’s second largest city since the mid-90s, and after a lengthy flight from Western Australia I am pleasantly surprised to see the new building and perhaps the hope it brings of a slow shift in the direction of modernity and efficiency, things Zimbabwe has been grappling with for the best part of 20 years. We enter the immigration hall and are immediately confronted by the dichotomy Zimbabweans face on a daily basis. There are three desks equipped with passport scanners, computers and various other high tech frills. One desk is labelled ‘visa payments’. I join its queue and note a piece of paper sticky taped to an adjacent office window offering an email address to contact if one has any complaints about the way things are being run. I almost immediately regret not taking the address down – as I approach the desk it becomes obvious that the technology is just for show. The attendant has a large invoice book in front of him with pieces of blue carbon paper emerging from its edges, like lettuce in a bureaucratic burger. He is not only hand-writing receipts but is directing travellers to the queue at the neighbouring desk. His job is the payment of the visa, his colleague is the one tasked with the complex process of actually sticking it into the passport. She also has access to a fully computerised system and mercifully, unlike the last time I arrived in Zimbabwe through Harare’s airport, it does not have a paused game of Solitaire on its screen. She does, however, take her time to press repeat on her smartphone’s music player, returning it to the beginning of an Oliver Mtukudzi number, which twangs out through the tinny speaker. Welcome to Zimbabwe, in many ways a parallel universe – old-world processes and 21^st century innovation are uneasy bedfellows here. Mtukudzi’s rough, melancholic voice complements perfectly his fluid, rhythmic melody. The country he so often laments in his lyrics sadly does not often strike has harmonious a key as his music.

We drive through Bulawayo’s sandy streets, shaking through bone-jarring potholes. The air is parched, dusty and smoky – mid-winter in this part of the world is a bleak time. We rumble towards out guest lodge as our host tells us the country is on its knees, but as we stagger out of the car onto the lodge’s green lawns we are briefed about such things as WiFi in the well-appointed chalets, how to find BBC on the TV, which button to press on our personal remote controls to open the front gate should we wish to venture out, and how to access the tennis court or the nine-hole golf course. The contrasts are coming thick and fast now. That evening, over an indulgent glass of South African red wine, we receive our schedule for the days ahead. We are due to visit a series of schools, as well as hold a public expo in another hotel. The lingering frustrations from the airport and the sense of sadness at the visual state of this once great city and country are replaced by the sensation that, in true Zimbabwean fashion, it is business as usual. There is no country better at keeping calm and carrying on.

The following day, our first visit is to Petra High School. We settle into our chairs at the front of the well-ventilated school hall, which accentuates a cloudy, chilly day – it is designed to cope with the searing summer heat. Petra does not meet the eye well. It is run down in parts; red brickwork is smothered in the ubiquitous reddish dust, and at first glance the school appears poor and deprived, struggling to direct its moderate student body through their O and A levels. Don’t be fooled. It is the dry season, not an aesthetically pleasing time of the year, and being mid-year exam time there is a buzz amongst the students now quietly filing in. The focus at Petra, as with many other schools, is academic output. We talk to the students, they listen attentively. A glance around the room takes in young boys and girls, black and white, with keen eyes and ready smiles. They all have phones and teenage attitudes, but not one is texting or giggling at some juvenile joke. Not all are blessed with wealth, but most are blessed with ambition and brains. Insightful questions flow, and at the end a trend is set for the rest of our trip as a lean, athletic senior student stands, gently signals with authority to his peers to hush, and thanks us eloquently for coming to see them. The extraordinary levels of discipline, maturity and manners have never left the Zimbabwean curriculum. And nor should they.

We move onto one of Zimbabwe’s most famous of Christian schools, Christian Brothers College. CBC turns 60 this year and that sort of longevity brings reputation, tradition and class. On the wall of one of its corridors sits a framed newspaper article from 2009. The cut-out shows the image of two sheepishly smiling students and the news that they ranked 1^st and 2^nd in the world in their Cambridge IGCSE Computer Studies and Design and Technology subjects. As Moira Davies, the school’s career counsellor sits us down for a pot of Tanganda tea and Lobels biscuits in the resplendent catering hall overlooking the sport fields, the answer to one of my questions begins to dawn on me. The retention of the well-established Cambridge system at the time of independence in 1980, coupled with what were particularly forward-thinking education policies from Mugabe’s incoming government, resulted for many years in some astonishing statistics. According to the African Economist, in 2013 Zimbabwe lead Africa in adult literacy at 90%. In the mid-90s, TIME magazine reported that the country boasted a 72% pass rate at O Level. Even now, 34 years on from independence, despite the incredible challenges schools face and the degradation of formerly sound education policies, UNICEF indicates the country had an 88% primary school attendance rate from 2008 to 2012. The horizon, however, is not without its clouds – for the same period, secondary schooling attendance was at 48%. The question is not how Zimbabwe manages to provide such a robust system of education, it is how long can it continue to. The foundations of the system are so solid and reinforced so strongly by the resolve of the students, parents and teachers, that shaking them will take an utterly catastrophic breakdown in the almost sacred perception Zimbabwe has of education. The foundations are being well and truly tested now, but with such innovations as CBC’s night school for underprivileged students, there continues to be hope. The University of Zimbabwe is still, despite calendar disruptions, State-sanctioned meddling, funding challenges and student riots, regarded very highly overseas in such areas as medicine and veterinary.

Our road trip continues, taking in Falcon College, one of many rural boarding schools that formerly catered for the burgeoning farming population. It now ekes out a living serving dwindling agricultural families and boarders from the cities pursuing the perceived qualities that day-schooling cannot provide. The road is almost unnavigable in parts and a sobering sight greets us as we pass a police station, where a line of steel coffins is propped up outside its entrance, apparently airing in the sun. Falcon College is a vast property, oozing confidence and reputation. There are university campuses that would easily fit within its boundaries. The drive to Falcon is nothing compared to the drive to Gweru. If education has, so far, largely resisted the state of affairs in Zimbabwe, the transport infrastructure has not. Progress is slow, the road surface brutal; entering this one-time industrial hub brings us to a grinding halt – there are missing patches of road so large that one has to take a moment to plot the best route through. Signs of improvement are not far off – huge road projects are underway here, resulting in long waits and plenty of time to reflect.

We visit the energetic Midlands Christian College (MCC) and the conservative, quietly confident Regina Mundi High School. Church backing is not far from the agenda in Zimbabwe, and many schools have impressive chapels at their heart. I meet a young student who gleefully tells me her sister is currently studying in Australia, which is not the first time this has happened, and I meet a charismatic young teacher giving back to MCC what he got out of it as a child: passion. He tells me he has aspirations to be an actor, and I wholeheartedly believe he will succeed. Zimbabweans often reach global fame, most notably in the sporting arena. MCC’s junior school was once attended by David Pocock, an excellent flanker for the Australian national rugby team who often returns to Gweru for philanthropic duties. Gary Ballance, a test cricketer for England is the product of another great boarding school, Peterhouse. South Africa’s rugby side has two Zimbabweans playing in it; eventually you have to ask the question, where are all the academic success stories? They are there aplenty, they just aren’t as obvious. Zimbabwean doctors, veterinary surgeons, engineers and lawyers are sprinkled around the world. They go largely unnoticed by dissolving into communities in which they settle as part of that dreaded but increasingly important sector of Zimbabwe’s population: the diaspora. Zimbabwe has a chronic brain drain. It is a torrent of skill loss that has the odd salmon of hope leaping against it. You get the sensation that any time now, especially with a change of regime, of investment and foreign policies, the spawning of a new era might just begin.

In the capital, Harare, we arrive at Chisipite Senior School, which, quite simply, is one of the best schools you are ever likely to encounter. It is an all-girls school celebrating its 60^th anniversary this year, just like CBC in Bulawayo. Its Deputy Headmistress, Lorraine Hill, ushers us towards a small lecture theatre. We pass classrooms where students are diligently sewing, cooking, playing piano, singing and fiddling with Bunsen burners. The classes appear unsupervised, and it is only upon closer inspection that I realise the teachers are indeed present. It’s just that they aren’t quite teachers here, they’re peers. This is a school that is doing things differently; it is innovating, and imparting a sense of maturity, independence and critical thinking on its students, the likes of which you would only expect to find beyond secondary school. It’s not my first visit to Chisipite but it is quickly turning into my most memorable. As the young ladies file politely into the theatre, we are presented with a thick book showcasing their six decades of achievement and a CD of musical pieces, recorded recently in the nearby chapel. Over dinner, Hill describes to me how one of her students is in the midst of writing an essay on what the benefits are of smacking children versus the psychological effects – is there a pay-off either way resulting in a loss-gain scenario? Impressive, and an indication of just what sort of student is coming out of Zimbabwe. The schools soldier on, doing what they do best, and what they have done so well for so long. Whether the students they produce and inevitably lose to the lure of further education and opportunity abroad ever start to return in substantial numbers largely depends, like many things in Zimbabwe, on the political developments and the impact they will have on foreign investment. Innovation, unsurprisingly, is increasingly a part of many African economies. It is often born out of necessity due to the absence of a more typical product or solution. Take M-Pesa in Kenya. With its roots in Mozambique, where those who struggled with cash flow took to swapping mobile phone credit as a means of payment and trade, M-Pesa is now used everywhere in Kenya, especially those places where cash machines or banks are scarce. It is a simple, effective innovation, guises of which have only recently popped up in developed nations, and it is a mark of just how resourceful Africa can be.

We descend upon our final school in Zimbabwe, St. John’s College, where as we arrive a rugby match is underway. Their opponents are St. George’s College. This is a derby; closing my eyes, I could imagine being at a college football match in the USA. The atmosphere is crackling with tension and anticipation. As we watch the sun set and the match unfold – and it’s a fabulous game – I am reminded of the commitment in Zimbabwe to a well-rounded education. Only days prior I was admiring the brilliance of the record-setting students from CBC; I was strolling the lawns of Heritage School listening to Tom Austin describe how it was designed with a gradual uphill rise from the gardens of the kindergarten, through the classes of the junior school, up to the senior school to give students a sense of moving up in the world; I was reading the cover of a CD of classical music recorded by students at Chisipite. Now I am watching a rugby match that is close to professional in standard. It is this commitment that one can only hope secures this great nation’s future. It seems to me that Zimbabwe closely resembles its most famous of trees, the baobab. Known as the tree of life, it can shelter, clothe, feed, and provide water. With fire-resistant bark, it can produce innovative solutions in the worlds of fabric and twine, and with edible fruit loaded with vitamin C, and leaves that contain medicinal properties its annual international market potential is estimated to be billions of dollars a year. If only it were cultivated. It can last for thousands of years and, at sunset, which is now peering through a dusty cloud billowing up from a scrum in this pulsating rugby match, the baobab can be breathtaking. Above ground, the baobab can endure extreme hardship because below ground it possesses a unique, extraordinary root system. When this system falters, something incredible will surely die.