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Pasi ne (Down With) Class Struggle? The New History for Schools in Zimbabwe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

I.R. Phimister
I.R. Phimister*
Affiliation:
University of Cape Town
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Extract

The struggle by the people of Zimbabwe to overthrow Ian Smith's Rhodesian regime in the 1970s won the support and gripped the imagination of democratic peoples around the world. As the struggle intensified, so it began to move away from nationalism towards liberation. Control of the state was no longer seen as an end in itself. For the vision of a socialist Zimbabwe to become reality, the state would have to be fundamentally restructured. The pace and direction of this historic movement has lain at the center of all subsequent encounters between the advanced capitalist countries and their local class allies on the one hand, and progressive elements inside ZANU on the other. While the former have busied themselves with reversing such progress as was made during the war, the latter have tried to avoid the snares and pitfalls which infest the pragmatic roads leading away from the compromise reached at Lancaster House.

Education no less than other state apparatuses has been a site of struggle between the forces of accommodation to the rule of capital and those of socialist transformation. By any measure, the expansion of Zimbabwe's educational infrastructure since independence in April 1980 has been phenomenal. Awarded some Z$408 million in 1982's Budget--a four-fold increase in little over three years--the Ministry of Education now caters for 1,903,917 primary school pupils, as opposed to 819,586 in 1979. Secondary school enrollment over the same period has climbed from 66,215 to 218,430. Equally impressive gains have been registered in the number of schools and schoolteachers.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 11 , 1984 , pp. 367 - 374
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1984

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References

Notes

1. Lessing, Doris, “The second hut” in Collected African Stories, Volume One (St. Albans, 1979), 51.Google Scholar

2. Stoneman, C., ed., Zimbabwe's Inheritance (London, 1981), 22.Google Scholar

3. Beach, D.N., Zimbabwe: A New History for Primary Schools (Harare, 1982)Google Scholar; Chirenje, J.M., A History of Zimbabwe for Primary Schools (Harare, 1982)Google Scholar; Mushambi, L.G., illustrator, A Picture History of Zimbabwe (Harare, 1982)Google Scholar; Seidman, G., Martin, D., and Johnson, P., Zimbabwe: A New History (Harare, 1982).Google Scholar

4. As reported in The Star, 2 November 1982.

5. Sunday Mail, 10 January 1982.

6. The texts discussed in this article have all been approved by the Ministry for use in schools.

7. Sunday Mail, 29 August 1982.

8. Ibid., 21 February 1982; 15 March 1982.

9. Beach, , Zimbabwe, 6.Google Scholar

10. Ibid., 25.

11. Ranger, , “Revolutions in the wheel of Zimbabwean history,” Moto, (December 1982/January 1983), 42.Google Scholar

12. Seldman, et al, Zimbabwe, 60–61.Google Scholar

13. Ibid., 49-50.

14. Mushambi, , Picture History, 34.Google Scholar

15. Seidman, et al, Zimbabwe, 68, 72, 69, 57–59.Google Scholar

16. Beach, , Zimbabwe, 84, 71.Google Scholar

17. Chisholm, L., “Ideology, legitimation of the status quo, and history textbooks in South Africa,” Perspectives in Education, 5 (1981), 134.Google Scholar

18. Education and Culture for Liberation in Southern Africa (Gaborone, 1981), 5.Google Scholar