Tuesday, 10 November 2026
By Takura Zhangazha*
As an adult individual I occassionally reflect on a very personal historical fact that I am very much Catholic mission educated.
As are some of my peers and many of my relatives.
By 'mission educated' I know it means many different things to many of them/us.
It may mean that we were lucky to eventually get the specific college or university enabling education that we acquired after Zimbabwe's national independence and in its peace-time wherein we were part of the almost born-free 'generation'.
Most of us came from comparatively poor economic backgrounds and our parents would never have been able to consistently afford the type of education we received in primary or secondary school.
Historically all of this is mainly because of the fact that at the onset of formal colonialism, after the First Chimurenga, education became key to 'black' at that time Rhodesian political, economic and social upward mobility.
Ditto Joshua Nkomo, Robert Mugabe, Reuben Jamela, James Chikerema and Morris Nyagumbo, Michael Mawema among many others!
Moreso with the rapid colonial state expansion and urbanisation via mining and agricultural towns after the 'first world war' in 1918.
The two sides of the same coin were ironically not the same.
The expanding settler colonial state required educated 'natives' and at the same time needed racial segregation as a differentiation factor about again, racialised economic privilege.
As learnt from genocidal tendencies in for example the then not so 'new colonies' of Australia, India, South Africa, Brazil, Madagascar and others.
So again, the two sides of the same coin were as we learnt in high school history (as basic and controlled as it was) are quite the opposite of each other.
One recognised/celebrated colonial history in a Livingstonian sense the three C's -Christianity, Commerce, Civilisation, while the other asserted racial superiority/racism/apartheid as the cornerstone of the other side. In an contradictory/oxymoronic sense.
With Christianity as central to the colonial control mix.
But we, as Africans, at least now with historical hindsight, took it in stride.
Particularly by the time we got to the Second Chimurenga in the 1960s. Where most recruits to war voluntarily and in some cases were forcibly recruited to it from, again, mission schools.
Most of of our Second Chimurenga nationalist founding fathers/mothers in Zimbabwe and Southern Africa will attest to the fact that they passed through, if they are still alive or now part of our liberation struggle history, that they attended one 'mission school' or the other.
Before or during our second liberation struggles.
Or in some cases after independence itself with the carry over missions in Zimbabwe such as for example Silveira in the Chishawasha valley or St Peters Kubatana vocational training college in Highfields.
All of whom were intricably linked to not only formal colonial racialised education but came to serve a critical role in post independent Zimbabwe as 'technical/vocational training colleges for former war veterans and refugees.
For a marginalised and poor black majority.
I could write forever on the history of mission schools and vocational training colleges.
The key issue however in this relatively brief write up is what obtains of them in the contemporary?
Whereas the original Christian and in my personl experience Catholic mission schools after the onset of colonialism had what we would now refer to as a 'philanthropic' face for 'black education' in aide of the Livingstonian '3 C's', the contemporary ones are caught up in a contradictory space and place in post 46 year independent Zimbabwe.
Including the key but somewhat unanswerable question of whether they are still 'mission schools'? Warts and all.
It is a very theological question that however is faced with a reduction of global funding for missionary related education.
One which now combines academic excellence with religiosity, neo-liberalism and high individualism (what in sociology is referred to as the 'Protestant Ethic') makes even the 'good-intentions' of mission schools/colleges now historically abstract.
I will explain.
There is now a deliberate push to privatise what were historically intellectually enabling and in part liberatory schools for Africans.
An intention that includes not only privatising them but also to mimic the former colonial government's school models' administrative structures without the necessary quantitative financial subsidies. Either from the state or private funders.
Except where and when these costs are passed on to the parent/guardian as not only a commitment to a measurement of academic support for an offspring's eventual academic success.
Or proof of potential job security as long as one can pay exhorbitant fees as a parent/guardian to get the not so little cde to a university overseas for a degree they may not finish due to lack of affordability/money. And other reasons.
In this, the previous assumption of the poor African child being able to get that necessary education to climb the post-colonial economic ladder is lost.
The most striking and dissapointing irony however is how most of us who came from a background of how after losing a parent/ guardian or both of the aforementioned losing income and sending us to school in/on the Christian mission school system, like me, would now be at the forefront of privatising the same?
This is a complete contradiction where we cannot discuss education in its historical, holistic and futurist terms beyond what you can pay as a parent or guardian in the contemporary.
Almost like asking yourself the Stimela and Ray Phiri question of, "Where did we go wrong?"
And where cdes who would have otherwise been denied the mission education they eventually acquired would in today's world would never have entered their current professions' doors without it.
The key point, as I conclude, is that without subsidised mission or government education, we will lose out on multiple talents, academic-sporting or otherwise, if we pursue the current policy that this current Zimbabwean government has of privatising education. Unrelentillingly.
Or even letting it run rampant on the basis of bedding, breakfasts, lunches or dinners without crosschecking the homes, villages, locations that all these young male and female Zimbabweans are coming from in order to be marked as present in class.
Across colour, economic class and race/ethnicity.
Including the churches that assume because of the national government's pro-privatisation policies they can casually ignore the progressive historicity of 'missionary education' to Zimbabwe's contemporary, still uneven education access arena.
Wherein it is easy to forget that if it were not for missionary education and its intrinsic people centered values, colonial warts and all, Zimbabwe would not be free.
Nor would a good number of those that went to high school on missionary scholarships, suffered long walks to their 'O' and 'A' level exams, got government payouts at tertiary education level, be screaming at each other in mission school halls about the ability to pay school fees or kicking children out of the same said schools!
On the false consciousness of 'arrival' for their children'.
While pushing for the privatisation of the same.
If cdes are going to repeat a bottle-neck of colonially designed education for our young ones, let it not be about money and mimicry.
There are better models of this globally.
*Takura Zhangazha writes here in his personal capacity
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