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1/98 animus-p14

VOICES FROM THE INSIDE: THE SHAPING OF LANGUAGE USE AND
LITERACY IN ZIMBABWE.

By

Adam S. Meyer

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

1998

ABSTRACT

VOICES FROM THE INSIDE: THE SHAPING OF LANGUAGE USE AND
LITERACY IN ZIMBABWE.

By

Adam S. Meyer

An institutional system of education is the product of the negotiation of group interests in
a given society. The arena in which this negotiation takes place may be understood as a
“market” (Bourdieu, 1991) in which members with larger amounts of linguistic capital
are able to maintain superior access. Over time, a system reﬂective of unequal relations in
the market is established that comes to serve the needs of a minority. This is especially
true of inherited colonial systems of education, because of the powerful inﬂuence of
colonial interests (the colonizing government, commercial interests, colonial
administration, and the settlers) in the formation of the system. The focus here is upon
one such system, that of post-colonial Zimbabwe, with the aims of better understanding
what it is like, and how it could be improved in the central area of language education.
Language education has become naturalized through a phenomenological process of
legitimation (Berger and Luckman, 1966). Internal and external institutions that promote
and maintain a uniﬁed linguistic and cultural market in Zimbabwe utilize legitimations
such as “modernization” and “unity” to maintain the status quo in language education.
This process is critically examined in order to locate institutional agency for the language
planning process within a society. Once agency is located and the nature of the market is

recognized, the concept of critical pedagogy (Giroux and McLaren, 1992) is utilized as a

transforrnatory inﬂuence upon language education. Critical pedagogy recognizes levels
of individual subjectivity operating within a historical context. Critical pedagogy also
advocates relevance and equity in the curriculum. This dissertation shows that Zimbabwe
has institutionalized a non—Zimbabwean concept of reading in its secondary education.
Through their unique approach to narrative, Zimbabwean writers produce works that
represent the negotiation of identity in historical context. These works contain narrative
voices that explore different areas of identity relevant to a Zimbabwean audience,
especially during Zimbabwe’s second Chimurenga period. These works can be utilized
in the spirit of Pratt’s contact zone approach (1991) to explore multiple voices of identity
relevant to a Zimbabwean audience. These voices are reﬂective of the role English plays
in the negotiation of power relations in Zimbabwean society. The central thesis of this
dissertation is that the introduction of approaches to literacy and literature that interrogate
contact zone issues is useful for exposing structures of domination in Zimbabwe’s
language market. Awareness of these structures is important for students so that they
may understand their reality in terms of the social forces that shape it; this awareness can
then lead to a development of student ability to more conﬁdently negotiate those social

forces.

Cepyﬁght by
ADAM SEARLS MEYER
1998

For my Ambuya Virginia Cone

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to my wife Marcy for always being there for me, my son Gavin for the
much needed “recharge” hugs, Mom and Dad who gave me the support to carry on, and
to my grandparents who are my professional and spiritual role models. Thanks also to
my extended family who were always supportive.

Special thanks go to the immensely supportive guidance committee of my chair
Kenneth Harrow, Marilyn Wilson, David Dwyer, and David Plank. Their ﬂexibility and
support was the key “enabler” for the completion of this dissertation. The support of the
African Studies Center (Title VI African area training program) under David Wiley,
Yacob F isseha, and MSU’s Aﬁ'icanist core faculty provided valuable language and area
studies training. I would also like to thank Mr. Robert Vassen for his professional
support and friendship; his impeccable integrity always set an example. A very special
thanks to my Zimbabwean colleagues: my good ﬁ’iend Dr. Albert Natsa who always went
the extra mile, and Mr. Thompson Tsodzo for his support. I must also thank Mr. John
Sadler of UCLES (Cambridge) for his assistance in the area of Zimbabwe’s exam

localization.

vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1

THE IN STITUTIONALIZATION OF LANGUAGE EDUCATION IN AFRICA
The Framing of Language Choice in Africa
Roots of Language Planning as a Field
Institutions and Legitimations of LP
Bourdieu’s Market
Role of Education
Giroux’s Critical Pedagogy
Legitimation and Nation States
A Source of Legitimations: Language Policy
Structural-Functional Discourse
Interactionist Discourse

CHAPTER 2
THE ROLE OF LANGUAGE EDUCATION IN THE ORIGIN AND
MAINTENANCE OF SYMBOLIC DOMINATION IN ZIMBABWE
English Competence, Access, and Equity
Historical Background
Hostile Settlers and African Agency
White Education
African Education
Class Interests
African Language Development in Zimbabwe
Challenges for the New Government
Current Zimbabwean Language Education Policy and Practice
Britain and UCLES
Localization and the O Level

CHAPTER 3

LITERACY AND LANGUAGE SOCIALIZATION IN ZIMBABWE
Literacy, Orality and Language Socialization
Relative Focus on Personal Involvement

vii

7

9
14
15
20
24
26
31
32
33
36

42
45
46
52
54
58
66
7O
72
74
75
78

83
86
94

 

The Literacy-Orality Relationship: Toward Language Socialization 97

Literacy Events and Cultural Knowledge 102
Contact Zones 103
National Reading Curriculum 109
The Zimbabwean-UCLES Ordinary Level Examination System 113
Agents of Change? 119
CHAPTER 4
TOWARD DIALOGUE: AN INVESTIGATION OF VOICES
FROM THE INSIDE 124
Authors, Teachers and Audience 126
Narrative Focus: Genette’s Narratology 132
Zimbabwean Literary Analysis 134
Charles Mungoshi 137
“Ten Shillings” 141
“Coming of the Dry Season 144
Waiting for the Rain 148
Language Socialization 161
Chenjerai Hove 167
Bones 169
Hove’s Language Socialization 178
Tsitsi Dangannebga 178
Consequences of Analepsis 184
Women’s History 186
Gender Roles and the Cash Economy 191
Language Socialization 195
Feminism in Zimbabwe 199
Summary 204
CONCLUSIONS 207

BIBLIOGRAPHY 224

viii

INTRODUCTION

Not long ago I found myself in a very pleasant, yet unnerving situation. It was a
clear day with a gentle breeze blowing through a nearby stand of pines. I’m paddling a
canoe through the middle of a pristine lake; waterfowl are noisily climbing the far bank.
Up in the bow, Ian, a friend, is doing his best to catch a rainbow trout. During the long
silences that come with the meditative work of ﬁshing, childhood memories of ﬁshing
trips in my native Minnesota ﬂash through my mind. Finally, apologetically, I break the
silence. In a half joking, half plaintive voice, I ﬁnd myself saying more to myself than to
Ian, “You know, I can’t believe I’m in Zimbabwe right now.” Looking back in mid-cast,
Ian replies, “I can’t either.”

Located in Northeastern Zimbabwe, near Nyanga National Park and the border
with Mozambique, Troutbeck is the fantasy creation of one Major McIlwiaine. This
Irishman ﬁrst established Troutbeck Inn (1950) by planting acres of forest on the bare
hills (he made each visitor plant a tree) and building several lakes with a miniature dam
system (McCrea and Pinchuck, 1990). In addition, Scottish trout were introduced to the
lakes. Once introduced, the predatory trout wiped out all nautical faunas in the region’s
previously undeveloped tributary system. The pine forest, while a very lucrative and
sustainable resource for Zimbabwe’s forestry department, is carefully guarded.

If African writers can teach readers through metaphor, trout ﬁshing in Zimbabwe
may be helpful for an historian. The metaphor of Troutbeck points to the contradiction of
a formerly established European system that is no longer a contradiction for most Aﬁican

countries. How does one successfully harness the lucrative but thorny legacy of

European “ﬁsh” and “trees”? For whom does one “conserve” the established
environment? Who beneﬁts from conservation?

This metaphor is relevant for issues surrounding African language education and
literature: i.e., orality vs. literacy, Aﬁican vs. European language use, ideologically
committed writers vs. bourgeois authors. Throughout the ongoing debates, one thing
remains quite clear: the contradictions have become naturalized. A dominant European
linguistic and cultural market has been established and is maintained in Aﬁican
educational systems. This market is highly unequal and reproductive. Those that get
more access to chances of European linguistic and cultural capital (in education), occupy
a dominant position in the economic market. Literacy and educational attainment rates in
most Aﬁican countries are very low. In the case of Zimbabwe, an educational leader in
Africa, literacy rates (rough estimates at best) range between 50%-70%. Two years of
secondary is terminal for all but the most select few (Colclough, 1990). Institutional
forces such as governmental policy, external educational agencies, and inﬂuential
examination systems assist in the maintenance of these unequal market relations. While
unequal market relations can be shown to exist in most countries, they are especially
marked in African countries; European languages in formal education are utilized by an
extreme minority.

To view issues of inequity as purely oppositional (rich vs. poor, European vs.
African, outside vs. inside) is to obscure the historical complexity of these issues.
Furthermore, it de-emphasizes African agency in the system. Dominant linguistic and
cultural market forces established during a colonial period do not directly translate into

country-wide cultural hegemony. A majority of Zimbabweans have chosen to participate

in English-based education, especially in elementary education, since the begimring of the
20th century. Aﬁican parents understand that access to European linguistic and cultural
capital is vital for the economic future of their children. They have historically sacriﬁced
a great deal to maximize their childrens’ chances of access. While English remains a
second language for a majority, this does not imply that Zimbabweans cannot master
English to satisfy their economic and political needs. As Street (1993) posits, “Different
models of society and of the political generate different ideas about the role of language
and cultural process” (32). The challenge for Zimbabwe is to what degree its educational
system can produce what Anderson (1994) has called a “politically sufﬁcient diffusion of
bilingualism.”

An institutional system of education is the product of the negotiation of group
interests in a given society. The arena in which this negotiation takes place may be
understood as a “market” (Bourdieu, 1991) in which members with larger amounts of
linguistic capital are able to maintain superior access. Over time, a system reﬂective of
unequal relations in the market is established that comes to serve the needs of a minority.
This is especially true of inherited colonial systems of education, because of the powerful
inﬂuence of colonial interests (the colonizing government, commercial interests, colonial
administration, and the settlers) in the formation of the system. The focus here is upon
one such system, that of post-colonial Zimbabwe, about which I will seek to understand
what it is like, and how it could be improved in the central area of language education.
This dissertation’s proposal for improvement utilizes a contact zone approach to
analyzing literature that draws speciﬁcally upon Zimbabwean texts written during

Zimbabwe’s second Chimurenga period. Unlike many literary analyses, this

interpretation is aimed directly at Zimbabweans. This dissertations central thesis is that
the introduction of approaches to literacy and literature that interrogate contact zone
issues is useful for exposing structures of domination in Zimbabwe’s language market.
Awareness of these structures is important for students so that they may understand their
reality in terms of the social forces that shape it; this awareness can then lead to a
development of student ability to more conﬁdently negotiate those social forces. In this
type of system, leamers’ backgrounds, not externally certiﬁed examinations, become a
primary resource for language education.

Zimbabwe was chosen as the context for this dissertation for several key reasons.
First, Zimbabwe had an historically important settler inﬂuence that continues to inﬂuence
the educational system today; the establishment of racially separate educational systems
created a set of market relations that continue to have an impact. Second, at the onset of
black majority rule in 1980, the Zimbabwean government fully committed itself to
transforming the unequal set of relations that had been established during the settler
period; while the impacts of that transformation have been examined from a quantitative
perspective (with attention to Zimbabwe’s massive expansion in access), the qualitative
issue of language education has gone largely unexamined. Finally, the recent move to
“localize” Zimbabwe’s examination system has mostly been examined ﬁom an
administrative perspective; consequently, the questions of how language plays a role in
examination (and therefore curriculum) have gone largely unexamined. The thesis
proposed by this dissertation is not based on an analysis of quantitative research data.
Rather, the thesis and framework aim to create new insight into language education

theory and its potential application in Zimbabwe.

 

 

This dissertation develops a critical framework in order to examine the roots of
unequal market relations in Zimbabwe, details a dialogic pedagogy, and develops an
analysis of Zimbabwean literature. The dialogic pedagogy and literary analysis detailed
in this dissertation are especially relevant in the context of Zimbabwe’s current move
toward a “localized” cuniculum. The term “localization” has come to mean the inclusion
of local content and the localization of examination administration; however, localization
has not reshaped the colonial nature of language education in the system. This
dissertation offers a speciﬁc application of critical literacy by showing how African
authors can be “voices from the inside” for Zimbabwean students and teachers.

As noted in Harrow (1994), African literature has always been seen to have an
educational function. Aﬁ'ican writers such as Chinua Achebe serve “the goals of the
teacher by constructing mimetic [see chapter one] art” (62). However, while this mimetic
or teaching function is recognized, most literary critics fail to engage thoroughly the
difﬁcult issue of “who” is being taught. Except for Ngugi, the issue of audience for
Aﬁ'ican literature has been seen to be one of “double voice” -- the African author that
writes in English addresses both a European and Aﬁican audience. This problematic,
oﬁen undeveloped, usually ignores the uneven linguistic and cultural relations in Aﬁican
educational systems. A speciﬁc development of a critical pedagogic approach using
African literature can be shown to address issues of relevance and equity for an Aﬁican
audience.

This dissertation addresses the “double voice” issue for Zimbabwe in four
chapters that examine the theory and practice of institutionalized language education.

Chapter one proposes a critical apparatus with which to view the institutional framework

of Aﬁ'ican language education. Chapter two historically contextualizes this framework
and describes the roots of institutionalized language education in Zimbabwe. Chapter
three examines the theory and practice in Zimbabwean language education; in addition, it
proposes a new a reshaping of the connection between theory and pedagogy. Chapter
four’s literary analysis examines the negotiation of identity and historical forces during
Zimbabwe’s second Chimurenga; through a close reading of Zimbabwean authors, a
speciﬁc approach is developed for a more pluralistic and relevant view of English

language education practice.

 

Chapter 1
THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF LANGUAGE EDUCATION IN AFRICA

All these questions [of a new language pedagogy] have less to do with literary production than
with sociolinguistic analysis, an educational policy, a political program. (Glissant, 1989)

Institutionalized language education remains the most enduring facet of the
colonial experience in Aﬁica. During the course of their colonial administrations, each
colonial power made its national language the ofﬁcial language of administration,
business and post-primary education. In a post-colonial context, issues concerning
language in Aﬁican school systems are intimately connected to political, economic and
educational discourse. A framework that critically examines these discourses as they
relate to the institutionalization of language in Aﬁican educational systems can provide a
more complete understanding of Aﬁican education. The primary goal of this chapter is to
establish this framework in order to examine the complex interaction of structure and
agency as they relate to language education. Borrowing from Wacquant’s reading of
Bourdieu (1991), the term “structure” should be understood as obj ectivated and
institutionalized social positions; “agency” denotes the lived experience of agents,
accompanying categories of perception and appreciation, and their inﬂuence upon action.
(W acquant, 1992) I synthesize a framework that draws upon Bourdieu’s concept of
inﬂuential market forces and also Giroux’s focus upon the transformational potential of
individual agency. This framework is necessary because of a tendency by relevant

theorizers to emphasize “structure” or “agency” at the expense of a more complex

interactional view that can be contextualized. It is this more complex interactional view
that lays the groundwork for a new approach to language education that is speciﬁcally
developed in chapters three and four.

Since the late 19603, new African governments have been conﬁonted with two
main policy options concerning language education: 1) to continue with the former
colonial policies; or 2) to forge new language education policies. The discourse of many
of the most inﬂuential language education institutions contributes to the maintenance of
unequal colonial linguistic and cultural market relations. Speciﬁcally, the nature of the
linguistic and cultural market, established in Aﬁican countries during colonial and white
settler periods, favors those who are in possession of more European linguistic and
cultural capital (in the terms of Bourdieu 1991). This unequal distribution of capital is
established and maintained by increasing the opportunity for access to that capital
through formal education.

At the classroom level, teachers are active participants in a daily negotiation of the
language curriculum. In this sense, they are important agents that have the potential to
challenge (in daily practice) curriculum guidelines that reﬂect and maintain unequal
relations of power. I would argue that one key goal of language education is to give
students an opportunity to fully express themselves in language. This level of individual
agency in the classroom is essential for students if they are to have a voice with which to
negotiate individual identity in a society. Following up on this line of reasoning then,
students and teachers are best served by a language curriculum that maximizes relevance
(in content) and equity at the individual student level. At the classroom level, an active

negotiation of the language curriculum entails addressing issues of power and identity in

language. Due to the inﬂuential settler experience in Zimbabwe’s education system,
highlighting this negotiation in English language curriculum is especially important.

As nation-states remain the most important units of organization and
institutionalization, legitimations that promote national “unity” and “modernization” may
be perceived as integral to nation-state interest. From a nation-state perspective, the
analysis of Zimbabwean policy (in terms of power and unequal distribution of linguistic
and cultural capital) may seem anti-institutional. Legitimations of “equity” and “local
relevance” can be perceived as being in opposition to the nation-state’s pursuits of unity
and modernization. Instead of viewing institutional and individual interests as
irreconcilable, I show the necessity of recognizing the complex interaction between
structure (Zimbabwe’s institutionalized interests in education and market forces) and
agency (individual teachers, students, and individuals in general) within the educational
system. Only when this structure-agency relationship is clariﬁed can the formation and
practice of language education be more fully understood. Failure to critically examine
language education in institutionalized systems has lead to an inability to visualize
alternative approaches. This contributes directly to the maintenance of the status quo.
The Framing of Language Choice in Africa

The process of choosing a national language is politically contentious for any
nation, but it was especially so for newly independent countries in Africa during the
1960s and 705. One of the most common reasons cited for the continued use of European
languages is the degree of etlmolinguistic diversity and competition on the continent.

Observer of African affairs in the late 19603, Richmond notes: "Since tribal rivalries ran

10

high, the young governments had to be careful not to slight one ethnic group in favor of

another” (Richmond, 1983). This view is echoed in a 1985 UNESCO report:

With the unfortunate upsurge and hardening of ethnic and regional sentiments since
independence in many Aﬁ'ican countries, the question of an indigenous lingua franca has
become an extremely sensitive one, and it is not surprising that only a few African
governments have been able to touch it so far. (802)

The citing of the threat of potential ethnic and regional rivalry, based on national
language choice, can be seen as a central legitimation for a new African government's
continued use of the colonial language in national administration and education.

Not only has the colonial language been viewed as a potentially unifying force, it
has also been framed as a primary instrument of nation building and development: a tool
for “modernization.” As early as 1956, Knappert posited three main obstacles to nation
building in Aﬁica: language, education, and development. Among these factors,
language can be seen as ﬁmdamental: without language there is no education, and without
education, no development. This view of language in nation-states, far from recent, can
be seen to have emerged at least as early as the rise of the nation-states of France and
England.

Language choice also has implications at the inter-Aﬁican and global levels of
communication. Maintaining a European language can be seen to facilitate
administrative communication at an international and regional level. In English in Africa
(1991) Schmied points out that, for international purposes, English has become more, not
less, important since colonial times. According to Schmied, this state of affairs involves
more than the fact that the US has supplanted the UK as the leading English speaking

world power:

11

While for many Africans the feeling about English may subjectively be very mixed, it is an
objective necessity for discussing national problems and expressing national points of view in
pan-African and international forums (such as OAU) and for claiming a fair share of the
international communication processes, be it in the political, economic, or technological
ﬁelds. (20)

Therefore, at the regional and international level, Aﬁican governments can be seen to
have an interest in being perceived as participants in a global system where English is the
lingua franca.

The educational language choice was the source of heated discussion among
commentators in the 1960s and 703 (especially in Kenya and Tanzania); the discussion in
the 19808 and 905 in Zimbabwe has ushered in a more local and pragmatic focus upon
modernization issues for educational policy makers. That is, as a part of a larger national
modernization effort, European language choice is viewed unquestioningly as modern
while local languages are viewed as traditional. Important consequences of the
acceptance of this dichotomy include the marginalization of the teaching of Aﬁican
languages and the unquestioned acceptance of English as the main language for
education. This juxtaposition of roles of languages in development seems to have been
largely accepted by Zimbabwean language scholars soon after independence (N gara
1982, Zvogbo 1982). The acceptance of English as a language of development was
highlighted at a lecture on educational issues in 1993 by Zimbabwe’s then Permanent
Secretary of Education and Culture. The ministry of Education and Culture is
responsible for African language promotion in primary schools. When asked what
language his children spoke at home, Permanent Secretary Sibanda replied: “Without
English you are doomed. My children speak only English at home . . .. Shona is a

language that is dying out” (Sibanda, 1993). In this personal response, Sibanda can be

12

seen to be drawing upon the concept of English as a “modern language,” serving the
economic needs of his children, irrespective of his ofﬁcial role as chief promoter of
African languages in Zimbabwe.

Most African countries currently practice dejure European monolingualism in
schools past the third year of primary schooling with numerous instances of defacto
European language use in ﬁrst year primary. This is striking when one considers that a
sociolinguistic survey sponsored by the Ford Foundation (cited in Schmied 1991),
estimated that the percentage of the population in eight Aﬁican countries that had some
degree of ﬂuency in a European language was between 5% and 40%. In terms of literacy
distribution and language education practice, this would be roughly analogous to having

French as the ofﬁcial language of education in the US.

Formal policy statements from Aﬁican governments in relation to educational
language use are often structurally ambiguous and defacto European monolingual. For
instruction in African languages, the 1987 Education Act of the constitution states,
“Shona and Ndebele may be used as languages of instruction from grade 1 up to grade 3
in areas where the majority of students are of Shona or Ndebele backgrounds” (emphasis
mine). The constitutional statement is optional (by its use of “may”), phrased in the
passive (used by whom?), and conditional upon majority L1 classrooms (read: rural
areas). Readers of the constitution are thus left to interpret the 1987 Constitutional Act as
non-binding and without any real constitutional backing.

For the non—European linguistic majority in Zimbabwe, the ambiguity of Aﬁican

language promotion and continued use of a European language in education remains a

l3

contradiction. This contradiction can only be understood through recognition of the
phenomenological process of legitimation and naturalization. That is, ﬁ'om Zimbabwe’s
earliest contact with white settlers to the present day, English has become naturalized at
the highest institutional levels through the continued use of legitimations that promote the
status quo. As English has become naturalized as the language of administration and
education, societal members have come to view its use as a primary avenue to access
linguistic, cultural, and accompanying economic capital (realized through access to more
highly paid jobs). A primary source of legitimations for the institutional promotion of the
status quo in language education is the ﬁeld of language planning.

Since language planning’s development as an academic ﬁeld, its dominant
legitimations have included modernization and unity. Institutions that promote what
Bourdieu (1991) terms a “uniﬁed linguistic and cultural market” utilize these
legitimations. Initially developed for understanding France’s early national development,
Bourdieu’s concept of a uniﬁed market is also helpful for understanding the early
national development of Zimbabwe; a deﬁned linguistic and cultural market emerged
during the 100 years of highly inequitable governance of the Rhodesian white settler
regime. Fairclough’s (1989) view, initially developed for viewing evidence of power in
discourse in modern day Britain, posits that social agents utilizing themes of
modernization and unity can be seen to belong to a relatively small elite or dominant
bloc. The concept of a dominant bloc is extremely relevant for understanding the often
elite-dominated political structures that have governed Aﬁican nations. In the academic
ﬁeld, language planning writers and researchers also utilize the concepts of

modernization and unity in their work. In Aﬁ'ica, the dominant players in language

l4

policy formation have drawn upon these themes, supported by the ﬁeld of language
planning, as the primary legitimations for the use of European languages in schools.

An alternative to this discourse has come mainly from a smaller group of
language education policy researchers that draw upon the legitimations of equity and
relevance to local context. Researchers that draw upon these themes usually advocate
F reirian transfonnator'y critical language pedagogy. Critical language pedagogy
highlights the need for educators to emphasize multiple levels of subjectivity within the
dialectic of identity and history. One example of this practice would be to highlight the
theme of gender in the classroom discussion of a literary work and then to apply it to
individual student experience. According to Giroux and McLaren (1992), this can only
be accomplished through a critical language practice in classrooms that views language
and its production as a form of historical argument or conﬂict. This approach, originally
elaborated in Brazil, has since been adopted by Aﬁican based researchers (Rubagumya,
1994; Natsa, 1994; Goke-Pariola, 1993; Moyana, 1988) in an attempt to rethink African
language education.

Roots of Language Planning as a Field

The term “language planning”(hereafter LP) has many correlates that have been
proposed as the basis for the global study of LP: Language engineering (Miller, 1950)
glottopolitics (Hall, 1951), language development (Noss, 1967), language regulation
(German, 1973), and language management (J emud and Neustupny, 1986). Haugen

(1966) has articulated one of the most widely utilized deﬁnitions of language planning.

Language planning is the activity of preparing a normative orthography, grammar, and
dictionary for the guidance of writers and speakers in a non-homogeneous speech
community. ( 1 88)

15

Currently used by Haugen and others as the basis of internationally oriented language
planning research, this deﬁnition of language planning can in fact be traced historically to
18th century Europe. While the French established a formal academy, the English
adopted a generalized prescriptive grammarian approach. Both the English and French
institutional approaches were forms of ascertainment. Baugh and Cable in A History of

the English Language (1957) trace the English approach:

Eighteenth-century attempts to deal with the English language and to direct its course fall
under three main heads: (1) to reduce the language to rule and set up a standard of correct
usage; (2) to reﬁne it-that is, to remove supposed defects and introduce certain
improvements; and (3) to ﬁx it permanently in the desired form. (14)

At the turn of the twentieth century, Ferdinand deSaussure highlighted the
parole/langue boundaries of language study. Viewing the study of language structurally
or as a system is to treat it as Iangue; to study language according to its individual social
manifestations of language is to focus on parole. Issues concerning parole may be seen
to have been explicitly developed in LP discourse concerning language policy
implications. As highlighted by Cooper in Fishman (1968), language policy-making
involves decisions concerning the teaching and use of language, and their careful
formulation by those empowered to do so, for the guidance of others. Language planning
as a ﬁeld primarily focuses upon issues of institutionalization, power, and language use.
Institutions and Legitimations of LP

On the surface, Haugen's structural deﬁnition of LP seems reasonable.
Orthographies, grammars, and dictionaries are assumed to be a normal part of a language.
It isn't often that one asks oneself, “where is my grammar ﬁom?” or, “who makes

dictionaries?” The presence of a universal English grammar and English dictionaries are

16

not usually questioned at the surface level; they have even been electronically
incorporated into the writing process to be checked by word processors. The institutional
maintenance of language becomes invisible at the day to day level and consequently
becomes a part of societal shared common sense. “Common sense” is understood here as
Fairclough (1989) frames it (building upon Garﬁnkel 1967): assumptions and
expectations are implicit, backgrounded, taken for granted, not things that people are
consciously aware of, rarely explicitly formulated or examined or questioned (77).
According to Fairclough (1989), the effectiveness of ideology depends upon it being
taken as common knowledge. This concealment of ideology into common sense takes
place in language. F airclough views ideology as being tied directly to relations of power
-- unequal relations. In his discussion of the concept of ideology, Thompson (1990)
proposes a view of ideological phenomena as “meaningful symbolic phenomena in so far
as they serve, in particular social-historical circumstances, to establish and sustain
relations of domination” (56). In Berger and Luckman’s (1966) view, language acts as a
means and ends for institutionalization; it is a vehicle for the imposition of institutional
order through the process of legitimation.

The institutional world of any society seeks legitimation, that is, ways by which it
can be explained and justiﬁed. When legitimatons become naturalized, they become
common sense. Berger and Luckrnan posit that for institutional maintenance purposes, it
is important to interpret social meaning to societal members in various legitirnating
formulas. These formulas need to be consistent and comprehensive in terms of the
institutional order, if they are to carry conviction to the new generation. At a societal

level of operation, they are able to function by relying upon what Fairclough terms

17

background knowledge. This knowledge is shared through societal participation in
institutional education, and maintained largely by media discourse. For instance, during
the Cold War, the term “communist threat” could be utilized by US politicians in public
speeches without audience members automatically questioning its meaning. Audience
members would tend to utilize shared US background knowledge, formed to satisfy
dominant bloc interests and promoted through the media, that allowed US citizens to
understand communists and communism as a threat.

Berger and Luckman (1966) posit that as part of the institutional order,
institutions rely upon mechanisms of social reproduction: “The children must be ‘taught
to behave’ and, once taught, are ‘kept in line’ -- so, of course, are the adults. The more
conduct is institutionalized, the more predictable and thus the more controlled it
becomes” (62). In addition, there is an imposition of order or logic in a new institution.
The logic does not reside in the institutions and their external functions, but in the
reﬂection about them. Put differently, reﬂective consciousness (individual human
consciousness) superimposes the quality of logic on the institutional order. As is implied
by Berger and Luckrnan’s reference to reﬂective consciousness, this order is only
meaningﬁrl in relation to human interaction. Thus, this process of imposition follows
from the naturalization of a contextualized logic or set of legitrnations as internalized by
individuals in a society. The vehicle for the imposition of this logic for humans is

language:

Language provides the fundamental superimposition of logic on the objectivated social world.
The ediﬁce of legitimations is built upon language and uses language as its principal
instrumentality. The “logic” thus attributed to the institutional order is part of the socially
available stock of knowledge for members of society and is taken for granted as such. (Berger
and Luckman 1966, 64)

18

The social phenomena of sharing background knowledge and ideological common
sense assumptions are not ones that entail automatic reproduction in the individual. It is
important to understand that individuals, as agents, interact with and negotiate the
legitimations upon which institutions are built. There is a dynamic negotiation present in
the receiving and sharing of background knowledge. As Berger and Luckman (1966)
point out, individual agency exists in dialectic with society:

Consequently, social change must always be understood as standing in dialectical relationship to
the “history of ideas.” Both “idealistic” and “materialistic” understandings of the relationship
overlook this dialectic, and thus distort history . . .all symbolic universes and all legitimations
are human products; their existence has its base in the lives of concrete individuals, and has no
empirical status apart from these lives. (128)

While institutions require ideological mechanisms for their maintenance, humans
constantly negotiate the shape of those very institutions. In fact, while institutions do
have a tendency to persist, deinstitutionalization can take place in certain areas of social
life. One example Berger and Luckman (1966) offer is the emergence of a private sphere
that is considerably deinstitutionalized compared to the public sphere in current society

To sum up the discussion of institutionalization and human agency to this point,
new institutions are created, legitimated and eventually naturalized through human
negotiation. Institutions are maintained by the imposition of an order through language.
This view, up to this point ﬁ'amed in general terms, can be applied to Zimbabwe’s
speciﬁc use of language planning in education. Brieﬂy, separate and unequal educational
systems were created during the settler period; English as the language of education for
the more lucrative non-labor oriented system that was introduced, legitimated and

eventually naturalized. At independence, the Zimbabwean government implicitly

19

addressed the question of institutional legitimation and order through language by
continuing to use English in administration, business, and schooling.

From a broader historical viewpoint, the real emergence of Language Planning as
a ﬁeld of study since the early 19603 coincides with the era of independence for many
former British, French and Portuguese colonies. It is an important historical fact that
nation states were originally artiﬁcially carved out of Africa by European colonial and
white settler forces. As colonial powers drew national boundaries regardless of ethnic
and language groups, the necessity grew, from the colonizer’s point of view, for a central
administration of regions that were extremely ethnically and linguistically diverse. The
administration of ethnically diverse regions was an important facet of the original
institution of European language use in Africa because it laid the groundwork for the
utilization of the previously discussed legitimation of “national unity.” Far from being a
passive process of adoption however, it can be shown that legitimation can serve interests
of certain groups over others. When this happens, it may be considered ideological. In
the context of language education, a minority of those in Zimbabwe who possessed a
competency in English at independence can be seen to be preserving relations of power
based on linguistic capital.

Fairclough (1989), develops Berger and Luckman's view of the role of language
in the institutionalization process by including the concepts of power struggle and

agency. Fairclough posits that the dominant bloc exercise power through language:

I don't assume that conventions are unitary and homogeneous; on the contrary, they are
characterized by diversity, and by power struggle. In so far as homogeneity is achieved-as it is
to some extent in the case of standardization-it is imposed by those who have power. (22)

20

Rather than treating language as langue, and outside societal inﬂuence, Fairclough frames
the use of language as an interactional relationship, involving struggle within society.
Linguistic phenomena are social phenomena of a special sort, and social phenomena are
(in part) linguistic phenomena. As such, linguistic phenomena are also reﬂective of power
relations within a society. When individuals speak to one another, they draw upon a set
of social assumptions that give meaning to the interaction. Adherents of this view of
language draw upon what shall be termed the interactionist discourse. In contrast with
this discourse, a structural or instrumental language planner draws upon a discourse of
language and society as separate entities. The focus here is less upon the social nature of
language, but rather the functional purpose of the interaction. This discourse will be
classiﬁed structural-functional as it seeks to highlight the system’s instrumental qualities
as opposed to the reciprocal relations within the system.
Bourdieu’s Market

While previously discussed authors offer a developed view of the
institutionalization process, this proposed framework is in need of ﬁirther elaboration in
its over-all operation. Without this elaboration, naturalization (as expounded so far)
becomes an unaccountably universal process that operates mechanically across all
institutions. The French scholar Bourdieu offers a more developed view of naturalization
as a contextualized and negotiated market inﬂuenced process. According to Wacquant
(1992), Bourdieu avoids the false opposition of structural necessity and individual agency
by weaving together a structuralist and constructivist approach into social praxeology.
This approach has two main positions: (1) there are objective spaces, or positions

(institutionalized structures), and a distribution of social resources (the market) that in

21

turn deﬁne the external constraints inﬂuencing interactions and representations and; (2)
the actual lived experience of agents (agency) can be used to understand categories of
perception and appreciation that inﬂuence their action. (Wacquant, 1992) Thus,
according to Bourdieu, the viewpoints of agents will vary systematically with the point
they occupy in objective social space.

Dissatisﬁed with the decontextualized, asocial Iangue view of language, Bourdieu
posits that language should be viewed mainly as a social-historical product. According to
Bourdieu (1991), dominant - subordinate relations within a linguistic and cultural market
are established during the process of state formation: The conditions are created for the
constitution of a uniﬁed linguistic market, dominated by the ofﬁcial language. The
market is maintained through a whole set of speciﬁc institutions and mechanisms,
objectivated social positions, that have become a part of habitus. Rather than a more
abstract shared “body of knowledge,” habitus speciﬁcally consists of a set of historical
relations “deposited” within individual bodies in the form of mental and corporeal
schemata of perception, appreciation, and action. (Wacquant, 1993)

Bourdieu would posit that the linguistic policy of the state and even the overt
interventions of pressure groups form only a superﬁcial aspect of overall market
maintenance. The key to maintenance of the ofﬁcial language is not an emphasis upon
institutional control, but rather the operation of powerful market forces that govern the
distribution of linguistic capital and in turn inﬂuence individual linguistic behavior.
Individuals, as automatic participants in the linguistic and cultural market, adopt

positions in the market that reinforce distribution of linguistic capital. Although the

22

context for Bourdieu’s views draws largely upon his observations of French society, his
view of linguistic and cultural market forces provide insight for Zimbabwean society.
While more than a decade has passed since a majority government has come into
power in Zimbabwe, the former white minority government’s policies still impact the
current distribution of linguistic capital in the educational system. Former group A
schools were schools reserved mainly for whites in low-density areas of Harare. Students
in these schools receive more intensive English education from qualiﬁed teachers who are
often paid supplemental salary bonuses from parent organizations. An increasing majority
of students at group A schools may come from families that encourage an “English only”
policy at home (Moyo, 1993). Group B schools were the urban schools that served
tightly controlled Black high-density suburbs pre-1980. Children in these schools tend to
come from home settings where Shona or Ndebele is spoken as a ﬁrst language but also
where parents often use English for work purposes. Government schools in rural areas
serve communities that engage mainly in small-scale agriculture. Schools in rural areas
often have difﬁculty in attracting qualiﬁed teachers due to a shortage of housing.
Children come from family settings where an African language is predominantly spoken.
The current multitiered educational system, connected to social market forces, is most
noticeably divided along the lines of language background. Those students currently
enrolled in former A group schools have the most number of chances for access to higher
quality English language instruction. This access in turn prepares relatively more fonner
Group A school students for higher levels of secondary and university education, where

ﬂuency in English is a prerequisite.

23

Bourdieu is clear on the point that participation in the market should not be
understood as ensuring equitable distribution of capital: dominant and subordinate
relations are a part of the operation of a market. Bourdieu (1991) outlines a process,
largely unconscious, of symbolic domination in which those with more access to
linguistic capital are in can maintain a superior class position over those who have less
access. For Bourdieu, participation in the symbolic domination of the linguistic market is

non-negotiable for both the dominated and dominators:

All symbolic domination presupposes, on the part of those who submit to it, a form of
complicity which is neither passive submission to external constraint nor a free adherence to
values. The recognition of the legitimacy of the ofﬁcial language has nothing in common with
an explicitly professed . . . belief, or with an intentional act of accepting a “norm.” It is
inscribed, in a practical state . . . through a long and slow process of acquisition, by the
sanctions of the linguistic market . . . [and is] therefore adjusted to . . . the chances of material
and symbolic proﬁt which the laws of price formation of a given market objectively offer to the
holders of a given linguistic capital. (51)

According to Bourdieu, different agents’ linguistic strategies are strictly dependent on
their positions occupied in the structure of the distribution of linguistic capital, which can
in turn be shown to depend, via the chance of access to the educational system, on the
structure of class relations. The linguistic market is established through a process of state
formation with one dominant, legitimated language. Those in possession of more
linguistic capital can enhance their chances of further access to that capital and thereby
ensure a superior class position and the maintenance of the system. By linguistic capital,
Bourdieu (1990) means a “speciﬁc criterion of linguistic competence”(73). More
speciﬁcally, it is an “understanding and use of language that are the major points of
leverage for teachers’assesments” that is operating at every level of the education system
(73). In Zimbabwe, the major points of leverage come from superior English reading and

writing skills in an examination-inﬂuenced curriculum.

24

Bourdieu’s elaboration of the interaction between agency and structure is
signiﬁcant because it further explains the individual’s role in the reproduction of unequal
distribution and market relations; it also describes the position of the individual who
participates in the system, even though he or she may be getting relatively little from it.
What Boudieu’s framework does not offer is a speciﬁc method of examining social
positions and individual agency. His is a framework that operates mainly on a
generalized model of efﬁciency and class domination in which the possibility of
institutional change is minimized. In the case of Zimbabwe, one can clearly trace how
institutionalized social spaces were actively negotiated by Zimbabweans. What
Bourdieu’s model offers is the concept of grounded market relations operating in an
individual’s societal background. An individual’s unique attempt to negotiate his or her
position can only be fully interpreted when it is related to societally deﬁned spaces. One
example of this is the differing responses of Zimbabweans to legally and socially
constraining categories of race and class. The strength of Bourdieu’s model would be to
predict that large numbers of Zimbabweans would perhaps respond predictably to
linguistic and cultural market forces. They would attempt to gain access to linguistic and
cultural capital by increasing their exposure to English in the education system. The
model’s weakness -- a weakness for Bourdieu’s model in general -- would be to fail to
account for social change in social structures.

Role of Education

Focusing more upon the role of agency and ideology in domination, Fairclough

posits that the dominant bloc (those in highest class positions), controls societies’

institutions: police, civil service, law, religions, the media, and more to the point --

25

education. Because it contributes to the formation of the intellectual movement,
education reproduces the ideology of the dominant bloc, which will typically choose an

ideology that serves its interests or agenda:

The general point is that education, along with all the other social institutions, has its
“hidden agenda” the reproduction of class relations and other higher-level social
structures, in addition to its overt educational agenda. (40)

Berger and Luckman (echoed in Althusser, 1971) identify an ideology as a deﬁnition of
reality that becomes attached to a concrete power interest. In societal terms, the dominant
bloc possesses the ideological power or ability to project their practices as universal and
common-sensical; this projection is accomplished through combinations of coercion and
consent. The consensual institution it uses for this projection is education. The use of the
English language in Zimbabwean education is consistent with this view of power
projection: ﬁrst language to an extreme minority, English is accepted as instrumental in
educational achievement. It is important to note that this power projection of English in
Zimbabwe’s educational system is not unique: educational systems around the world,
including monolingual ones, utilize languages or language varieties that belong to be
those of the economically privileged elite.

It is from this point of view that language use in education can be seen to be
connected to the ideology of the dominant bloc. This connection has important
implications for actually locating institutional agency and ideology, in the form of
legitimations, within societal discourse. Fairclough is able to expose structures of power
present in language by offering a systematic way of identifying legitimations through a

practice called Critical Language Study (CLS). Usually utilized with spoken and written

26

texts, CLS is a form of discourse analysis. It differs from more traditional discourse
analysis in that it attempts to highlight elements of power in language (discourse) by
identifying the connections between micro structures at the textual level and macro
structures (ideologies) of social institutions.

When discussing the role of ideology in education, it is important to establish the
speciﬁc meaning of ideology and how it may be contextualized. For Thompson (1990),
to study ideology is

to study the ways in which meaning serves to establish and sustain relations of domination.
Ideological phenomena are historical circumstances, to establish and sustain relations of
domination. (56)

Examining language education discourse for ideology requires that we socially and
historically contextualize that discourse. This discourse is a form of what Thomspon

would term symbolic phenomena:

We can grasp symbolic phenomena as ideological, hence we can analyze ideology, only by
situating symbolic phenomena in the social-historical contexts within which these phenomena
may, or may not, serve to establish and sustain relations of domination. Whether symbolic
phenomena do or do not serve to establish and sustain relations of domination is a question
which can be answered only be examining the interplay of meaning and power in particular
circumstances, only by examining the ways in which symbolic forms are employed, circulated
and understood by individuals situated in structured social contexts. (56)

For Berger and Luckman (1966), a natural afﬁnity exists between those with an interest
in maintaining established power positions and the personnel administering monopolistic
traditions of universe-maintenance. “In other words, conservative political forces tend to
support the monopolistic claims of the universal experts, whose monopolistic
organizations in turn tend to be politically conservative” (122-23). At the general level of

this chapter’s framework, the practice of language education in the African context can be

27

seen to be supported by speciﬁc ideologies that can be uncovered in the discourse of
language planning. In the more speciﬁc socio-historical context of Zimbabwe, practices
in language education that were naturalized in the white settler period can be shown to
have continued in the current system.
Giroux’s Critical Pedagogy

As previously discussed, Bourdieu’s market framework is helpful for elaborating
the market forces operating upon an educational system; however, it does not tell us very
much about the speciﬁc features of the market or manifestations at the individual level
that go beyond simple market participation. Agency is framed as a surface feature of the
system that cannot affect the deep mechanisms of the market. From a more speciﬁc
critical pedagogical point of view, Giroux and McLaren (1992) posit that language
education practice emanates from an authoritarian ideology that ties it to national identity,
culture, and literacy. Giroux and McLaren also posit that “as the cultural mask of
hegemony, language is being mobilized to police the borders of an ideologically
discursive divide that separates dominant from subordinate groups, whites from Blacks
[in the US], and schools from the imperatives of democratic public life.” (7) Rather than
remaining at a descriptive level of market features as Bourdieu does, however, Giroux
and McLaren go on to propose an alternative educational model that recognizes relevance
and equity as educational goals. This model depends upon agency at the level of teachers
and students in order to transform the hegemony: this transformation is initiated through a
critical pedagogy that recognizes the transformational inﬂuence of language.

Giroux and McLaren offer a transformatory model of education that includes an

understanding of how language and subjectivity (related to issues of identity) intersect

28

with history and power. Furthermore, they address their approach to educational theorists
interested in questions of student agency. Unlike Bourdieu’s view of reproductive
dominance, Giroux and McLaren detail a critical pedagogy for classrooms that they view
as a potential way to break out of the reproduction of the authoritarian discourse on

language and literacy education:

The purpose of developing a critical language of schooling is not to describe the world more
objectively, but to create a more ethically empowering world which encourages a greater
awareness of the way in which power can be mobilized for the purposes of human liberation.
Critical educational theory needs a language that understands how experience is produced,
legitimated, and organized as a central aspect of pedagogy. We need to examine language and
its production as a form of historical argument; furthermore, we need a language that is critical
about its own mechanisms of authority. (1 1)

Thus, awareness of how language operates in relation to society and resistance to
hegemony are introduced as resources at the individual and pedagogical level. Teachers,
as active negotiators of the curriculum, enable students to develop an awareness or
“foregrounding” (F airclough, 1989) of hegemonic structures. In this critical pedagogy,
teachers attempt to make students aware of their own transforrnative potential within the
system. According to this perspective, human agents possess the capacity to remake the
world both through collective struggle in and on the material world and through the
exercise of their social imagination.

In Border Crossings (1992), Giroux’s proposed role for teachers is a radical
departure from a traditional conception of teacher roles. In order to empower students
with a concept of transforrnative possibilities, Giroux is challenging teachers to make
classroom knowledge relevant to the lives of their students. According to McLaren in
Border Crossings’s introduction, students must be empowered with a voice that is

established through an afﬁrmation of student experience. This means that teachers, not

29

national curriculum committees or commissioned examination companies, must provide
curriculum content and pedagogical practices which resonate with the life experiences of
students. By advocating this departure from traditional roles, Giroux highlights a tension
that all teachers inevitably face: to what degree can teachers be expected to be agents of
social change? Cited in Graham-Brown (1991), Zimbabwean educator K.P. Dzvimbo has
noted that after the change of power in 1980, teachers as a group were supposed to be
agents of change, but the environment within which the teacher operates has not changed.
According to Natsa (1994) what has been noteably lacking in Zimbabwe’s approach to
language education is an active collaboration on the part of government, University of
Zimbabwe, and the county’s system of teacher colleges toward developing a relevant and
equitable language education that draws upon a critical pedagogy (Natsa, 1994). This
dissertation develops a role for critical pedagogy and a transformatory approach to
language education (chapter three) in the Zimbabwean context. In addition, it goes one
step further by detailing a speciﬁc contact zone approach for interpreting Zimbabwean
authors that exposes important features of Zimbabwe’s linguistic market (see chapter
four). Recognition of these features is important because it creates the opportunity for
further dialogue about a more relevant and equitable language education for Zimbabwean
language learners and educators.

Giroux and McLaren raise the important theoretical issue of the connection
between Bourdieu’s proposed dominant linguistic market and cultural hegemony. While
it is clear that English is the market dominant language in Zimbabwe, it is also the case
that English is a second language for most Zimbabweans. The establishment of highly

unequal linguistic and cultural relations may or may not be directly translated into

30

cultural hegemony for the majority. In Gramsci’s (1971) formulation, hegemony is
achieved through the combination of “spontaneous” consent given by the great masses to
“the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant ﬁrndamental group,” and
the existence of a coercive state apparatus that enforces discipline on those groups who
do not “consent” either actively or passively (12). While Gramsci’s discussion of
hegemony is a relevant issue for this dissertation’s framework, Sassoon (1982) has noted
that Gramsci’s views are highly contextualized in time and place (Italy and France in the
early twentieth century). The historically important factors in the negotiation of
hegemonic inﬂuence in language education for Zimbabwe are speciﬁcally analyzed in
Chapter two.

When discussing hegemony, it is important to emphasize that Bourdieu’s work
does not develop structure and agency as existing in a pure dialectical relationship.
Bourdieu’s market ﬁamework recognizes the interaction of objectivity and subjectivity;
however, these levels do not exist in a pure dialectic, exerting equal inﬂuence upon
society. Wacquant (1992) has noted that epistemologically, there is a priority given to an
objectivist over subjectivist approach: Bourdieu’s position is that agents are born into
predetermined social spaces with a fully internalized habitus. It is the combination of the
concepts of social space and habitus that can lead to a potentially deterministic approach
in Bourdieu’s work. Bourdieu and Passeron’s (1990) discussion of reproduction in

education is indicative of this perspective:

In reality, because they correspond to the material and symbolic interests of groups or classes
differently situated within the power relations, these pedagogic actions (PA) always tend to
reproduce the structure of the distribution of cultural capital among these groups or classes,
thereby contributing to the reproduction of the social structure. The laws of the market which
ﬁxes the economic or symbolic value, i.e. the value qua cultural capital, of the cultural
arbitrariness produced by the different PA 3 and thus of the products of those PA 3 (educated

31

individuals), are one of the mechanisms - more or less determinant according to the type of
social formation - through which social reproduction, deﬁned as the reproduction of the
structure of the relations of force between the classes, is accomplished. (11)

I would argue that Bourdieu’s automatic participation in the linguistic/cultural market is
in fact better framed as an ongoing negotiation between institutional structure and
individual agency that leads to the shaping of a more unique habitus for the individual.
The concept of individual negotiation leading to a unique habitus is especially pertinent
when one considers the wide variation of different individuals’ responses in different
social-historical contexts.

Contextual differences are pertinent for interpreting Giroux’s work as well.
Though he works from the context of the US educational system, his advocated critical
pedagogical approach is relevant, if not more so, for post settler-regime Zimbabwe. A
critical pedagogy in education is vital for a country attempting to transform colonial
structures of domination as Zimbabwe was from 1980. Unfortunately, Giroux severely
weakens his approach to a critical pedagogy by failing to translate it into speciﬁc
language curriculum applications. It is as if he views an actual translation of critical
pedagogy as somehow unimportant. If one posits that the individual and cultural
implications of education are being negotiated daily in the classroom, it is then
imperative that a relevant curriculum be developed to satisfy the implications of a critical
pedagogy. In the Zimbabwean case, this means that a curriculum that satisﬁes the goals
of relevance and equity should be outlined. This curriculum would recognize the
uniqueness of Zimbabwe’s social-historical context and also serve as a cultural resource.

Legitimations and Nation-States

32

Fairclough (1989) highlights the three step process of language adaptation of
nation states that is widely accepted by most LP scholars: standardization, codiﬁcation,
and prescription. According to Fairclough, these three steps facilitate an original
capitalistic goal of economic efﬁciency. Through a naturalizing hierarchy, the goals of
bureaucratic efﬁciency and modernization are satisﬁed for the state. This hierarchy
increases communication by maintaining a language that can be shared. Fairclough adds
that the establishment of a “standard variety” (through prescription) serves a dual
ﬁmction of being a “national” language belonging to all classes and sections of the
society, and yet remains in many respects a “class dialect” (57) It is a class dialect
because it is the dominant bloc that makes most use of it, and gains most from it as an
asset -- as form of “cultural capital” analogous to capital in the economic sesnse, as Pierre
Bourdieu has put it. (57-8)

There are also organizations beyond nation-state boundaries that share external
and internal institutional interests. These shared interests translate into organizational
support (in the form of language education material support) of shared institutional
maintenance; this maintenance is realized in monopolistic traditions of what Berger and

Luckman term universe maintenance:

It should not surprise us, then, that a profound afﬁnity exists between those with an
interest in maintaining established power positions and personnel administering
monopolistic traditions of universe-maintenance. In other words, conservative political
forces tend to support the monopolistic claims of the universal experts, whose
monopolistic organizations in turn tend to be politically conservative. (123)

The concept of “universe maintenance” is especially relevant in the discussion of the role

of African governments in educational policy, LP analysts, and external institutions; all

mu“, _

33

can play the role of universe maintenance personnel (hereafter referred to as LP players),
directly or indirectly, in the educational LP institutionalization process in Aﬁica.
A Source of Legitimations: Language Policy

A subgenera or type of LP discourse that is a more applied view of how LP
should be implemented is called “language policy writing.” Its practitioners, LP analysts,
normally link abstract LP thinking to concrete prescriptions.

In a brief review, I will show that Eastman's Language Planning (1983) and Jacob
and Beer’s Language Policy and National Unity (1985) are a part of a structural-
functional discourse of LP while Tolefson’s Planning Language Planning Inequality
(1991) and Goke-Pariola’s The Role of Language in the Struggle for Power and
Legitimacy in Africa (1993) are a part of interactionist discourse. The goal of this review
is to identify assumptions, agendas, and agency within the texts, and to show how these
may ﬁrnction as a resource for LP players. Legitimations of unity, efﬁciency, and
modernization function prominently in the interpretation of the structural—ﬁrnctional
discourse, while equity and relevance to local context are the underlying themes of the
interactionist discourse.

Structural-Functional Discourse

The structural-functional discourse of LP is drawn upon by those interested in
institutional control: members of the dominant bloc. Accordingly, structural-functional
LP accepts the imposition of order through language, regardless of social context.
Structural-functionalists seek to systematize LP so that it may be framed as an instrument

for nation building.

34

Eastman (1983), the author of the ﬁrst LP textbook appropriately titled Language
Planning, an Introduction, attempts to systematize LP by initially drawing upon
sociolinguistics and then relating LP to other ﬁelds. Eastman draws directly upon

Fishman’s (1971a) characterization of LP as it relates to sociolinguistics:

The systematic sociolinguistic study of language planning begins with the study of how
writing systems are created and spelling systems revised, and extends to the study of how to
assist government or other ofﬁcial efforts to manipulate language. (Fishman, 1971a)

The focus of Eastman’s Language Planning is to ﬂame LP as a conscious step by step
process in which planners (usually government representatives) choose a sufﬁciently
“developed” (with orthographies and writing systems) language. In Eastrnan’s view,
language planners engage in a systematic LP process in order to enhance commmrication
and to “encourage feelings of national unity and group cooperation” (Eastman, 1983).
Alter establishing LP as a branch of sociolinguistics, Eastman characterizes the

“universal” aspects of LP and then relates them to a wide variety of disciplinary ﬁelds:

The sociologist needs to know how standard languages inﬂuence social structure . . .the
anthropologist needs to know how to standardize languages, develop practical writing and spelling
systems . . .the linguist needs to know how to plan language change; the second-language teacher
needs to know how to plan a curriculum so that the desired learning takes place. (ix)

Thus, once language planners (with the help of anthropologists and linguists) fully
describe the languages of a country, language choice becomes a matter of centralized
governmental choice for speciﬁc developmental outcomes. This view of LP has been
called the instrumental approach by Appel and Muysken (1988). Once standardized,
language is separated ﬂom society in a direct cause-effect relationship: if you adjust the

language situation, you affect society.

__._.

35

Relating LP to economics, Eastman agrees with Fishman (1968) that “linguistic
unity or homogeneity usually characterizes a nation that is economically more developed,
educationally more advanced, and politically more modernized.” Holding that linguistic
homogeneity is economically desirable, Eastman examines all other ﬁelds in the context
of maximizing economic resources. Anthropologists standardize languages in order to
make them “efﬁcient and uniform” (69). In addition, anthropology is useful for socially
mobilizing or civilizing a language in that it is concerned with intracultural and cross-
cultural communication (69). Linguists can help identify trends in language change in
order to devise more accurate language plans. Educationists can assist students in literacy
acquisition and learning a second language. Thus, in each academic ﬁeld, Eastman links
the agenda of LP to the instrumentalist concept of social engineering.

Jacob & Beer's Language Policy and National Unity (1985) addresses itself
directly to the dominant bloc. Their view of multilingualism can be seen as part of the
larger nation-state ideology. That is, it is desirable to have a uniﬁed state which can carry
out its policies with one language: "the state exercises power and policy in order to
maintain national unity in the face of potential disintegration"(4). In this view, the
primary agent of LP is the state. Beer and Jacob see the function of the state as a
producer 'of unity through persuasion or coercion, or some combination of both. In
addition, Beer and Jacob are highly instrumental in their view of LP in that they view a
monolingual nation state as an inherent solution to a theoretically weaker multilingual
state. In addition, they view the agenda of the state as being controlled by the dominant
bloc. It is useful to highlight the ﬁgurative language Beer and Jacob use to convey their

view of the negative aspects of multilingual contexts:

W‘Y'uﬁ— ,

36

If one includes spoken dialects, the magnitude of the potential problem increases still
further...[The role of the state is] more or less successful management of these potentially
conﬂict-ridden cleavages between different language groups. Language policy becomes the
social glue through which . . . by confrontation, accommodation, or benign neglect,
governments seek to bond these human fissures into a stable political and social whole. (4)

The Beer and Jacob text is far ﬂom unique in its ﬁgurative framing of the “problems” of
multilingual countries: the structural-functional school draws heavily upon this highly
suggestive imagery of cleavages, social glue, and ﬁssures. In essence, multilingual
countries are ﬂamed as ﬂagile amalgarnations of “dialects” waiting to fall apart. To use
the two most popular metaphors of national integration, it is the job of the government to
make sure that the country is more of a melting pot than a salad bowl. One tool the
government can use for the melting is language policy.

Beer, Jacob and Eastman are instrumental in their views on LP and articulate the
major legitimations that African governments have often utilized in order to continue
with a former colonial language in education: unity vs. fragmentation along ethnic lines;
modernization vs. underdevelopment. It is seldom that heads of state or ministers venture
to favor openly a policy of instrumentalism over linguistic/cultural diversity. Rather,
they rely upon the legitrnations of unity and modernization that have become naturalized
through institutionalization and are now largely a part of societal background knowledge.
Interactionist Discourse

Tollefson in Planning Language, Planning Inequality (1991), has noted that
books and professional articles are just beginning to appear in which connections are
explored between LP and decolonisation, LP and national, group, and personal identity;

the relationships between planning itself and the necessary conditions of ownership of the

37

plan, are being exposed. Writers, in pursuing this critical view of LP, are “interactional”
in the sense that they view LP as a social process involving equal participation of national
planners and local participants in the plan. Both Tollefson and Goke-Pariola are
examples of writers ﬂom this interactional perspective.

Like Fairclough, Tollefson focuses on what he terms the hidden agenda that is
legitimized in LP. For Tollefson, LP is typically an enterprise of the dominant bloc. He
shares the conception of the structural-functional discourse that language policy is one
mechanism available to the state for maintaining its power and that of groups that control
state policy. Tollefson’s position is that the importance of language policy is
fundamentally rooted in the rise of the modern state. LP can therefore be seen as a
mechanism for allocating political and economic resources among social groups. The
social elite is the social group that beneﬁts most ﬂom a national language policy.
Tollefson's deﬁnition also ascribes speciﬁc social goals to these owners of the language

plan.

Language planning-policy means the institutionalization of language as a basis for
distinctions among social groups (classes). That is, language policy is one mechanism
for locating language within social structure so that language determines who has access
to political power and economic resources. Language policy is one mechanism by which
dominant groups establish hegemony in language use. (16)

Thus, the social and economic systems of the state create conditions that ensure
that vast numbers of people will be unable to acquire the needed linguistic competence.
This view of LP assumes that language is one arena of social struggle in which groups
seek to exercise power through their control of language. To develop this thesis further,
one way to ensure hegemony and satisfy the legitimation of modernization in Aﬂica is to

pursue a monopoly over language use in education in the form of European

”warn ‘.

4;...

38

monolingualism in higher education. Monolingualism has been associated with the goal
of modernization.

Tollefson views language as one criterion for determining which people will
complete different levels of education. He points out that when people must learn a new
[second] language to have access to education or to understand classroom instruction,
language becomes a factor in creating and sustaining social and economic divisions.
Rather than advocating a speciﬁc practice in LP however, Tollefson focuses upon
developing critical awareness of the inequitable effects of LP. In addition, he exposes the
underside of the modernization legitimation by showing that it has been used to
institutionalize inequality and exploitation.

Goke-Pariola in The Role of Language in the Struggle for Power and Legitimacy
in Africa (1993), develops the concept of interaction in LP further to include parental
agency in the educational market. He notes that parents involved in the education process
of their children are not ignorant of issues of language and power. Goke-Pariola posits
that for most Aﬁ'ican families, the reason the children are in school is not to learn more of
their own language or culture; it is to get a head start in the education game. In this
pragmatic view of education, it is clear that most of these parents will not tolerate
anything that they could perceive as diverting their children ﬂom the goal of mastering
English as early as possible.

This is a reaction not simply based on parents’ preferences, but one also
determined by their reading of the government’s position. In essence, in a national
sociolinguistic context where home languages are marginalized, parents see that

government may have a double agenda of promoting home languages in rural primary

*w- ”g

39

schools while favoring a European language at higher levels of education. There may
even be a perception that government employees, through their superior class position,
are hypocritically attempting to increase job prospects for their own children. Goke-
Pariola asserts that parents understand that the relative power of English and other
languages of colonial domination in Aﬂica is directly contingent upon the role of
education as the key to elite status (97). Therefore, Goke-Pariola rightfully highlights
parents as agents in an educational market process that contributes to a movement away
ﬂom local African language promotion due to “backwash” effects ﬂom English
secondary level practice: this effect inﬂuences language education practice in earlier
grades. It is perhaps at this level of parental perception that any pedagogy/curriculum
innovation will face the steepest obstacles.

Similar to Giroux, Goke-Pariola advocates an alternative to this form of defacto
European monolingualism: a Freirian transformatory View of education. In this view,
neither educational institutions, the policies that inform them, nor their curriculum are
recognized as neutral, given their link to the economy. In what Goke-Pariola terms “the
revolutionary perspective,” relevant education is not an ideal: it is a pragmatic solution
to a social problem; it is an important, fundamental political right. In the English
language classroom, a relevant education is one that assists students in the apprehension
of the role of human beings as the principal agents of change in their environment.
(123) Goke-Pariola posits that the adoption of this interactional view of education is a
necessary precondition to the determination of what would constitute an appropriate

language education for previously colonized African societies. (123) For Goke-Pariola,

40

this transformatory view of education necessarily includes a realignment of power in
favor of indigenous languages.

While Goke-Pariola and other language experts may advocate and prescribe the
teaching of African languages over parental objections, Bourdieu’s concept of market
forces might lead one to classify this prescriptive view as economically oppressive. I do
not question the fundamental economic market power of English in Zimbabwe and
therefore would disagree with language experts, especially non-African experts, who
claim to know what is best for Zimbabwean families by prescribing Aﬂican language
education. It is my own view that Zimbabwean families have voted with their school fees
for English as the language of education of their children. It is with this position in mind
that this dissertation develops an alternative approach to English language education. I
would agree with Anderson (1983) that “language by itself is not an instrument of
exclusion: in principle, anyone can learn any language”(122). This is especially the case
in the multilingual nations of Africa. The question that Anderson correctly identiﬁes is
“whether the administrative and educational systems, particularly the latter, can generate
a politically sufﬁcient diffusion of billingualism” (122).

In Tollefson’s and Goke-Pariola’s conceptualization of LP, the involvement of the
majority as players in the language education process ﬁts with an interactionist view of
language use in education. In response to the structural-functional discourse’s
legitimations of unity and modernization, the interactionist discourse offers alternative
themes of equity and relevance to local context. Clearly, interactionist legitimations
complement Giroux’s advocated critical pedagogy. What Goke-Pariola and Tollefson do

not examine is the potential of a reshaping of English language education practice within

41

a dominant European linguistic/cultural market. Rather, they argue that the
sociolinguistic situation must somehow be “realigned” to favor home language
legitimation. In addition, they fail to contextualize their positions in a detailed social-
historical analysis that would illuminate the complex interaction of structure and agency.
Speciﬁc groups within societies adopt deﬁnitions of reality to serve their interests:
these are known as ideologies. Writers and scholars of LP are “universe maintenance
personnel” in Berger and Luckrnan’s sense of the term. Those in positions of power,
interested in maintaining the status quo, draw upon structural-functional legitimations of
“unity” and “modernization.” Groups interested in changing the status quo draw upon
interactionist legitimations that include “equity” and “relevance.” These legitimations, or
ideologies, once uncovered, can also be seen to form the foundation of discourse
surrounding LP in language education. With this critical framework of language
education established, chapter two goes on to contextualize the framework’s structure-

agency dynamic in Zimbabwe.

Chapter 2
THE ROLE OF LANGUAGE EDUCATION IN THE ORIGIN AND
MAINTENANCE OF SYMBOLIC DOMINATION IN ZIMBABWE

Zimbabwe, unlike most African colonies, had a substantial number of European
settlers in the colony and post-independence nation state; and not too surprisingly white
settler interests were directly reﬂected in the education system. Dzvimbo has pointed
out that education, like land and political liberties, was denied to Africans since the
imposition of white domination -- ﬁrst by the British South Africa Company ﬂom the
18903 to the 19203, and second, by British colonial and white settler rule ﬂom the
19203 to 1980 (Dzvimbo, 1988). This is not to imply that there was no education for
Aﬁicans per se; rather, Europeans consciously shaped a racially segregated educational
system that established and then maintained a privileged position for European
language and culture as an important way of maintaining socio-economic dominance
over Aﬂicans. Language education played a crucial role in the education system:
advanced proﬁciency in English was utilized by colonial educators for the maintenance
of unequal market relations based on race and class. While settler domination operated
in the societal foreground, the educational system increasingly naturalized symbolic
domination in which those with more access to linguistic and cultural capital
(Europeans) were in a superior class position to those who had less access (Aﬁicans).
The white Rhodesian school system’s adoption of a Cambridge Ordinary (0) level in

the 19303 and the Advanced (A) level examination by 1955 became a part of this

42

43

naturalized symbolic domination. From a more general point of view, the education
structure accomplished white settler goals of domination through language education.
By de-emphasizing race as a factor, it ﬁrrther strengthened dominant-subordinate
relations by increasing over-all participation in the system.

Class-consciousness related to education was severely limited for Aﬂicans due
to the racially based economic barriers erected by the settler regime. Educational
access was an issue around which Aﬁican nationalists originally organized. At the
same time, uneven market relations were established between a more highly educated
Aﬁican minority and the majority of Zimbabweans who attended what became known
as Class II and HI schools. At independence, the new government promised redress of
the issues of access and equity in education by promising a “ﬂee and meaningful”
education for all Zimbabweans. During Zimbabwe’s ﬁrst decade of independence, the
legal elimination of race and primary school fees contributed directly to a massive
increase in educational access. At the same time, the issue of educational equity has
gone largely untouched as the increasingly linked factors of class and English
competence become ever more important. The O and A level examination system,
naturalized during the white settler period, has become increasingly inﬂuential with
little or no modiﬁcation to English competence requirements.

It is not possible to understand the development of language education in
Zimbabwe without some knowledge of the history of Aﬂican language development.
Language development in Zimbabwean education can be understood only in relation to
white settler and Aﬁican interests. Strong ethnic identiﬁcation with language and region

was inﬂuenced by early colonial educational policy. The use of Shona and Ndebele in

44

Aﬂican education was encouraged by colonial administrators who adhered to a Phelps-
Stokesist inﬂuenced view of a separate, more “traditional African” labor based
curriculum for Africans. Colonial education ofﬁcials in the 19203 and 303 attempted to
encourage Africans to learn through home languages and to focus on primary education
as terminal and labor based. In resistance to this labor track education policy, Aﬂican
parents understood that a more academic education based on advanced English
competence held more economic promise for their children. Thus, ﬂom the beginning of
Zimbabwe’s educational history, Aﬁicans viewed an African curriculum through African
languages as less beneﬁcial than a European curriculum through English.

The post settler government in Zimbabwe ofﬁcially adopted a policy stance of
“access to all” in education; this stance transformed the physical landscape of primary
and secondary education with massively increased enrolhnent. Despite this gain in
access, the fundamental nature of symbolic domination within the linguistic and cultural
market remains largely unchanged ﬂom the colonial period. Class, not race, has emerged
as the primary factor in determining access to valued English linguistic and cultural
capital. The practice of symbolic domination has been strengthened through an
expansion in access without market transformation: increased competition for places in
secondary and university, based on examination results, is driving an understandable but
uncritical pursuit of English competence on the part of parents and educationists in
Zimbabwe.

The focus of this chapter is upon historically tracing of important institutional
forces in Zimbabwean language education. Chapter four will draw upon this examination

for the central analysis of the writings of Zimbabwean authors themselves. Living

45

through a critical period in the formation of Zimbabwean society (the second
Chimurenga), these authors intimately represent many of the historic and current
inﬂuences of language education as they speciﬁcally relate to the negotiation of identity.
English Competence, Access, and Equity

Several terms are historically salient in the context of Zimbabwean language
education. The term English competence will be utilized simply as possessing knowledge
and ability in the English language. Historically, English competence in Zimbabwe has
meant different ranges of ability for different time periods. Early Rhodesian concerns in
the educational system were to provide basic reading and writing skills. Later in the
colony’s history language education standards rose so that English competence included
an increasingly higher level of literacy skills.

By “access to education” I follow the general meaning of approaching, entering,
or making use of (American Heritage, 1992) formal education. Early in the colony’s
history, access was interpreted as the establishment and maintenance of a formal primary
system for whites. Much later in the colony’s history, limited access to a formal system
was extended to blacks while white access was developed for secondary and university
education.

“Equity,” or the state, quality, or ideal of being just, impartial and fair (American
Heritage, 1996) was interpreted initially by the settler government as applying to the
white community only. There was a concern that societal divisions were forming within
the white community due to differences in the quality of educational provision for rural
white farmers and urban based settlers. This potential division was feared in the context

of white minority status within the colony. The settler government attempted to organize

46

educational provision so as to make it equitable in the white community, and also to
protect white race and class interests. Equity between predominantly white and black
educational systems was not pursued by the settler government. Within government
regulated black education, there was early on a division in the quality of educational
provision between class I, II, and III schools. This division contributed to the
naturalization of inequitable educational provision for blacks. A better education
required the payment of restrictively high fees; therefore, class background became an
early factor.

Historical Background

By AD 1000 an Aﬂican population that may have spoken a form of what is
currently known as Shona, had established an empire, probably centered on what is now
Great Zimbabwe (near current day Masvingo), and, through Arab intermediaries, traded
gold for commodities ﬂom as far away as China (Stoneman and Cliffe, 1989). According
to Bourdillon (1987), the Portuguese began a period of conquest and trade with the
interior of East Africa in the ﬁfteenth century. They came into contact with and had
“dealings” with Shona leaders for about ﬁve centuries (4). By the nineteenth century, the
series of empires that had been politically powerful in the area had declined under
pressure ﬂom the Portuguese, slave-trading, and ﬁnally Nguni (Ndebele) incursions ﬂom
the Zulu state to the south (Stoneman and Cliffe, 1989). Ndebele settled in the south-
west and incorporated large numbers of resident Shona into their state (Bourdillon 1987,
14). In 1890, under the auspices of the British South Aﬂica Company (BSAC), Cecil

Rhodes’ Pioneer Column invaded the area, initially in search of gold. It has been

47

speculated that Rhodes, having recently developed mines in Kimberly, South Aﬁica, may
have invented the white settlement of Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) as one way of absorbing
white unemployment (Rotberg, 1988). After ﬁnding little gold, agriculture soon took

over as the backbone of the settler colony (Stoneman and Cliffe, 1989).

During the early 19003 African competition in agriculture (which was superior at
the time) was undercut and eventually destroyed by the wresting of land and labor away
ﬂom indigenous pe0ple. With virtually no supervision from Rhodes (head of the BSAC)
or Britain, settlers relied upon a highly oppressive South African model of direct white
rule. According to Rotberg (1988), white native commissioners, in full accord with white
settler interests, alienated land, appropriated property, and abused their tenants and
laborers. An ordinance of mid-1 885 declared that all cattle in Matabeland (southwestern
Zimbabwe) and their offspring held by Africans were the property of the British South
Africa Company. In addition, a hut tax was imposed upon the Shona in a settler effort to
recruit scarce labor. These forms of early settler repression have been credited with
sparking the ﬁrst Chimurenga (war of liberation) between Aﬁicans and settlers that began

in 1896 and was only put down in 1897 aﬁer much bloodshed.

The colony was ruled by the BSAC until 1923 when whites (then numbering
35,000) opted for the status of self-goveming colony under Britain rather than union with
South Aﬁica. The colony had a constitution, an elected legislative assembly, and the vote
was given to all who had property qualiﬁcations. Sections of the Constitution could not
be amended by the Legislature, and the United Kingdom had power to legislate for

Southern Rhodesia by Act, or Order in Council. Young (1969) has noted that while this

48

arrangement appeared to offer some check to an unrestricted pursuit of settler interests,

real power was exercised by settlers with little interference ﬂom the British Government.

Following the economic “war boom” of World War II, there was a great
expansion in white settler population -- doubling ﬂom 100,000 to 200,000. At the same
time, the Aﬁican population was also increasing. This meant that the economy would
require a greater infusion of industrial workers ﬂom the Aﬁican communities; whites
anticipated an increased potential for conﬂict over issues of land ownership as a result of
increased numbers of Aﬁican workers. During this period, Northern Rhodesia (now
Zambia) also appeared to be a promising area of mineral development. Driven by white
Southern Rhodesian (now Zimbabwe) concerns for increased opportunity for economic
growth, proposals were ﬁnalized in April 1952 in a Lancaster House agreement for the

creation of the Central Aﬁican Federation.

Britain supported the creation of the Federation under the assumption that with
increased economic growth and prosperity, race relations would improve. According to
Atkinson, British statesmen came to show increasing concern over the retarding of
relations between the racial groups in central Africa (Atkinson, 1982). The grant of
independence to India and Pakistan in 1947 brought a new sense of obligation in the
former empire to build up a multi-racial Commonwealth, based on an equal partnership
between the many different peoples concerned (Atkinson, 1982). This spirit of multi-
racial cooperation was not shared by settler administration, especially in the area of

educational provision. While white education was placed under federal jurisdiction,

49

black education remained a territorial responsibility. This meant that black education’s

budget would remain insigniﬁcant compared to white education.

Partly due to pressure ﬂom black nationalists such as Joshua Nkomo’s
Zimbabwean Aﬂican People’s Union (ZAPU) party in Northern Rhodesia and
Nyasaland, the Federation was eventually dissolved by 1963. Settlers in Southern
Rhodesia viewed the potential of black organized resistance as a direct threat and began
to mobilize to protect their interests. The Rhodesian Front (RF), the white extremist
party, took over in 1963 and declared unilateral independence (UDI) ﬂom Britain in
1965. This move was an unambiguous rejection of British constitutional proposals for
gradual Aﬂican political advancement. The RF party, under its Prime Minister Ian
Smith’s leadership, was fully committed to the consolidation of white hegemony and the
further development of a system of separate racial development. A group that had split
ﬂom ZAPU, the Zimbabwean Aﬂican National Union (ZANU) and ZAPU formed a
common “Patriotic Front” (PF) to resist the white regime. Rhodesia’s economy was one
of the most unequal in the world during the UDI period: the 3% white population
controlled nearly two-thirds of national income and nearly all the capital in industry and
mining (Stoneman and Cliffe, 1989). Britain during this period refused to recognize
Rhodesian independence but also acknowledged the fact that its inﬂuence was limited

due to Rhodesia’s original 1923 semi-autonomous status (Mtshali, 1967).

During UDI, education for Europeans remained a national responsibility while
Aﬁican education became the responsibility of district councils and private bodies.

Under the RF’s education plan in 1966, advancement to secondary school was to be

50

“bottlenecked” at 12.5% for Aﬂican children. Funding for black education dropped ﬂom
8.6% GNP to 2% in 1967 (Zvogbo, 1981) while white education’s budget remained
unaffected. This meant that the government spent 12 times more per primary school
pupil in the European system and nearly three times more in the secondary system
(Dorsey, 1989). The regime’s ﬁnal attempt to maintain white privilege was enacted in
the 1979 Education Act. The Act relied on the colonial zoning system and was designed
to bar children whose parents did not reside in the former European suburbs ﬂom
attending Group A (formerly all-white) schools (Dorsey, 1989).

Under the impact of sanctions and the PF guerrilla war, the white regime was
forced to settle at the Lancaster House Conference in 1979. With the election victory of
the ZANU-PF party under Robert Mugabe, the country was renamed the Republic of
Zimbabwe in 1980. ZAPU and ZANU went separate ways at independence (later to be
rejoined in 1988). Alter being elected to power, ZANU-PF quickly backed away ﬂom its
original promise to redistribute white-owned land after independence (a stance that only
recently was reversed toward redistribution). Historical commentators have called this a
“calculated move” on the part of Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party due to fears of white capital
ﬂight (Stoneman and Cliffe, 1989). While socialist in rhetoric, ZANU-PF’s handling of
the Zimbabwean economy remained largely capitalist in character after independence.

One of the important promises made by ZANU-PF during the liberation struggle
was ﬂee access to a meaningful education. President Mugabe reiterated this commitment
in the opening line of his speech to the World Congress of Education International in

1995:

51

As one who is no stranger to the teaching profession, and in the context of our firm belief and
commitment, as government and people of Zimbabwe, to access and equity in education, I had
no hesitation in accepting the invitation to ofﬁcially open the First World Congress to be
organized by Education International. (Mugabe, 1995 - emphasis mine)

Undeniably, the promise of increased access was carried out in an unprecedented
explosion of primary and secondary educational provision: From 1980-1990 the number
of primary schools increased ﬂom 2,401 to 4,549 and enrollment rose ﬂom 820,000 to
2.4 million; the increase in the number of secondary schools and enrollment was even
more impressive with an increase ﬂom 177 schools in 1979 to 1,517 in 1992. Enrollment
for these years jumped ﬂom 66,215 to 687,742 (Mugabe, 1995). The logistical and
inﬂastructure implications of such an expansion are truly staggering and should be
recognized as a fundamental shift in previous policies of educational provision. As with
the handling of the land question however, the content of the remainder of Mugabe’s
address at Education International was indicative: strategies for improving educational
access were discussed while a concrete discussion of issues of equity was never
mentioned.

ZANU focused on issues of quantity (majority access to primary) during the ﬁrst
decade of independence in the 19803; a key issue that it now faces is the more difﬁcult
questions of educational quality (qualiﬁed teachers, equitable provision) in a period when
economic conditions are strained. Societal divisions based on class and geographic
location are extremely predictive of educational advancement. In addition, annually over
200,000 graduates of secondary and higher education are produced while new job

creation often is as low as 5,000 positions (Dzvimbo, 1993).

 

52

Commentators often highlight the colonial-settler heritage as a main source of
inequities that exist in the current system (Zvogbo, 1986; Moyanna, 1988; Dorsey, 1989;
Graham-Brown, 1991). Their portrayal of the settler inﬂuence upon education sometimes
de-emphasizes Aﬂican agency in the negotiation of the education system prior to
independence. Current questions of equity in education can only be understood in
relation to an historical examination of the establishment and maintenance of uneven
linguistic and cultural relations in education. Aﬂicans gained access to education and
also established an awareness of education’s link to class position by at least the 19303.
This class-education awareness, while not fully actualized during the settler period due to
the established system, has manifested itself after independence. It can be historically
shown that a majority of Africans mobilized for provision of more English academic style
of higher education and that a minority actually gained access to it. This mobilization
laid the foundations for class based symbolic domination in post independence
Zimbabwean education. Once racial barriers were legally removed and access expanded,
class became an even more important educational factor. Previously naturalized
institutions of symbolic domination continued to operate within the system, especially at
the secondary level.

Hostile Settlers and African Agency

Sybille Kuster offers a valuable synthesis of existing Zimbabwean educational
history and a general thesis for the shaping of education between 1890—1962: the settler
regime was generally hostile toward any form of non-labor related Aﬁican education and
was primarily interested in controlling African education. The administration was not

trying to co-opt Aﬂicans (as “cultural imperialism” theorist’s hold) or work toward an

53

eventual partnership (through a so-called “civilizing mission”) with Africans. In
addition, Kuster goes on to posit that African agency and missionary efforts shaped the
development of an Aﬁican primary and secondary education that did not necessarily
adhere to colonial/settler interests.

While Kuster posits that Aﬂican groups participated in the shaping of educational
opportunities early in Zimbabwe’s history, she also attempts to de-link that participation
ﬂom the creation of different class based interests. Kuster asserts that Aﬂican groups
negotiated an education system that was “syncretic”: i.e., consistent with self-deﬁned
forms of Aﬂican socio—economic and cultural life. Kuster borrows ﬂom Meintj es’s
(1990) concept of “contradictory and syncretic mission culture” to signify a general
mixing of Christianity and African belief systems that need not be necessarily
contradictory. Kuster goes on to develop her concept of educational synchrony as
mission education directly serving “Aﬂican interests.” What is problematic about her
formulation of synchrony is the way it overly generalizes the character of Aﬁican
interests in education and downplays the powerful inﬂuence of European settler market
forces. This concept of synchrony as it applies to education is weakened by the fact that
she provides little evidence for the speciﬁc shapes of the phenomenon. The evidence she
does cite tends to be conﬁned to examples of religious observance. I would argue that
there is sufﬁcient historical evidence to show that different class interests, reﬂected in
educational demands, formed as early as the beginning of the twentieth century in the
missionary and settler inﬂuenced education system. There was a creation of subordinate
linguistic and cultural market relations among Africans: a superior market position,

reﬂected in class position, was dependent upon maximizing access to English education.

54

While missionaries, colonial administration, and a settler regime institutionalized an
English academic education intended for whites, Aﬂican groups early on identiﬁed the
economic beneﬁts of an English education and pursued access to it throughout the
colony’s history.

Ironically, Kuster attempts to de-emphasize the formation of class interests of
Africans in education while at the same time showing numerous examples of new classes
of jobs emerging as early as 1910. Education offered not only the possibility of
economic advancement, but also more social mobility than would otherwise have been
possible, especially for young men and women. Through her examination of the
historical evidence, Kuster shows that mission education offered opportunities for
economic advancement that were not tied to more traditional categories of age, maturity
and sex. If young men could gain capital ﬂom a job that required education (teacher,
police ofﬁcer, messenger, boss boy), they could avoid the traditional practice of required
service to the chief for land. F urtherrnore, the teaching profession was one of few
professional ﬁelds open to women (Kuster, 1994, Challiss, 1982). Drawing upon
Kuster’s own marshaling of the historical evidence, I would posit that these opportunities,
while limited, formed the basis of an initial linkage between education and class-
consciousness.

White Education

Early in Rhodesia’s history, the administration’s main concern was to ensure
universal access to basic primary education for white settlers; this was logistically
difﬁcult in a new colony with a dispersed white farmer population. According to

Atkinson (1972, 1982), the main issue that faced white education in the colony until the

q . _ . _ 4

 

55

19203 was how to make it compulsory and ﬂee; the perception at the time was that a
majority of whites had to be brought into the educational system in order to survive as a
dominant class. Atkinson (1972) cites an early Farmer’s Congress held in 1916 in which
a legislative member contended that education had to be compulsory and ﬂee for one
main reason: class distinctions among the European community were to be de-
emphasized so that the European minority could remain strongly united. After the grant
of Responsible Government in 1923, resource allocation for education increased and
attendance in primary schools greatly expanded. In addition, a correspondence course
was initiated for more geographically isolated white students in order to bring them into
the system. Challiss (1980) notes that it was during this time that European secondary
education also began to expand as large numbers of young white Rhodesians were
completing primary education. By the time the 1930 Compulsory Education Act
requiring school attendance was passed, most European children between ages seven and
ﬁfteen were enrolled in schools (Atkinson, 1972).

After the initial push for compulsory primary attendance in the 19203, the main
concerns of the settler administration revolved around three issues: the increased
provision of secondary education; provision of an education that would maintain racial
superiority; and preparation of whites for positions in the colonial economy. To these
ends, British style examinations were adopted by most schools in the 19303 as a part of
an overall trend toward the expansion and reinforcement of a British modeled academic
form of schooling. This adoption of British examinations was also reﬂective of a larger

discussion about appropriate curriculum in Rhodesian schools. According to Atkinson

 

56

(1972), concerns of local relevance and technical education were largely ignored by

parents in favor of a traditional academic curriculum:

Among a people grown accustomed to the responsibilities of political and economic power,
there was an exaggerated respect for the type of preparation thought necessary for the
professional and adnrinistrative classes; technical and manual skills were down-graded as
appropriate only to the less successful groups in the community. (82)

When given the choice between South Aﬂican and British examinations by educational
administrators, two schools (Prince Edward and Dominican Convent, Salisbury) decided
to take Cambridge Certiﬁcate during 1938, the remaining high schools followed during
1939 (Atkinson, 1972).

Atkinson’s interpretation of increased reliance upon a more academic curriculum
is that settlers were interested in maintaining the economic status quo: the European
minority already held a monopoly of administrative posts in government and commerce.
More technical and manual occupations were held in low esteem in a rural community,
where extensive supplies of Aﬁican labor were available at very low wages. Due to the
racial basis of the colony’s economy, whites continued to pursue a more British academic
curriculum into the 19403 and 503 that largely de-emphasized local/technical areas. In
essence, whites perceived academic training as more consistent with their legally
institutionalized race and class positions.

The Cambridge Certiﬁcate was widely utilized until 1963 when British
examination boards collaborated with the University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland
to create a new General Certiﬁcate of Education. This new certiﬁcate tested individual
subject areas and allowed for specialization in high school. According to Ayerst (cited in

Atkinson, 1972), then senior inspector of the Ministry of Education in England, the new

57

examination’s approach to curriculum meant that Rhodesia, then part of a central African
federation, eculd better develop economically by producing more professionally qualiﬁed
men and women. According to the inspector, this development was needed, especially in
the context of a decline in the demand for white unskilled labor in primary production.

The concept behind subject specialization was that it allowed for a smoother
transition into the British modeled university system. The British model relied upon the
specialized Advanced (A) level examination system. Entrance to the newly established
University of Rhodesia (195 5) was based on performance in the standardized A level
subject examination system. Atkinson (1972) notes that the adoption of the relatively
high standards of A level performance in the Central Aﬂican Federation taxed most
secondary schools’ abilities to produce qualiﬁed candidates and contributed to an initially
slow grth rate in student numbers at the British style university: the University’s ﬁrst
intake of students numbered 68 in 1957 (Atkinson, 1972). Unlike primary and secondary
education, the University of Rhodesia had a multi-racial charter that allowed all qualiﬁed
African candidates entrance: enrolhnent by 1967 was 432 Europeans, 211 Aﬂicans, and
74 for other groups (Atkinson, 1972). This multi-racial charter is reﬂective of the
collaboration between British administration’s desire for racial integration and a
relatively progressive group of white Southern Rhodesian philanthropists. This emphasis
on racial integration was possible in university education (and not secondary) due to the
relative need for Cambridge’s certiﬁcation of the new university. While the charter
guaranteed the possibility for African access to university education, the institutional
impact of the Charter must be understood in the context of Southern Rhodesia’s

education system: competition with whites for places at university was effectively

 

 

 

 

58

undercut by the compromised Aﬁican system at primary and secondary levels.

Nevertheless, 211 Aﬂicans did take places that otherwise would have gone to whites.

African Education

While the earliest Aﬂican education in the colony was sponsored by missionaries,
colonial administration early on expressed a direct interest for the institution of a labor-
oriented curriculum. Earl Grey, administrator of colonial Zimbabwe ﬂom 1896 to 1898
stated that “The very ﬁrst steps towards civilizing the Natives laid in a course of
industrial training which had to precede the teaching of [religious] dogma” (Cited in
Challis, 1982). Missionaries during this period largely went along with the colonial
administration’s labor curriculum policy. In 1903, at the Southern Rhodesia Missionary
Conference (SRMC), all missionary societies expressed their agreement with the view
that a modiﬁed form of education for Africans which centered upon the provision of
simple industrial training was desirable (Challiss, 1980). In addition, missionary societies
had to work on slim budgets and saw in manual training a means of reducing the
expenditure necessary to build schools, churches and other mission facilities (Challiss,
1982)

This labor oriented policy extended to language education in that English
proﬁciency was viewed as purely functional. Early colonial views of Aﬂican education

as they related to curriculum and language are summed up by Atkinson (1972):

Africans were to be given such training as would enable them to become more efﬁcient workers
in agriculture and industry, and perhaps render more efﬁcient service to European employers.
There was no great interest in giving them instruction in the three Rs. Though a further

 

—-

59

provision in the Ordinance of 1903 required African pupils to be taught to speak and understand
the English language, this was intended to have a purely functional use only. (90)

Thus, early on there was an understanding on the part of colonial administrators that
Africans should be taught English instrumentally for manual labor purposes.

While there was general agreement with the general policy outline for a labor
oriented curriculum on the part of missionaries, they disagreed over the speciﬁc amount
of time and quality of English education for Aﬂicans. By the early 19003, missionaries

viewed English education as an important part of African schooling. Kuster (1994) notes

that some provision of English education served several important ﬁrnctions for missions:

1) to enable Aﬂicans to read scriptures and to enhance and spread Christian beliefs; 2) to
recruit and keep more church members (especially young) and; 3) to expand the
geographical territory of the mission as training Aﬁican teaching staff to take up new
posts required higher literacy skills (Kuster, 1994). Thus, one important source of this
conﬂict was the “market” driven nature of Christian recruitment: African educational
provision, especially English academic education, became a key factor in the mission
societies’ competition to establish spheres of inﬂuence.

Most importantly, this competition in English education is indicative of the early
development of Aﬁican agency in education. Missionaries, fearing the loss of members,
were responding to African demands. In fact, regardless of the mission education’s
proselytizing function, Aﬂicans early on applied pressure for the provision of increased
English curriculum. Kuster (1994) notes that missionaries intent on winning and
maintaining African pupils did not adhere to the administrative directive of 1907 that

called for basic English for master servant relations: “In an effort to meet Aﬁican

 

_--.___. .

 

6O

demands, various mission societies, such as the Anglicans at Epiphany and St.
Augustines’s, soon offered advanced instruction in the English language” (8 8).

Missionaries thus had to negotiate educational demands of African students and
parents, the constraints of government curriculum regulation, and extremely limited
government grants. In view of these constraints and in an effort to expand educational
provision, missionaries and the government arrived at an agreement in which standards
were reduced to expand the missionary education system. This system created different
ﬁnancial grant levels and accompanying curriculum requirements. The curriculum
requirements in turn established stark differences in how much English language
exposure was offered in each class of school. Schools were divided into three classes by
1907. Class I schools were boarding schools under European supervision for four hours
of instruction a day for 180 days. Two hours a day were required for industrial and
agricultural subjects. The teaching of English was integrated into the curriculum. Class
11 schools were day schools that were also to be under EurOpean supervision, but were
only required to provide two hours of instruction a day for 180 days. There were no
requirements for industrial training, and teachers were expected to teach English and
instill “habits of discipline and cleanliness.” Class 111 schools were taught by Aﬂican
teachers, and the only requirements were that basic English be taught (Atkinson, 1972).
Thus, by 1907 a system with highly differentiated provision in education and English
training was established. Pupils who attended the Class I system received twice the
exposure to education in English as those in Class I or 11 schools.

Demand for educational access increased greatly over the next two decades. From

1908 to 1917, Atkinson (1972) notes that enrollment numbers in Class I schools

 

61

increased by 126%, Class II schools by 667%, and Class 111 schools by 911%. From 1908
to 1927 enrollment increased 415%, 993%, and 2,808% respectively. High fees were
introduced as a way of managing the huge demand: entrance fees ﬂom 3 pounds to 8
pounds for courses that usually lasted for three years were instituted in Class I and 11
schools. The quality between the different classes of schools varied greatly. Atkinson
(1972) sums up the state of most Aﬁican educational provision, especially where

expansion was greatest —- in class 111 schools -- during the period:

The system of education, in fact, become dominated by large numbers of small and indifferently
organized schools, where the teacher’s training was likely to be of an extremely rudimentary kind.
Little more could be expected ﬂom such schools than a training in basic English vocabulary and
in certain habits of discipline and cleanliness. They could not be said to be giving, in any sense,
an education capable of raising the African to higher levels of productivity, or of enabling him to
proﬁt ﬂom European experience. (92)

Despite the issues of inequity in the curriculum and the introduction of fees, demand for
all forms of education accelerated during this period.

Where was the greatly increased demand, even for extremely limited class III
education, emanating ﬂom? Kuster (1994) posits that the connection between education
and socio-econonomic beneﬁts, especially for youth and women, is perhaps the most

compelling explanation for the increase:

Aﬂicans could expect to beneﬁt considerably ﬂom the exploitation of the economic possibilities
connected with a certain level of education. Job opportunities - though limited - comprised
employment as police and court interpreters, post-ofﬁce messengers, menial clerks, drivers and
as so—called “Boss boys” on European farms. (81)

In addition to these positions for young men, the teaching profession represented one of
the only professional ﬁelds open to women. Simply stated, increased economic
opportunities and the potential for increased social mobility among some groups in the

colonial economy drove the increasing demand for education.

 

62

Also, ﬂom a macroeconomic point of view, the restrictive nature of the white
government’s hold on the economy contributed to increased African desire for an English
academic curriculum. The form of agricultural and industrial education advocated by
government was designed to minimize competition from African farmers and artisans.

As this training turned out to be of small beneﬁt due to increasingly legalized settler
dominance, “African aspirations were directed to literary [English] training as the kind of
education which would be the most likely to improve chances to obtain better paid jobs in
the European sector” (Kuster, 1994: 87). There is evidence that Aﬁican families were
starting to understand this relationship between a narrowing of economic opportunity and
English education: the lack of academic instruction and the exclusion of English at two
missionary schools in Matabeleland led to their closure in 1909 due to student withdrawal
(Flood, 1973 cited in Kuster 1994). The fact that Aﬁicans would not accept a curriculum
without more English training was recognized by the educational administration by at
least 1915 (Kuster, 1994).

Class I and II schools were more responsive to African curriculum demands, and
instituted advanced instruction in English by 1910. As previously mentioned, a fee
structure was instituted to manage demand at these schools, effectively limiting
enrolhnent to a minority. Challiss (1980) notes that this economic minority had access to
the very education that promised the highest economic rewards. I posit that the three-
class system, fully established by 1910, was the historical foundation of unequal market
relations in African education that exist today. It was a system by which a minority in a
superior class position gained access to a highly valued English academic education.

This education was directly associated with the perceived superior European curriculum

 

 

63

that could give access to better paying jobs. By 1927, enrollment in Class I schools was
4160, enrollment in Class 11 schools was 6470, and Class III schools had an enrollment of
86, 421. The only documented form of Aﬂican resistance to this system came in the form
of protest for more English curriculum. According to Atkinson (1972), there were
student strikes on this issue by 1921, reﬂecting student agency in the negotiation of the

curriculum:

Matters were made worse by an impatience felt by many pupils with their rate of progress in the
English language . . .This attitude was responsible for the ﬁrst school strike, which took place
towards the end of 1921. Twenty-nine boys in junior four decided that they were being kept
back in English through being refused a reading-text, and declined to do any work. . During the
summer of 1922 there was a second strike by thirty boys, on the grounds that insufﬁcient time
was being allowed for literary instruction. (100)

Evidenced by the increased and vocal demand for more English cuniculum, Aﬁican
students and parents were correctly identifying white administration’s ideology of
separate and unequal development. Wishing to gain access to beneﬁts ﬂom the white
economic sector, Aﬂican students and parents were attempting to maximize exposure to
an English— based curriculum.

While exposure may have been the goal of many Aﬁican families, Atkinson
(1972) hints at the practical difﬁculties in teaching English as a second language. He
notes that there was limited knowledge about the teaching of English as a second
language in general: “Though teachers were required to impart no more than the basics
of oral communication, they were nevertheless given very little help in ﬁnding suitable
teaching techniques” (91). This lack of training on the part of teachers, many of whom
were unqualiﬁed and afﬁliated with missions, seems to have remained unaddressed.
Colonial administrators, most of whom wanted a docile work force and believed that

Aﬁicans did not have the intellectual capacity to c0pe with a purely academic education,

 

did not identify the systematic development of an ESL methodology and teacher training
as a priority.

The lack of initiative for development in areas such as ESL may have stemmed
ﬂom a prominent educational philosophy, eventually linked to racial separation, that was
sweeping colonial states during this period -- Phelps Stokesism. The term “Phelps-
Stokesism” is derived ﬂom the name of a fund bequeathed in 1909 an American heiress,
Miss Caroline Phelps-Stokes, for the welfare of Blacks in the US and Africa (Challiss,
1984). Inﬂuential in the US and Aﬂica in the 19203, Phelps Stokes commissions
endorsed racially differentiated educational policies on the grounds that they would
preserve traditional African life and also alleviate possible racial ﬂiction between whites
and blacks. This philosophy, based on Booker T. Washington’s proposed strategy for
ameliorating post-civil war race relations in the US, provided colonial administrators with
an argument for separate and less resource intensive educational systems for Aﬁicans.
Challiss notes that by 1925, this policy was already in place in then Rhodesia. According
to Kuster (1994), there was Aﬂican and missionary consciousness and resistance to
legally instituted economic, educational, and geographic separation by the late 19303.
This consciousness was sparked by the double standard of colonial reliance upon Phelps-
Stokesist policies that rhetorically claimed to “support” Aﬁican ways of life through a

separate educational system:

In the 19205 and 19303 settler pressure, state legislation and ensuing economic developments
resulted in the creation of a socio-economic ﬂamework which rendered the adnrinistration’s
promotion of what was to be, in essence, the separate development of Africans in the reserves
along lines of “traditional African practices and beliefs” impracticable and anachronistic . . . the
Phelps-Stokesist policy of restricting Aﬁican aspirations to the “simple needs” of rural
community life and of providing Africans with an adapted education centered on rudimentary
practical skills was bound to provoke resentment and suspicion among Africans. (167)

 

711.1

65

Kuster goes on to point out that resentment of policies during this period was tapped by
leaders of Aﬁican proto-nationalist organizations which came into existence in the 19203
and 19303. Members of these groups were educated Aﬁicans, many of them urban-based
and therefore representative of a certain upper class stratum of Aﬂican society rather than
the Aﬂican population at large (Kuster, 1994). This group was also interested in
maintaining and increasing access to advanced English based education, especially at
secondary levels. Thus, colonial administration’s use of Phelps-Stokesism encountered
stiff resistance: Aﬁican families had already made the connection between English based
education and increased opportunity for economic advancement.

Ranger (1970) notes that most of the proto-nationalist organizations, especially in
Matebeland, were organized around the issue of a right to representation by the early
19203. These organizations largely represented Aﬁican labor’s interests. Aﬂican leaders
shifted their strategy ﬂom protest to participation after realizing that real power lay in the
hands of white settler interests rather than Britain. While ﬂanchise was theoretically
open to blacks, its requirements effectively excluded the overwhelming majority. Early
political leader Martha Ngano summarized the differences between the Aﬁican ﬂanchise
requirements and realities in a petition in 1924: 1) yearly wages of 100 pounds -- the
absolute highest for blacks being 50 at the time); 2) English literacy - while most
Aﬁicans receive instruction in home languages; 3) Aﬂicans were not allowed to count
live stock as wealth -- the main local index of wealth (Ranger, 1970). Thus, proto-
national organizations identiﬁed English literacy and education as instrumental for

participation in the colony’s economy, not for open resistance. This political mood

 

r-r

it:

66

would change by the 19603 and 703, as it became clear that whites had no intention of
allowing real participation.
Atkinson cites an increase in demand for secondary training for factory workers in

1942 as a key factor in the establishment of the ﬁrst government school. This school, in
Goromonzi, had a full range of classes up to Cambridge certiﬁcate level by 1949 with an
enrolhnent of 202 boys and 31 girls. A second government secondary school, Fletcher
High School, was established in Gwelo during 1957 (Atikinson, 1972). Though
extremely selective, secondary education became at least a possibility for Aﬂicans by the
19603. By 1970, 83,000 Aﬂican students were expected to complete primary school with
26,000 spots open for some kind of secondary course (Atkinson, 1972).

Class Interests

Current Zimbabwean historical commentators attempt to separate the early

establishment of black class interest ﬂom the concept of Aﬁican agency in education; as
a result, there is a lack of continuity between educational historiography and any in-depth
treatment of current Zimbabwean trends. For example, Ranger’s (1970) criterion for the
foundation of meaningful class interests is based on the ability for an African elite to
form coalitions and translate group interests into political action. There is little evidence
of this kind of elite-mass mobilization until 1960 (Ranger, 1968). While I would agree
that organized political action is one criterion, political action represents class formation
at an advanced stage. One should trace class interests to their foundation in early
differentiation of educational provision based on economic constraints. Attention to this
foundation is an important historical factor because it highlights the character of Aﬂican

participation and negotiation in the colonial economy through education. It is clear that

 

----

Africans from all economic backgrounds understood the relation between English
education and economic opportunity.

A further example of historiographical discontinuity in class awareness and
educational developments is Kuster’s (1994) position concerning the “syncretic” nature

of Aﬂican education during the colonial period:

The supposed culturally imperialist impact of colonial education and missionary inﬂuence
was mitigated and negated by the resilience of Aﬂican cultural and social practices, the
reinterpretation and appropriation of Western culture and Christian beliefs, and the
emergence of a syncretic rather than European-controlled form of culture on most mission
stations. (229)

Clearly then, there is sufﬁcient evidence to show Aﬁican interests in the shaping of
educational provision. African parents, students, and early political organizations have
been shown to be active negotiators of educational provision. Rather than recognizing
the complexity of Aﬂican agency however, Kuster oversimpliﬁes it into an extreme
cultural imperialist argument. Kuster (1994) ﬂames the argument too narrowly: one must
accept or reject the premise that Europeans were intentionally attempting to mentally
colonize Aﬁicans. There is clearly little evidence of settler strategies for mental
colonization of Africans. Further evidence of an inability to analyze the complexity of
Aﬂican agency can be adduced ﬂom the absence of discussion of the role of language in
education by historical commentators. Acceptance of the naturalized position of English
in education is total and the historical roots of its naturalization are not discussed beyond
a direct identiﬁcation with the European education system. I would argue that evidence
has not yet been provided on the syncretic nature of educational provision in Zimbabwe,
especially in language education, ﬂom 1920 onwards; rather, the evidence points toward

Aﬁican agency in the pursuit of increased access to English education.

68

To view English so unproblematically is to miss a fundamental point of
Zimbabwean social and economic reality: the foundation of class differences during the
colonial period and beyond rested upon possession of advanced English competence
which could only be gained through a formal English education. A minority of Aﬂicans
who attended Class I and 11 schools had superior access to this type of competence due to
their class position (ability to pay high fees). This position and accompanying
competence could be exploited, though in a limited fashion, through further access to
secondary education. Success at secondary school rested upon passing a Cambridge
examination written in English. By the 19203 and certainly into the 403 and 503,
maintenance of a superior class position was increasingly linked to an English based
academic education. Those who could actually take full advantage of this class -
education linkage (progression into secondary and beyond) were in an extreme minority.

We can approach the issue of this lacuna in Zimbabwean historiography by
evoking Bourdieu’s market framework. Clearly, the concept, as ﬂamed by Kuster (1994),
of “cultural imperialism” de-emphasizes Aﬁican agency. Cultural imperialism requires
the elimination of Aﬂican agency and cultural identity. If however, one were to
reintegrate the concept of Aﬂican agency within a dominated educational and linguistic
market, a more complex ﬂamework that explains continued English inﬂuence and
Aﬁican agency may be posited. That is, the roots of Zimbabwe’s class based system of
educational provision can be found in the naturalization of English competence.
Bourdieu would posit that black Zimbabweans of all classes support the dominant-
subordinate nature of the postcolonial linguistic market through their active participation

in it.

Kuster and other commentators would resist this interpretive move as their
understanding of Zimbabwean consciousness and agency in education seems to be one
that is shared by an undeﬁned majority. There is a notable lack of historical investigation
of the origins of class interests and the nature of Zimbabwean educational participation.
While links are made to the rise of a nationalist movement among ﬂustrated secondary
school leavers and rural councils’ desire for development of upper primary education
(Kuster, 1994), there is no in depth examination of the character of educational advocacy.
Current evidence points to politically organized urban-based groups, working with
missionaries, that advocated increased English education and secondary education by the
19403. Historical evidence ﬂom the 19203 and 303 shows that an ability to pay higher
school fees, and therefore class position, was a key factor for access into class I schools.
Students who attended Class I schools received superior exposure to an economically
valuable English curriculum.

What has yet to be historically investigated is the thesis that the minority of
Aﬂican students who received increased exposure to English curriculum were able to
economically translate that educational experience into better paying employment. If a
majority of Class I school leavers occupied superior economic positions in the settler
controlled Aﬂican economy, the next area to investigate would be the degree to which
those economic positions allowed initial Class I students to send their own children to
Class I schools, and perhaps secondary institutions by the 19403 and 503. If this
contributing factor to reproduction of class through increased access to English education
were to be historically shown, an argument could be supported for the creation and

reproduction of unequal market relations.

70

What can be shown is that Aﬁican parents and students, responding to the settler
controlled market, participated in overwhelming numbers in the education system. In
current day educational practice in Zimbabwe, different class interests point to a
naturalization of the unequal character of pre-independence educational provision,
enforced through minority possession of advanced English competence. Dominant
market relations based on linguistic and educational capital offer a model that more fully
integrates the historical evidence and current reproduction of class relations in

Zimbabwe’s educational system.

African Language Development in Zimbabwe

While it is important to understand the historical development of Zimbabwe’s
educational system, early trends in Aﬁican language development also contributed,
perhaps indirectly, to the process of naturalization of English in Zimbabwean education.
It has been recognized and detailed by Ranger (1983), that in many cases throughout
Aﬁica, the constructs of ethnicity and language were inﬂuenced by colonial institutions.
In Zimbabwe’s case, there was no such group as the “Shona,” though there were smaller
groups (Marrlike, Zezuru, Korekore) who seemed, at least to missionaries, to speak
mutually intelligible languages. Colonial administrators and missionaries, looking for
larger units of administrative control and less linguistic and cultural ambiguity, classiﬁed
areas, languages, and ethnic groups. Hence in 1931, CM. Doke, a South Aﬂican linguist,
was hired by the Rhodesian government to describe and classify the Shona language and
people. Literally given the power to name entire groups and their relationships through

linguistic analysis, Doke was one of the most inﬂuential contributors to the concept of the

 

71

Shona people. The concept of Shona as a uniﬁed language and people, a separate ﬁeld of
study itself, has since become largely naturalized in Zimbabwe.

After Doke’s study was completed, the use of Shona and Ndebele was
increasingly utilized in the Phelps-Stokesist inﬂuenced concept of Aﬂicanization and
separation of educational curriculum in Rhodesia. Blacks were encouraged to learn
through home languages and to focus on primary education as terminal. In addition, in
1953, the Literature Bureau was set up under the Native Affairs’ auspices with speciﬁc

duties:

The expansion of African education after the World War II and the opening of the university in
Salisbury in the 19503 made the creation of literary texts in the vemaculars an urgent necessity.
In order to encourage writing, the Bureau organized annual literary competitions; quite a few of
the prize-winners later became leading Shona and Ndebele writers . . . By far the greatest
market however were the schools which began to use Literature Bureau-sponsored books as
supplementary reading material. (Veit-Wild, 1993: 73)

The major tasks that the Literature Bureau had to tackle were the ongoing
uniﬁcation of the various Shona dialects into one standard Shona and the standardization
of Shona and Ndebele orthography and grammar rules. In practice, the Literature Bureau
always had a double function: on the one hand, it played a very important role in
promoting vernacular writing and providing the means for its development; on the other,
it also attempted to control the emergence of critical political literature in Aﬁican
languages through its promotion of traditional themes. Veit-Wild notes that this

institution was inﬂuential in separating the development of English writing as well:

The literature Bureau cultivated the trivial and folklorist nature of indigenous writing over the
next decades and prevented it from tackling any serious issues; it thus ensured that this literature
remained apolitical and isolated, branded as “native,” and that it followed a completely separate
development from black writing in English. (Veit-Wild, 1993: 74)

 

 

72

Veit-Wild (1993) also notes that the Literature Bureau kept a tight grip over content
issues so that the censoring and banning of any political or socially critical book went
hand in hand with the cultural policy of “indigenisation” of black writing in African
languages (216). Thus, the initially European-sponsored development of Shona and
Ndebele in Zimbabwe shows that there was an administrative attempt to inﬂuence
Aﬁican writing toward traditional and apolitical themes.

How successful the settler government was in this perhaps somewhat ironic goal
of control through linguistic promotion is difﬁcult to assess. To do so would require
extensive language attitude and popular culture studies that span several generations of
Zimbabweans. This was initially attempted with prominent Zimbabwean authors by
Veit-Wild in her 1993 work Teachers, Preachers, Non-Believers: A Social History of
Zimbabwean Literature.

What remains clear is that there was wide spread Aﬁican resistance, rural and
urban, to Phelps-Stokesist inspired educational policy. It came in the form of demand for
more English academic curriculum. Posited prior even to Kuster’s work, Metzler (1988)
noted that a demand for an academic curriculum increased probably due to a perception
that the settler controlled black education system was not structurally linked with either
the subsistence mode of production or any other vital sector of the economy. While there
is little evidence for a fully developed class-consciousness even in 1980, I posit that there
was a general conviction that there were economic beneﬁts of an English academic
curriculum as early as 1930. This association and previously discussed demand for
English curriculum laid the foundation for an education system that utilizes what can be

described as English symbolic dominance. That is, the Zimbabwean majority participates

73

in a system that favors advanced English competence as a prerequisite for increased
educational access. Shona and Ndebele continue to be the ﬁrst languages of an
overwhehning majority while English is the language of education.
Challenges for the New Government

The new government did not passively accept the educational policies of the
previous regime. As previously mentioned, during the ﬁrst decade of majority rule, a
majority of resources were committed to the expansion of access to primary and
secondary education. In addition, the University of Zimbabwe’s Department of Teacher
Education faced the task of redeveloping and expanding teacher education. The newly
created national CDU was to provide new curriculum guidelines for the teaching of all
subjects. Subjects like history, and social studies have been made to focus more on
Aﬂican experience and values than they were before 1980 (Natsa, 1994). As previously
discussed, President Mugabe, a former school teacher, remains committed to the concept
of education as a way of improving the quality of life of Zimbabweans (Mugabe, 1995).

As Zimbabwe approaches the twenty-ﬁrst century, it faces severe constraints on
its ability to carry out educational reform. Colclough’s 1990 Education Sector Study

highlights a few of these constraints:

[1] There are still considerable pockets of poverty in the country — vulnerable groups
include farm workers, poor peasants, the un- or under-employed, low paid urban workers,
some resettled people and people in the remote and sparsely populated areas. The
differences in living standards between the modern and traditional sectors are still striking,
and indicative of the little change in the distribution of wealth that has occurred during the
last decade. . . .[2] Employment generation in the formal sector is put at less than 20,000
new jobs (net) per year over the 19903 compared with over 250,000 school leavers per year
most of whom will have 0 levels. Even with a return to rapid economic growth, the labor
market will not be able to absorb all job seekers. (3)

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The current system is suffering ﬂom a disjunction between a generally weak economy,
and a system that is producing graduates (with 0 levels) will immediately encounter
difﬁculty ﬁnding employment. Those without 0 levels face even less chance of ﬁnding a
job (Colclough, 1990).

In the short term, groups that are facing economic insecurity will probably not be
interested in the relationship between language curriculum and issues of equity and
relevance in education. Daily struggles for basic necessities are naturally foregrounded
for groups under economic stress. The central thesis of this dissertation highlights a more
long-term perspective; the current system, negotiated during the white settler period, is in
need of critical examination. This is not to say that initial connections have not been
made by Zimbabweans; former Minister of Zimbabwean Education Fay Chung (198 8)
has noted that examinations have a very strong inﬂuence on the curriculum and in the
way it is conceived and implemented. Within the examination system, English ﬂuency
plays a crucial role as one cannot pass without passing the English subsection. Pertinent
language policy and examination support is critically examined here in order to explain
current practice being promoted in the examination system.

Current Zimbabwean Language Education Policy and Practice

As previously noted, a 1987 educational clause in the constitution states that
“Shona and Ndebele may be used as languages of instruction ﬂom grade 1 up to grade 3
in areas where the majority of students are of Shona or Ndebele backgrounds”
(Educational Act, 1987 - emphasis mine). This statement can viewed as structurally

ambiguous; there are multiple interpretations that can lead to various Aﬁican LP practices

75

in education. Also, this statement must be viewed in the context of current educational
practice: in all schools English takes over as the language of instruction ﬂom grade four
onwards in preparation for the nation-wide Cambridge examination system (conducted in
English). This combination of contextual factors translates into a non-incentive for the
educational utilization of Shona or Ndebele, even in early primary school. It has been
observed that many schools situated in predominantly Shona or Ndebele speaking
neighborhoods prefer to introduce English as the medium of instruction right ﬂom grade
one. The explanation often offered for this practice is that it prepares students for later

grades where they will be expected to function completely in English (N atsa, 1994).

These perceptions and practices are striking when one considers countrywide
examination ﬁgures. The rate of total cohort progression (beginning in primary) past
Zimbabwean 0 levels ranges around 5% (Calculated ﬂom Ministry of Education and
Culture transition rates in Colclough, 1990). This means that about ﬁve out of one
hundred students starting in grade one will advance beyond roughly the third year of
secondary. Failure to pass the English section of the 0 level examinations means failure
to advance beyond 0 levels. In addition to this low rate of progression, there are signs
that a majority of incoming ﬁrst year students at the University of Zimbabwe are reading
well below 0 level ability (McGinley, 1984). This means that those who presumably
pass Advanced levels (two years after 0 levels), are in actuality reading at much lower
levels when tested independently. What therefore seems to be taking place in Zimbabwe
is a continuation of a monolingual European educational LP that is consistent with

Bourdieu’s pattern of symbolic domination. This practice may be characterized as one of

76

initial access to primary education while issues of equity are in part “sidestepped” as the
majority pursues access to higher education with limited English competence.
Britain and UCLES

The development and maintenance of English language education in Zimbabwe
should not be viewed as purely internal historical phenomena. The British-based
institution, University of Cambridge Local Examination Syndicate (UCLES), is perhaps
one of the most inﬂuential institutions for language education practice in Zimbabwe due
to the close connection between examinations, curriculum and teaching. Through
continued collaboration with the Zimbabwean government, UCLES indirectly supports
the linguistic minority’s interests. These interests are directly tied to the maintenance of
the highly uneven class oriented education system that functions through symbolic
dominance. Speciﬁcally, Zimbabweans remain dependent upon British based UCLES’s
interpretation of “English standards” for a Zimbabwean based examination system.
English standards should be understood as a level of competence that is roughly
comparable to a native British English speaker at the same stage of education. These
standards are reﬂected in the English reading and writing cuniculum in the Zimbabwean
secondary education. The speciﬁc contours of these standards in the 0 level examination
will be examined in the following chapter.

While direct British colonial presence has ended in Africa, the British Council,
established by the British government as the main institution for spreading British
language and culture (Spolsky, 1995), is still active as a supporter of English education in
Zimbabwe. Established in 1934 with support ﬂom private business interests, one of the

Council’s original missions was to consider a scheme for furthering the teaching of

77

English abroad and to promote a wider knowledge and understanding of British culture
generally (Phillipson, 1992). In essence, the British Council serves as the educational
“middle man” between foreign governments interested in developing their English
education systems and English educational/cultural agencies.

In addition to funding and coordinating educational assistance projects, Spolsky
(1995) has noted that the British Council formed a Joint Committee with UCLES as early
1944 (Spolsky, 1995). UCLES is one of the largest private examination companies in the
world. From the early part of this century, Spolsky describes UCLES as an organization
that has had a history of a humanistic concern for subjective judgment that is combined
with smug certainty in the infallibility of their unexplained collective opinions (337). He
describes their views as originally traditional and elitist; they were examining the extent
to which foreigners, who wanted to teach English or be recognized as knowing it, had
assimilated the ability to perform like ideal British candidates, and to share their common
literary culture. The First Certiﬁcate in English was added to the UCLES examination
system by director Roach in 1939. By the 19803 it was examining about a quarter of a
million students a year in sixty countries (Spolsky, 1995).

By 1987 the overseas examination syllabus had four guiding principles: the
priority of a communicative approach; the importance of listening and speaking; the
authenticity of reading and listening; the avoidance of culture bias. According to
Spolsky, in ofﬁcially accepting these principles, UCLES has shown sensitivity to the
major trends in language teaching in general.

Surrounding these principles is also a keen UCLES sensitivity to the legitimation

of maintaining standards, especially in measuring English language proﬁciency. In

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essence, reliance upon this concept depends upon a shared concept, connected to
Cambridge’s educational prestige, that UCLES is in possession of “the standard.” When
one places UCLES’ legitimation in the context of English language testing as
international big business, as Spolsky’s work does, this organization’s institutional power
can be seen as very inﬂuential in Zimbabwean language education practice.

While the 0 level examination is taken by most Zimbabwean students in the
equivalent of US tenth grade, its inﬂuence is felt much earlier in the educational system.
The Zimbabwean Junior Certiﬁcate (ZJ C), taken by primary school leavers, administered
completely by Zimbabwean educationists, utilizes similar approaches to the Cambridge
system. At present, the ZJ C is a watered-down version of the 0 level English exam and
is used as a training exercise for the O level. Based on the highly selective British model,
the O level can be seen as the highest goal that most school children can hope to achieve.
Localization and the O Level

Perhaps one of the most understudied innovations in Aﬂican education is the
concept and process of “localization.” The process, on the surface, is represented as a
smoothly oiled (and agentless) machine that somehow makes the education more
“relevant” and “meaningful” for the majority of students while at the same time
“maintaining standards.” In the case of Zimbabwe, localization for the 0 level
examination system (completed in 1994) has largely meant a change to local exam
administration (largely for distribution and marking) and an inclusion of
African/Zimbabwean themes in some curriculum content areas. What localization has
not done is to change any of the ways in which the English language subject examinations

(both writing and reading sections) are formed or marked. I would argue that this

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amounts to a “surface” localization. By leaving English examination formation and
marking procedures largely intact and in the hands of UCLES, fundamental issues of
language use, language curriculum coordination, and examination autonomy remain
unaddressed.

Prior to the commencement of the localization process in 1984, Zimbabwe
candidates were examined by three different private boards ﬂom the UK: University of
London Schools Examination Board (ULSEB); Associated Examination Board (AEB);
and UCLES (University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate). While the
speciﬁc institutional source for the push for Zimbabwean localization in 1984 (Rakuni,
1995) is not clear, there is evidence that there was an overall recognition on the part of
the educational administration on the need to move to address issues of relevance in the
curriculum. UCLES proposed that it would consolidate the examination (Sadler, 1995b).
The adoption of these innovations was ﬁnancially supported by the British Overseas
Development Administration (Sadler, 1995b). Localization was in Zimbabwe’s best
ﬁnancial interest as it allowed it to assume the majority of responsibilities of its own
examination system. One estimate is that the Zimbabwean government went ﬂom
spending nine million Zimbabwean dollars to around two million (Sadler, 1995b). As the
exarnination’s sole certifying body, UCLES certiﬁes the development of English
syllabuses and question papers. Consultants ﬂom the UCLES ofﬁce in Britain visit
Zimbabwe regularly for this purpose.

Zimbabwean teachers and administrators were tapped ﬂom the beginning of the
localization effort to discuss issues of content reformation of the cuniculum. For

example, new material in Zimbabwean history was introduced that included a treatment

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of Aﬁican kingdoms (Rakuni, 1995). In the area of English language however, “there
were few issues” (Sadler, 1995c) related to localization. In other words, there was no
questioning of the way English was currently being taught in schools or marked in
examinations. The main concern of UCLES and government ofﬁcials during localization
was a very non-local one: maintenance of English standards and test security to ensure

perceived examination integrity. According to one UCLES ofﬁcial,

We [UCLES] still supervise the marking of the question papers and attend all the grading
meetings to make sure that the standards adopted in Zimbabwe are equivalent to those obtained
in the rest of the world. The main problem in Zimbabwe is the security of the examination. I
have a colleague in Zimbabwe at present making unannounced calls on various schools
throughout the country to ensure that there is no mal-practice. (Sadler, l996d)

This concern for security and integrity, while reﬂecting a concern for in-country
legitimacy for the examination, can also be seen as a concern for the development of
markets elsewhere in the world. For instance, if the examination answers are not secure
in Zimbabwe, could they also be at risk in Malaysia? The concept of the equivalence of
“standards” with the “rest of the world” also points to a global rather than local
examination priority.

In essence, UCLES can be seen to be engaged by the Zimbabwean govermnent as
an instrument for legitimating the examination system. The shared perception of
“English standards” being maintained with local Zimbabwean administration seems to be
the goal of the government in the English language section, At the same time, UCLES
maintains an examination service monopoly and upper administrative institutional
control, through paid certiﬁcation, of one of the most inﬂuential Zimbabwean institutions

of language education -- the O and A level examination system.

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UCLES’ inﬂuence is substantial, especially in the context of the relative
professional power and global prestige it wields. It beneﬁts through its afﬁliation with
British governmental agencies and a perceived interpretive claim of “English standards.”
Through its most recent collaboration with the Zimbabwean government in localization,
it has established a monopoly over Zimbabwe’s examination certiﬁcation procedures. As
a private company, UCLES pursues its own interests as they relate to language education
in Zimbabwe. UCLES’s institutional interests complement Zimbabwean dominant bloc
interests in that institutionalized symbolic dominance in education continues to be

legitimated.

As previously discussed a speciﬁc representation the inﬂuence of these broadly
outlined forces can be found in Zimbabwean literary sources. At the level of the
negotiation of individual identity, the power of these institutionalized forces of language
education forces will be examined in the works of Zimbabwean authors (chapter four).
These authors intimately represent these historic and current inﬂuences as they
speciﬁcally relate to the negotiation of identity in the period of the second Chimurenga.
In addition, while not resolving the issue of the degree language education’s hegemonic
inﬂuence, Chapter four’s analysis of Zimbabwean authors will allow for a detailed

analysis of these issues.

In Zimbabwe, power projection through LP in education has been emphasized by
the nature of the political economy of the settler enterprise. Separate educational
systems were created in which the Aﬂican system was perceived to be inferior to the

European. An intense demand for access to the European system developed among an

82

Aﬂican elite who understood the economic connection to superior education. The
European school curriculum, especially at secondary levels, reﬂected the colonizer’s
language, culture, history, religion, and ways of life. In Bourdieu’s (1991) terms, a
uniﬁed cultural and linguistic market was created, certainly by the 19603 and 703, in

which an English academic curriculum was more highly valued.

Current Zimbabwean language education policies can be seen as evidence of an
historically grounded institutional momentum that will carry Zimbabwe into the twenty-
ﬁrst century. In this sense, Zimbabwe can be seen to be moving toward the integration of
its elite into the larger linguistic and cultural “market” that includes other global
participants. Britain, through British based UCLES, is one the most powerful sources of
economic, linguistic, and cultural capital for English language education in Zimbabwe.
UCLES does not have Aﬁican based language education as a part of its institutional or
market interest; rather, European monolingualism contributes to a superior market
position for UCLES. Thus, a market bias can be seen to have been formed, ﬂom within
and without Zimbabwe, that favors the practice of an English monolingual educational
policy. The most inﬂuential external institution for Zimbabwe’s language education, due
to the powerﬁrl linkage between educational advancement and the passing of English
language 0 level, is the British based UCLES. The following chapter suggests an
alternative pedagogy that would lead to a more contextualized, less examination-driven
English language curriculum. This curriculum, while not necessarily in UCLES interest,
would satisfy Zimbabwean concerns for relevancy while preserving English as the

language of education.

Chapter 3
LITERACY AND LANGUAGE SOCIALIZATION IN ZIMBABWE

It goes without saying that the criteria suggested in the book for the selection of texts are
proposed on the assumption that school syllabuses are Aﬂicanized or modiﬁed to meet the
needs of African pupils. Overseas examinations which do not take into account the needs of
particular countries and regions tend to defeat the whole purpose of education for development,
especially in the arts where the content of education necessarily reﬂects the culture and world
views of particular societies. It is my earnest hope, therefore that where African schools still
teach syllabuses designed by British and other overseas examination boards, the authorities will
do something to make the education of their children relevant to their own conditions and to the
aspirations of the peoples of Aﬁica. (N gara 1984, 3)

Speciﬁc institutional forces that inﬂuence the current language education in the
area of reading include Zimbabwe’s early reading curriculum and UCLES certiﬁed
English 0 level examination system. The 0 level has an especially important effect on
language education due to an examination “backwash” effect: this effect inﬂuences
language education practice in earlier grades. The 0 level and early reading curriculum
guidelines, perhaps the two most inﬂuential institutionalized language education
guidelines, draw upon a concept of English reading that is decontextualized and skill
based. After examining the current approaches to literacy in the reading curriculum and
examination system, this chapter will focus speciﬁcally on reshaping this concept of
literacy to include a dialogic view of language socialization relevant to Zimbabweans. A
critical pedagogy that utilizes a contact zone approach to literature is joined with this new
concept of literacy. Chapter four will draw directly upon this new approach to language
socialization and pedagogy in order to fulﬁll this dissertation’s central thesis of praxis--a
speciﬁc and contextualized analysis of Zimbabwean literature that draws upon

Zimbabwean voices.

83

84

The structural limitations for this innovation are important to recognize as they
detail important constraints that students and teachers must face daily in their negotiation
of the curriculum. At the same the introduction of approaches to literacy and literature
that interrogate contact zone issues is useﬁrl for exposing structures of domination in
Zimbabwe’s language market. They offer the potential to give the learner the awareness
of the relationship between power and language and to locate him or herself socially
among a wide array of subjectivities. This awareness is important for students so that
they may understand their reality in terms of the social forces that shape it; this awareness
can then lead to a development of student ability to more conﬁdently negotiate those
social forces. In this type of system, learners’ backgrounds, not externally certiﬁed
examinations, become a primary resource for language education.

This issue of “localness” in Aﬂican language education is not new. Ngugi (1986,
1993) has suggested an alternative approach in language education by proposing the sole
use of Aﬁican languages in the curriculum. While such an argument may be appealing,
especially for those that feel Aﬁican culture is not served by European languages, it de-
emphasizes the powerﬁrl institutional roots of language education. In response to market
factors, Zimbabweans have actively chosen English over Aﬁican languages in education
since the early part of this century. In contrast to Ngugi, Achebe (1965) argues that
European languages have become vehicles for African national and cultural expression,
“able to carry” Aﬂican experience (29). That is, like other varieties of English (i.e.,
American, Australian, and Canadian), one can have a distinctly Nigerian (or other Aﬁican
nationality) form serves the communicative needs of the people. Supporters of this

counter-argument often fail to detail the speciﬁc ways that European languages function

85

in education. Language curriculum and examinations are distinctly non-local and
promote highly unequal relations in the Zimbabwe’s linguistic market. I am attempting
to map out a middle ground in this discussion by recognizing three important factors: 1)
the institutional roots of language education; 2) a reconceptualization of literacy 3)
development of resources for language education.

Current conceptualizations of the reading process and literacy should be
understood in relation to earlier theoretical trends. By the 19603 and 703, New Criticism,
the reigning critical mode ﬂom the ﬂom the 19503 on, found itself isolated and perceived
as elitist because it had excluded the reader ﬂom the reading process. The effort to let the
reader back into the interpretation process was initiated by what was later to be termed
the reader-response approach. What made reader-centeredness different ﬂom New
Criticism was its questioning of the positivistic approach; it privileges the reader’s
socially constructed meaning of a text over meaning residing completely in the text.
Reader-centered theorists have been able to enter partnerships with other disciplines on
the reading process (Tompkins, 1980) in order to create new approaches to interpretation
that can be viewed as transactional.

One important development in the alliances of reader-centered theorists was in the
area of schema theory. Schema theorists posit that readers have a repertoire of schemas
or ﬂames that they bring to a reading. In addition to letter and word recognition, the
reader draws upon schemas so that meaning can then be negotiated or transacted between
the text and the reader. A more elaborated view in the form of psycholinguistic reading
theory has been articulated by authors such as Goodman (1968), Smith (1988), Edelskey

(1988), and Weaver (1988). Their work details how higher level reading strategies such

86

as schema recognition and background knowledge work with lower level reading
strategies such as letter and word recognition.

Psycholinguistic reading theory can play a signiﬁcant role in the formation of any
language education curriculum that has equity and relevance as goals since it takes into
account the sociolinguistic context of the teacher and the student. The psycholinguistic
model of reading highlights the interaction of reader, text, and sociolinguistic context
(Weaver, 1988). Goodman (1976) states that common experience, concepts, interests,
views, and life styles of readers inﬂuence how and what they take ﬂom the reading. This
approach to reading theory is relevant to both Bourdieu’s market ﬂamework and Giroux
and McLaren’s critical pedagogy: from Bourdieu’s market perspective, psycholinguistic
reading theory highlights the importance of identifying the shape of the valued linguistic
competence within the market of the educational system; ﬂom a critical pedagogical
perspective, a psycholinguistic approach to reading offers a model that can describe
Giroux’s levels of subjectivity in the reader (forms of background knowledge) and social
context in the reading process.

Literacy, Orality and Language Socialization

Primitive education was a process by which continuity was maintained between parents and children . . ..
Modern education includes a heavy emphasis upon the function of education to create discontinuities . . ..
Illiterate into the literate. (Goody & Watt 1968, 59)

Literacy events must . . .be interpreted in relation to the larger sociocultural patterns which they may

exemplify or reﬂect . . .It is only on the basis of such thorough-going ethnography that ﬁrrther progress is
possible towards understanding cross-cultural patterns of oral and written language uses (Heath 1983, 74)

Children -- Zimbabwean and non-Zimbabwean -- are inﬂuenced by oral
backgrounds. Zimbabwean oral tradition remains an important part of language

socialization. When discussing curriculum and examination reform in Zimbabwe, it is

87

thus important to examine the conceptual and contextual relations between what is
commonly referred to literacy and orality. The ongoing discussion about literacy and
orality in relation to society and the individual can be traced back to Plato (examined by
Havelock, 1963). In the past three decades, the discourse surrounding the effects of
literacy and orality has become increasingly polarized into “cogrritivist” and
“sociocultural” approaches. Members of the cognitivist approach (V ygotsky, Luria,
Goody & Watt) posit that literacy leads to individual and societal cognitive
transformation. The sociocultural approach (Scribner & Cole, Tannen, and Heath) posits
that literacy can only be examined ﬂom within a sociocultural context. While it is not
always the case, the views of cognitivists and socioculturalists tend to be mutually
exclusive.

While it is perhaps somewhat of an oversirnpliﬁcation to label authors ﬂom
Vygotsky to Goody and Watt as cognitivists, the term refers speciﬁcally to their approach
to literacy and its implications. These authors share the overall position that there are
important cognitive consequences of literacy. In addition, these authors conﬂate the
effects of literacy and schooling in their treatment of language socialization processes.
As a result, home oral and school literate phenomena are emphasized by cognitivists as
salient categories. The underlying theme then of the cognitive approach to literacy is the
stress placed upon the process by which individuals move away ﬂom oral to literate
cognitive backgrounds.

The major empirical problem that is suggested by Luria and Vygotsky’s studies is
how difﬁcult it is to separate the inﬂuence of literacy ﬂom that of formal schooling since

they usually go together. Schooling involves learning a set of complex role relationships,

88

general cognitive techniques, ways of approaching problems, different genres of talk and
interaction, and an intricate set of values concerned with communication, interaction, and
society as a whole (Wertch, 1985). Since the introduction of literacy is always
accompanied by the introduction of new forms of social organization, differences in
thinking processes cannot be attributed to literacy per se. Cogrritivists in the ﬁeld have
drawn upon Vygotsky’s classiﬁcations of schooled and unschooled. These studies have
not inﬂequently been used to make generalizations about literacy itself (Street, 1984).
The leading cognitivists in the ﬁeld (ﬂom Luria and Vygotsky to Greenﬁeld and Olson)
have all tested schooled as opposed to unschooled subjects rather than literate/non-literate
ones.

One example of the effects of conﬂating schooling and literacy is Greenﬁeld’s
study of a Wolof village in Senegal (Greenﬁeld, 1972). In her study, Greenﬁeld analyzed
discourse in an attempt to examine formal operations and logical thought processes.
Greenﬁeld’s central hypothesis about literacy and language socialization was that
context-dependent speech is linked with context-dependent thought, which in turn is the
opposite of abstract thought. Abstraction is the mental separation of an element ﬂom the
situation or context in which it is embedded. Oral speech depends on context to
communicate meaning; it is therefore egocentric and takes for granted a common point of
view as though no others were possible (Greenﬁeld, 1972).

The unschooled Wolof in Greenﬁeld’s study experienced what she termed a
failure in the “structure of communication.” It seemed that the unschooled Wolof
children lacked Western self-consciousness; they did not distinguish between their own

thought or statement about something and the thing itself (72). For Greenﬁeld, literacy

89

has the direct effect of creating the ability for abstraction. “Writing is practice in the use
of linguistic contexts as independent of immediate reference . . .. Once thought is ﬂeed
ﬂom the concrete situation the way is clear for symbolic manipulation . . ..” (175). Thus,
like Vygotsky and Luria, Greenﬁeld does not separate the effects of literacy and
schooling. This leads to a dichotomy in her study of schooled/literate/logical/urban
Western versus unschooled/illiterate/rural Wolof.

In addition to Vygotsky and Luria’s original conﬂation of schooling and literacy,
there is also an underlying assumption about there being less cognitive development in
the individual coming ﬂom an oral background. In her Wolof study, Greenﬁeld attributes
a “lack of communicative structure” to a maternal language socialization process that
depends on demonstration and concrete physical situation. She then likens her
characterization of language socialization to what Bernstein termed “language
deprivation” (Berstein, 1971) in his study of working class children in England. By
treating solely the cognitive implications of literacy and schooling, Vygotsky, Luria and
other cognitivists fail to form hypotheses about the cognitive effects of orality; they
proceed as if there is a cognitive void prior to literacy and schooling. This then is an
unresearched assumption that was established early on and continues in current language
socialization studies.

While Vygotsky and Luria’s approach may have been the initial foundation for
views on literacy, Goody and Watt’s inﬂuential article “Consequences of Literacy”
(Goody & Watt, 1968) presented a sweeping historical, social, technological, and
psychological account of literacy. Probably more than any other work of its time, this

article has ﬂamed the discourse of literacy and orality studies. Concerned about what

90

they perceived as a “diffuse relativism” emanating ﬂom anthropology’s rejection of the
distinction between the thinking of “primitive” and “civilized” peoples, between
“mythopoeic” and “logico-empirical” modes of thought, Goody and Watt believed that
the reaction had been pushed too far and that anthropologists and sociologists had in fact
turned a blind eye on some of the most basic problems of human history (Goody, 1968).
In “Consequences” and later works, Goody and Watt detailed their view of the important
distinctions between the cognitive skills and social achievements of oral and literate
cultures.

Orality for Goody and Watt consists of an information transmission system in
which all beliefs, and values, all forms of knowledge, are communicated between
individuals in face-to-face contact and stored in human memory. Goody and Watt
contrast this conception of orality with “technology of the intellect” or literacy. In this
system, words accumulate successive layers of historically validated meanings. Since
oral societies have cultural repertoires that are stored solely in memory, they are subject
to forgetting and modiﬁcation. Literacy, with its more permanent form of institutional
memory, allows for the development of higher intellectual forms such as logic, the
distinction of myth ﬂom history, the emergence of skepticism, and the ability to
challenge and reinterpret social dogma (Goody, 1968). In addition to differences in
social levels, literacy also has a profound impact on the social identity of the individual.

This characterization of literacy’s wide reaching effects, while appealing to
Western common sense assumptions, is made without reference to directly supporting
studies. This is later remarked upon by Scribner and Cole (1981) in the introduction to

their work on Vai literacy in Liberia:

91

[In this] line of theorizing [Havelock, Goody, Watt] we may ﬁnd many of the propositions about
literacy and thought that dominate discussion in other scholarly and practical arenas: written language
promotes abstract concepts, analytic reasoning, new ways of categorizing, a logical approach to
language. It is striking that the scholars who offer these claims for speciﬁc changes in psychological
processes present no direct evidence that individuals do, in fact, process information about the world
differently ﬂom those in societies without literacy. (7)

Throughout “Consequences” and later work, Goody and Watt caution against any
extreme views of a “great divide” between primitive and modern societies being inferred
ﬂom their work. While these are certainly politically correct sensitivities, they are not
consistent with most of the central themes of Goody and Watt’s work. Street (1984) has
remarked on these periodic qualiﬁcations and has remarked upon the “circularity” of
Goody and Watt’s (1968) statements about literacy. This circularity is evident in the

following quotes:

Nevertheless, although we must reject any dichotomy based upon the assumption of radical
differences between the mental attributes of literate and non-literate peoples . . .there may still
exist general differences between literate and non-literate societies . . .. Writing establishes a
different kind of relation between word and its referent, a relationship that is more abstract . . .
(44)

The individual has little perception of the past except in terms of the present; whereas an analysis
of a literate society cannot but enforce a more objective recognition of the distinction between
what was and what is. (53)

Evidence for the circularity of their argument comes ﬂom the empirically undeveloped
connection between writing systems and the ability for superior abstract reasoning. If to
write is to automatically process more abstractly, then the argument becomes circular.
While Goody and Watt may attempt to shield their argument ﬂom critics with cautionary
remarks, their position is that literacy creates individuals and societies that are capable of
higher levels of abstraction and objectiﬁcation.

Rather than examining the interaction of the two modes of language socialization,
Goody (1968) labels oral practices within literate societies as “restricted literacy.” This

kind of literocentric terminology, combined with an overall lack of treatment of orality,

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points to a value judgment about the innate social utility of literacy. Most importantly,
the view of orality as restricted helps to naturalize the assumption that orality has fewer
beneﬁcial social and cognitive consequences than literacy.

Socioculturalists (Scribner & Cole, 1981; Tannen, 1985; Heath, 1983) posit that
literacy can only be examined ﬂom within a sociocultural context. For a socioculturalist,
there is no one literacy, but many different literacies that take on different forms in
different cultural contexts. Coming ﬂom a variety of disciplines and approaches,
socioculturalists view literacy less as abstract and more as a socially inﬂuenced practice.
Scribner and Cole speak of “literacy practices” while Heath’s study details what she
terms “literacy events.”

In their landmark study among the Vai in Liberia, Scribner and Cole (1981) set

out to address many of the issues raised by the cognitive approach to literacy studies:

The Greenﬁeld - Brunner (Greenﬁeld and Brunner, 1966) thesis explicitly maintained that
schooling pushes cognitive growth to new levels; Luria, Goody, Havelock, and others claimed that
literacy is linked to abstract and logical reasoning-processes that are at the high end of the
developmental continuum. We refer to this phase of our experimental research as testing for
general consequences of literacy. (114)

Scribner and Cole recognized the fundamental importance of attempting to isolate the
effects of literacy ﬂom schooling in order to focus on literacy. They therefore chose the
context of the non-schooled literacy of the Vai people of Liberia. This study was an
attempt to uncover the empirical validity of the claim of literacy’s cognitive effects.
The study included a cognitive battery sampling ﬁve domains of intellectual
activity that have ﬁgured prominently in speculations of literacy’s effects: abstract

thinking, taxonomic categorization, memory, logical reasoning, and reﬂective knowledge

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about language. In order to test hypotheses about psychological consequences and
degrees of literacy, Scribner included a reading comprehension test. Contrary to
Greenﬁeld’s (Greenﬁeld, 1972) ﬁndings, Scribner and Cole found the members of the
Vai literacy community provided answers on a language objectiﬁcation task that reﬂected
a Vai view of the world, rather than confusion between words and things. Of all the
survey tasks, logic problems proved the most predictable and demonstrated the strongest
effects of schooling. While schooling was shown to have an effect on logic, literacy had
no effect on logic, abstraction, memory or communication. On tasks closely related to
script activities, such as reading or writing with pictures, some nonliterates did as well as
those with school or literacy experiences (Scribner and Cole, 1981).

These discrepancies between posited effects of literacy and schooling led Scribner
and Cole to challenge the hypothesis that schooling affects thinking by equipping
children, in Greenﬁeld’s (1972) terms, with a “written language.” The one hypothesis
they generated about the linkage between schooling and the resulting form of literacy is
that school fostered abilities to engage in expository talk in “contrived situations.” They
found that claims about the mediating effects of written language “lose attraction as well
as explanatory power” when applied to the Vai literacy context (Scribner and Cole,
1981)

In the course of their research, Scribner and Cole’s ﬁndings led them to the
conclusion that literacy is a set of socially organized practices which make use of a
symbol system and a technology for producing and disseminating it. Literacy is not
simply knowing how to read and write a particular script, but applying this knowledge for

speciﬁc purposes in speciﬁc contexts of use. The nature of these practices, including

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their technological aspects, will determine the kinds of skills associated with literacy
(Scribner and Cole, 1981).

What Scribner and Cole’s work provides, unlike most language socialization
studies, is an empirical attempt at conﬁrming the cognitive effects of literacy. Scribner
and Cole have treated literacy and schooling in its social context while attempting to
uncover possible cognitive consequences of each. In the works of cognitivists, schooling
and literacy are conﬂated. Until this ﬂaw is addressed, works that draw upon this
school/literacy conﬂation cannot distinguish activities and contexts and therefore cannot
directly infer their respective cognitive consequences.

While Scribner and Cole explicitly set out to study literacy, they might have
provided more insight to orality if they had focused more closely on the social context
and potential cognitive consequences of regular language socialization for unschooled,
illiterate Vai. To provide this contextualization would have added valuable depth to their
conceptualization of knowledge acquisition through language. Heath refers to this
contextualized knowledge acquisition as Barthes’s “ways of taking” ﬂom the
environment (Barthes, 1974). It is in this sense that Scribner and Cole have something in
common with preceding cogrritvists: by focusing solely on literacy as a form of
knowledge acquisition, the alternative of orality remains potentially “less developed” or
“less logical.”

Relative Focus on Interpersonal Involvement

Long interested in the discourse features of what has been popularly termed oral

and written communication, Tannen has arrived at less polarized interpretations about the

effects of literacy. She views many the features of orality and literacy as overlapping.

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She notes that orality and literacy are superimposed upon and intertwined with each
other: no individual is completely “oral” or “literate.” Rather, people use devices
associated with both traditions in various settings (Tannen, 1985). Tannen believes that
the polar distinctions between orality and literacy have arisen mainly ﬂom the types of
discourse analyzed: casual conversation for spoken modes and expository prose for
written form. She has therefore decided to move away ﬂom the categories orality and
literacy and prefers to refer instead to “features reﬂecting relative focus on interpersonal
involvement” (Tannen, 1985).

Spoken casual conversation and written expository prose are the types of discourse
that have been traditionally analyzed to show differences between modes of
communication. Tannen has remarked that this is no coincidence and that indeed there is
something typically written about message-focused communication and something
typically oral about interpersonal involvement (Tannen, 1985). The mistake has been to
view conversation and expository prose as exclusive. The key then for Tannen is to
analyze the relative focus on involvement as contrasted with relative focus on
information. This approach has the marked advantage of de-emphasizing the artiﬁcial
separation of modes of communication in order to focus on the more universal features of
the discourse.

This does not mean for Tannen that there are no useful distinctions in modes of
communication. Tannen points out that there are some notable paralinguistic features of
the oral mode that include pace, pitch shifts, amplitude shifts, expressive phonology, and
expressive tone quality. For Tannen, this constitutes an elaboration of the paralinguistic

channel. In writing, on the other hand, the nonverbal and paralinguistic channels are not

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available. Therefore, in writing, the relationships between ideas, and the writer’s attitude
toward them, must be lexicalized (Tannen, 1985).

An example of Tannen’s innovative approach is her “rethink” of what it is to be a
good reader and a writer. The act of reading is a matter not so much of accurate
decoding, but of discerning a familiar text structure and hypothesizing what information
will be presented, so that it can be efﬁciently processed when it comes. Tannen notes that
by making maximum use of the context of prior texts, readers are using highly context -
sensitive skills, strategies that she suggests are interactive (i.e., a familiar author or
writing style) or involvement-focused (i.e., a familiar genre) (Tannen, 1985). In a
similar vein, good writing for Tannen is an act of recontextualization of an audience, in
which the writer must successfully contextualize his or her audience in order to
communicate successfully.

Rather than attempting to attribute direct cognitive consequences to literacy, Tannen
is more interested in the features of the discourse itself. This approach places her more
within the sociocultural camp. Markedly absent ﬂom both the cognitive and
sociocultural approaches is Tannen’s thorough attention to the level of discourse. It
offers the opportunity to form a well-grounded view of the actual features of spoken and
written discourse ﬂom which to base a more thoughtful interpretation.

This polarization of views on literacy becomes especially relevant in Zimbabwe
when one attempts to view the overall lack of language socialization praxis taking place
in the educational system. A comparable situation in language education has been noted
in US schools by linguistic anthropologist Heath (1983) and also Tannen (1985). Both

researchers have remarked that there is strong evidence in the literature of teachers

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tragically unable to recognize discourse patterns that deviate ﬂom the school norm due to
the fact that teacher and student have different linguistic and cultural backgrounds
(Tannen in Olson, 1985). One working hypothesis may be that students ﬂom an Aﬂican
language background (with more oral than written experience) will generally be better
served in classrooms where teachers are aware of and attempting to incorporate
background knowledge in reading instruction.

While there seemed to be a dialogue forming between psychology and linguistic
anthropology in the works of Scribner & Cole (1981) and Heath (1983) in the early
19803, these researchers have moved markedly away ﬂom their earlier work; this is
unfortunate since their earlier studies are groundbreaking works that seek to address the
fundamental issues of language socialization that could integrate the concepts of literacy
and orality. Literacy and orality do not occur in isolation: in either school or home
contexts. Thus, it is important that any conception of literacy take cognizance of
implications of orality, as they are a part of the background knowledge of a majority of
Zimbabweans.

The Literacy-Orality Relationship: Toward Language Socialization

Edward and Thomas’, Oral Cultures, Past and Present, Rappin ’ and Homer
(1991) is one of the few recent works to directly address the interaction between oral and
written traditions. Edward and Thomas actually call attention to the possible reasons for

the scarcity of work on orality:

It is important to remember, however, that when we discuss differences between orality and
literacy, we do not do so in a social vacuum. The literate assumption that the oral tradition is
in some way inferior to the literate has important implications for the status of the most
comfortable using oral strategies . . .. [An] awareness of the different strategies and aesthetics
of oral performance would represent an important challenge to the all-pervading
ethnocentrism which is the hallmark of mainstream society. (220)

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There are in fact a great deal of similarities between oral and written transactions.

Finnegan posited many of the similarities in Orality and Literacy (1988):

We need to remember that oral literature is only one type of literature, a type characterized by
particular features to do with performance, transmission, and social context with the various
implications these have for its study. But for all these differences, the view is that there is no
essential chasm between this type of literature and the more familiar written forms . . . (25)

Also, the audience for an oral performance is more closely linked to the actor while in a
reading performance both the actor and the audience interact in the consciousness of the
same person. Both oral and written literatures need to have continued performances in
order for them to exist. Iser (1989) relies on what he terms “literary anthropology” to
provide the answer for why we continually “repeat the play ” of representation and
interpretation in writing:

Representation arises out of and thus entails the removal of difference, whose irremovability
transforms representation into a perforrnative act of staging something. This staging is
almost inﬁnitely variable, for in contrast to explanations, no single staging could ever
remove difference and so explain origin. (245)

Repetition of oral literature in many Aﬁican communities also plays a societal role. The
performer may sense a problem in the community and use oral literature to address it;
there is a wide range of roles for oral literature in many Aﬂican societies.

Iser suggests that the nature of audience participation is similar in both the oral
and written tradition. A successful reading performance requires the ﬁrll participation of
the reader. Iser draws upon the metaphor of staging in order to make a point about the

similarities between the process of reading and an oral performance:

The staged play of the text does not, then, unfold as a pageant that the reader merely watches,
but is both an ongoing event and a happening for the reader, enabling and encouraging direct
involvement in the proceedings and indeed in the staging. (258)

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In a similar vein, Finnegan (1988) posits that oral performance draws upon the concept of
staging for its audience:

This visual aspect is sometimes taken even further than gesture and dramatic bodily
movement and is expressed in the form of a dance, often joined by members of the audience
(or chorus). In these cases the verbal content now represents only one element in a complete
opera like performance which combines words, music, and dance. (5)

Clearly, there is a convergence in the areas of reader and audience involvement. One
additional overlap is that oral and written performance always takes place in a cultural

context. Iser places importance upon context in the historical component of his
paradigm:

No matter what the constitutive presuppositions may be, ﬁction will always be a mode of
exercising an impact and its effect will vary according to requirements necessitated by the
context in question. (267)

Aﬂican oral literature is also highly contextualized in the culture ﬂom which it emanates.
In the past two centuries (and especially in the past ﬁfty years), a written tradition has
been built up that is more accessible to outsiders in sub-Saharan Aﬁica, but also requires
sensitivity and experience to the socio-historical context ﬂom which it emanates.

Finding the point of convergence between the work of oral and literary theorists is
important for an understanding of language socialization, but a direct correlation between
orality and literacy should not be attempted. An important difference is face-to-face
interaction. In a social exchange there is a face-to-face interaction so that partners in the
exchange can ask each other questions to see how well they understand each other. Iser

(1989) notes the potential differences for a reader:

The reader, however, can never learn ﬂom the text how accurate or inaccurate his views of it
are. . . There is no such frame of reference [oral context] governing the text-reader relationship;
on the contrary, the codes that might regulate this interaction are fragmented in the text, and
must be reassembled or, in most cases, restructured before any ﬂame of reference can be
established. (32)

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In oral literature, the artist is usually face-to-face with his public and can take advantage
of this “ﬂaming” to enhance the impact and even sometimes the content of the words
(Finnegan, 1989). There is a social closeness (with feedback) and immediate context in
oral literature that is lacking in written literature.

As previously highlighted, Tannen (1985) posits that written modes focus more
on the communication of information and lexicalization while conversational oral modes
focus less on the information in favor of interpersonal involvement and contextualization.
These modes and styles are not exclusively bound, however; written texts can draw upon
contextualization and involvement (with a speciﬁcally implied audience), and oral
discourse may be able to utilize lexicalization. Tannen’s approach is useful for
understanding how oral and written communication can overlap, and also for suggesting
innovative ways of viewing written and oral discourse.

Bakhtin’s (1981) discussion of dialogic utterances (oral and written) adds a
valuable dimension to Tannen’s concept of relative involvement because it investigates
the author’s ability to draw upon (and refer back to) multiple voices in discourse.

Bakhtin posited that texts, oral and written, exist in a context of heteroglossia, the

base condition governing the operation of meaning in any utterance. It is that which insures the
primacy of context over text. At any time, in any given place, there will be a set of conditions--
social historical meteorological, physiological--that will insure that a word uttered in that place
and at that time will have a meaning different than it would have under any other conditions.
(428)

To view a text dialogically is to understand speciﬁc utterances as part of a “greater
whole” where there is a “constant interaction between meanings, all of which have the
potential of conditioning others” (426). An individual (author and reader) does not exist

outside of dialogue -- “a dialogue in which the consciousness of a speaker encounters the

lOl

consciousness of another speaker; a dialogue that reveals conﬂicts; a dialogue that
embodies history and culture” (Moraes 1996, 94).

Utterances, oral and written, do not exist outside of living interaction. Utterances
encounter other utterances, and the “social arena” is composed of a social background
facing another social background (Moraes, 1996). According to Bakhtin (1981), the
authentic environment of an utterance, the environment in which it lives and takes shape,
is dialogized heteroglossia, anonymous and social as language, but simultaneously
concrete, ﬁlled with speciﬁc content as an individual utterance (272). However, oral and
written texts are not equal in their ability to dialogize heteroglossia: Bakhtin viewed the
literary text (especially the novel) as a form that could give the greatest degree of order to
a speciﬁc discourse.

In Zimbabwe, oral and multilingual traditions contribute to heteroglossia; in
heteroglossic Zimbabwean novels, these traditions contribute to what Bakhtin referred to
as “double voiced” discourse. With this in mind, one must approach texts with the
awareness that multiple voices are usually present. How do these multiple voices interact
in the text? As Harrow (1994) points out, one cannot reduce the presence of multiple
voices to a “simple binary opposition, to a clear ambivalence, or to a contradiction
reduced to simple term.” A more helpful approach is to view multiple voices in a text as
contributing to a “concerto, often with one voice given prominence, but always with a
polyphonic accompaniment” (52). As this concerto emanates ﬂom the historically
located negotiation of identity in language, it is also reﬂective of underlying power
struggles. In his interpretation of important Aﬁican novels, Harrow posits the double-

voiced dialogue is “always marked by that element of coercion that entered into the

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acquisition of the author’s written language, containing and constraining the unvoiced
echoes in Ewondo or Ibo or Wolof or Kikuyu” (152—emphasis Harrow’s). While I would
agree that one main voice is dominant at the level of written discourse of novels, the
degree to which the author represents it as coercive varies. This level of representation is
inﬂuenced by each author’s attempts to highlight language socialization as a theme in his
or her novels. This point will be further developed in chapter four in a narrative analysis
of several Zimbabwean novelists.

Literacy Events and Cultural Knowledge

In Zimbabwe, as in most of Africa, grade three primary teachers are presenting
knowledge that is linguistically and culturally new to most students when making the
transition to English as the medium of the classroom. This is true in the case of the
majority of Zimbabweans for whom Shona or Ndebele is their ﬁrst language. Most
children ﬂom these backgrounds experience two transitions: ﬂom Shona (or Ndebele) to
English and ﬂom oral medium to written. I would agree with Bourdillon (1977) when he
points out “that in this transitional stage, the teacher might attempt to emphasize the
social origins of Shona oral and English written knowledge so that students and teachers
could explicitly discuss and recognize features of oral and written discourse.”

Heath’s speciﬁc focus upon social context of “literacy events” is one innovative
way of discussing differences between home and school culture (Heath in Saville-Troike,
1982). In the context of reading, the means of making sense ﬂom books and relating
their contents to knowledge about the real world is but one way of taking (49). A
“literacy event” is an occasion in which written language is integral to the nature of

participant’s interactions and their interpersonal processes and strategies (50). In Shona,

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the closest translation of the words cultural knowledge is “ruzivo rvvemagamuchidzanwa”
or literally “ways of doing and knowing things passed down ﬂom the ancestors.”
Zimbabwe is a society in which literacy events occur in a full range of social contexts.
There is an active publishing industry that produces nationally distributed newspapers,
magazines, school texts, literary works, and other written materials in at least three
languages. In addition, computers are being introduced in some schools, thereby
introducing electronic print as a literacy event. While English reading is the focus of this
dissertation, reading as a language skill cannot be seen to operate in isolation ﬂom the
individual’s full store of background knowledge. In many ways this dissertation is about
ways of taking (to adopt Heath’s use of Barthes, 1974) in Zimbabwe. How teachers,
students, and authors negotiate language education involves an ongoing dialogue between
the speaker and listener, as well as linguistic and cultural knowledge, and a speciﬁc
historical context.
The main implication of this approach is to view classroom interaction as dialogical: the
individual exists simultaneously in a dialogue with student and teacher background
knowledge and historical context. In order to fully detail this new model of language
education, the pedagogical space (context) in which this occurs must be further
elaborated.
Contact Zones

Reshaping a language education in a way that integrates background knowledge
and historical context requires a transformation of current approaches to literacy and, no

less important, the context of literacy instruction. Pratt (1991) offers a way of

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envisioning the space of negotiation between identity and historical context in what she

calls the contact zone:

I use this term to refer to social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other,
often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or
their afterrnaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today. (34)

This concept of a contact zone is useful because it speciﬁcally investigates the
historically contextualized sites of cultural conﬂict that teachers, students, and authors
must negotiate when they are to be found in a text. This approach stands in contrast to
the transmission oriented monolingual model. Pratt suggests a new model that is based
on the assumption that the most revealing speech situation for understanding language is
one involving a gathering of people, each of whom speaks two languages and understands
a third and hold only one language in common with any of the others. Here Pratt is
advocating a multicultural and multilingual approach in the US educational system. In
Zimbabwe, this is a part of most students’ daily negotiation of the educational system.
Bizzel (1994) takes Pratt’s proposal one step ﬁrrther by offering a new way of
understanding English studies “in terms of historically deﬁned contact zones, moments
when different groups within the society contend for power to interpret what is going on”
(167). For Bizzel, this means including as much material (literary and otherwise) as
possible that is relevant to the issue being contested. Time periods can be short or long,
literatures of different groups, languages, or continents can be considered together, all
genres are admitted (167). One example of change in approach would be away ﬂom
“19th century British literature” to a speciﬁc contact zone such as “British - Aﬁican

contact in West Aﬁica ﬂom 1800 to 1920.” Bizzel notes that the priority in such a class

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would be to explore how each group (within a text) represented itself imaginatively in
relation to the others, rather than attempting to represent what groups were “really” like
(167).

This contact zone approach is extremely relevant in the context of exam
localization in Zimbabwe. As examination and curriculum planners attempt to make
subject areas such as history more relevant to Zimbabweans, they will also need to
realign the traditional boundaries of English language studies. This would mean
including materials ﬂom Zimbabwean writers that address relevant Zimbabwean contact
zones. In order to form an outline of those zones, it is necessary to engage in a close
reading of materials emanating ﬂom different periods in Zimbabwean history. The
period (and resulting contact zone) that the following chapter examines (in literary works)
is what might be called “twentieth-century Chimurenga society” with a special focus on
the late 19603 through the 19703.

In order to identify this zone it is necessary to engage in a careful reading of
Zimbabwean social history and literature. For a contact zone to take on a speciﬁc shape
with speciﬁc boundaries, it is important to examine the concept of a shared community.
The importance of addressing this issue becomes immediately apparent when one asks,
“What is Zimbabwean (or Russian, British, American for that matter) literature?” One
way of viewing narratives is to understand them as dialogues between an individual and
his or her community. This community can have a number of different historically
relevant layers-- racial, economic, gender, and linguistic. These layers are often

negotiated within the broader concept of “nation.” The boundaries contained in a

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narrative are dialogized in an ongoing and ever shifting interaction between the narrator,

characters, and readers.

When discussing how groups imaginatively represent themselves, Anderson’s
(1994) concept of “imagined communities” is pertinent. What are important factors in
the speciﬁc negotiation of imagined communities? According to Anderson, human
communities, or nations, exist as imagined entities in which people will never know most
of their fellow members, meet them or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives
the image of their communion (15). Anderson points to two factors in eighteenth century
Europe as vital for the birth of the concept of nation: the novel and the newspaper. Each
invention is able to support the idea of a sociological organism moving calendrically
through homogenous, empty time (31). While a bourgeoisie minority initially had access
to national print languages in reading and writing, this minority was key for building the
modern concept of nation states. What is striking about ex-colonial states, especially in
Aﬂica, is that the national print languages are used by a tiny ﬂaction of the population in
conversation or paper (Anderson, 1983). If, as Anderson posits, imagined communities
are generated ﬂom language communities (with national print access), Zimbabwe has a
number of communities (notably Shona and Ndebele) within the settler formed nation-
state. Anderson highlights the challenge to ex-colonial states like Zimbabwe as to
whether or not they can generate a politically sufﬁcient diffusion of bilingualism. I
would extend Anderson’s position to say that the challenge to a state like Zimbabwe is to
reimagine itself in relation to its plurality of language communities and colonially

inﬂuenced boundaries.

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As discussed by Pratt, this reirnagining is by no means a conﬂict ﬂee proposition.
Historical commentators point to a possible 16th - 17th century pre-colonial rivalry (often
drawn upon and exaggerated by current day political groups) between Ndebele and Shona
speaking groups. In addition, there is historical and archeological evidence of several
Shona speaking empires prior to Ndebele contact. More importantly, by closely
examining colonial contact, one may witness an uncomfortable disjunction, supported by

education, that Anderson (1994) comments upon:

In the colonies things were very different. Youth meant, above all, the ﬁrst generation in any
signiﬁcant numbers to have acquired a European education, marking them off linguistically and
culturally ﬂom their parents’ generation, as well ﬂom the vast bulk of their colonized agemates
. . .. In the colonies, then, by ‘Youth” we mean ‘Schooled Youth,’ at least at the start. This in
turns reminds us again of the unique role played by colonial school-systems in promoting
colonial nationalisrrrs. (Anderson, 109)

Students and teachers of the 20th century Zimbabwean contact zone, studying in English,
may ﬁnd themselves asking challenging and uncomfortable questions about the very
foundations and current practices of their educational system. When studying pre-
colonial society, they may also encounter issues that point to inter-group conﬂict that is

currently drawn upon by current political groups.

This is not to say that Zimbabweans cannot engage in a national dialogue in

English. Anderson points out that,

Nothing suggests that Ghanaian nationalism is any less real than Indonesian simply because its
national language is English rather than Ashanti. It is always a mistake to treat languages in the
way that certain nationalist ideologues threat them - as emblems of nation-ness, like ﬂags,
costumes, folk-dancers, and the rest. Much the most important thing about language is its
capacity for generating imagined communities, building in effect particular solidarities. After
all, imperial languages are still vemaculars, and thus particular vemaculars among many. (122)

108

As previously detailed, there is ample evidence to show that Zimbabweans -- Shona and
Ndebele speaking -- have chosen English as their language of formal education. The real
challenge is the implementation of what Anderson calls a “politically sufﬁcient diffusion
of bilingualism.” That is, the challenge in Zimbabwean education is for English to be
utilized as an instrument for national inclusion rather than exclusion.

What makes Anderson’s concept so intellectually promising is that it implies that
one can encounter the nation through an investigation of narratives. Bhabha builds upon

this line of inquiry in Nation and Narration:

To study the nation through its narrative address does not merely draw attention to its
language and rhetoric, it also attempts to alter the conceptual object itself. If the problematic
“closure” of textuality questions the “totalization” of national culture, then its positive value
lies in displaying the wide dissemination through which we construct the ﬁeld of meanings
and symbols associated with national life . . .. For the nation, as a form of cultural elaboration
(in the Gramscian sense), is an agency of ambivalent narration that holds culture at its most
productive position . . .. (3- emphasis Bhabha’s)

Here Bhabha is in part referring to Bakhtin’s rejection of monologic approaches to
language and literature. According to Bakhtin’s (1981) “dialogic imperative” the “pre-
existence of the language world releative to any of its current inhabitants, insures that
there can be no actual monolgue” (426). In addition to Bhabha’s agreement with this
imperative, he highlights the ambivalent character of examining the different layers that
make up a narrative. The narrative exists dialogically; the dialogue present in the
narrative constantly refers to a backgrounded order; this order may be perceived as a
collection of voices that make up the “nation.”

In Zimbabwe, a pedagogic approach that recognizes polyphony in narrative would
have the effect of opening up language education classrooms to an explicit examination

of identity that draws upon a dialogic approach to language, background knowledge, and

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historical context. Student teacher, and authorial background knowledge could be
equally validated through more personal examinations of different contact zone issues:
children who speak Shona as a ﬁrst language could choose to examine issues of
discrimination in texts ﬂom different time periods; English speaking children could
choose to examine issues ranging ﬂom neo-colonialism (often manifested in earlier
Zimbabwean writing) to cultural dislocation. These are all heteroglossic issues that most
Zimbabwean authors treat in their novels. Bizzel (1994) points out that by focusing
upon difference as an asset, students and teachers can understand how groups and
individuals represent themselves imaginatively in relation to others in texts. In addition,
by including historical context as an important factor, this approach offers a way to
initially focus on rhetorical analysis. Rather than maintaining the boundary between
content (literature) and the traditionally inferior pedagogy (composition), students can
more ﬂeely experiment in their own approaches to writing about texts (Bizzel, 1994),
bringing in their own background knowledge as members of the “nation.”

If, as stated by President Mugabe, the party platform, and the constitution, the
Zimbabwean government wishes to address issues of equity and relevance in education, it
could facilitate these goals by shifting its language education curriculum away ﬂom
largely institutionalized monolingual (English only) and monodialectal (standard written
forms) notions of literacy. Such a substantial move, not unlike the massive campaign
toward expanded access in the 19803, would transform the nature of Zimbabwe’s
language education system. It would entail coordination at the levels of teacher training,
curriculum design, and examination formation. As no market transformation can occur

without mass participation, parents and students would need to be deeply involved.

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Starting points for this involvement can be found in a reconceptualization of literacy
toward language socialization, and Pratt’s “contact zone” approach to language
education. How different would such an approach be ﬂom current English language
curriculum and examination practice in Zimbabwe?
National Reading Curriculum

An analysis of English reading curriculum guidelines is an important starting
point for assessing current practice; this is because educational planning and
implementation is extremely centralized in Zimbabwe. All primary curriculum guidelines
are formulated by an institution called the Curriculum Development Unit (CDU).
Secondary curriculum guidelines, linked closely with the examination system, are set at
the national level through a collaboration of Zimbabwean and UCLES curriculum
ofﬁcials. Textbooks are subject to governmental approval. Several companies produce
the overwhelming majority of textbooks in Zimbabwe.

In an effort to understand the general shape of early language education
guidelines in Zimbabwe, the national English reading syllabi for the third grade will be
examined. While third and fourth grades are the initial grades that English is ofﬁcially
supposed to enter the curriculum, it is interesting to note that the curriculum makes an
immediate distinction between students with pre-existing English competence, and

without. The following excerpts focus on the early goals of the language curricultun:

a) The syllabus for each Grade is based on a list of ﬁmctional objectives . . . Functional means
that the aim is not to practice language structures for their own sake, but to use language for
functional communication. Hence structures are introduced and taught with real-life purposes
in view (Grade 3 Syllabus, 1 - emphasis mine)

b) There is a division of the objectives between Core and Enrichment, The Core is the basic
language which all children should be able to learn for active use during the year. Enrichment

lll

consists of further suggestions to teachers whose classes, for one reason or another, have time
to explore a wider range of language. (Grade 3 Syllabus, l- emphasis mine)

c) With English L2 speakers, bear in mind their language and reading abilities in both
languages. (Grade 3 Syllabus, 41)

The ﬁrst important point to note is that the syllabus’s approach is termed
structural —fimctional. Not directly related to the use of the term in Chapter two, a
structural-functional syllabus means that language is broken up into discrete structures
(parts of speech), their use in everyday life or function (asking questions, making
statements) is identiﬁed, and a link is made between the structure and function.

The second point to note about the curriculum is that, while there is a real- life
“functional” focus to it, there is an accepted notion of separation between “those who
have a wider range” or “L2” and those who should stick to the “core” objectives. English
is a ﬁrst language for fewer than 5% of Zimbabwe’s population. Therefore, the
guidelines alert teachers to this minority and encourage their separation and pursuit of an
enriched portion of the curriculum. In addition, the wording of point e) is quite striking;
the cautionary “bear in mind” for English as a second language students seems out of
place as these students are the norm and not the exception. These excerpts show that
there are already distinctions based on English background knowledge present at the
beginning of third grade.

What is it that restricts the “range” of the majority of “core” English students? 13
there something lacking in their background knowledge? Zimbabwean students who are
not “enriched” most likely have little or no English literate background that they bring to
the English curriculum. Shona, Ndebele, Kalanga, Tonga, and Shangaan, ﬁrst languages

spoken the majority of the country, all have a long spoken traditions. Tannen (in Olson,

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1985) posits that the act of reading efﬁciently requires highly context -sensitive skills
rather than pure decoding. Much of the “reading wor ” that a reader does may be matter
of discerning a familiar text structure and hypothesizing what information will be
presented. In this sense, the interpretation of a written text differs ﬂom oral performance
in terms of immediate ﬂame of reference rather than interpretive abilities. Therefore, for
Zimbabwean students with mainly oral background knowledge and linguistic experience,
written language in the classroom presents unfamiliar ﬂames of reference. This is not to
say that unfamiliar ﬂames of reference automatically result in difﬁculty or failure in
textual interpretation; rather, a lack of awareness about differences in ﬂaming can
contribute to a less relevant language education practice for the majority. In addition, it
may make the task of learning to read more difﬁcult, and overall levels of reading
achievement may be lowered. It is this sensitivity to ﬂames of reference that is notably
lacking in the national syllabus. Most striking in the curriculum is the immediately
prescribed remediation for those who do not possess a “wider range” of English reading
ability. As third grade is the ﬁrst ofﬁcial transitional year for students, immediate
remediation suggests that only a minority will be able to function with advanced English
competence in higher grades; thus, current educational practice can be seen to reinforce a
functional-structural focus and the marginalization of the majority’s linguistic and
cultural background. This policy also accommodates the white minority population.

The potential strength of psycholinguistic reading theory for Zimbabwe is that it
offers a ﬂamework to conceptualize the reading process that incorporates the interaction
of reader background knowledge, text, and a wider sociolinguistic context. This model

also does not exclude the beginning/lower levels of the reading process such as letter and

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word recognition; it establishes an interaction between higher level processes such as
schema or ﬂame recognition and lower level strategies. Rather than remediation, a
psycholinguistic approach to reading would actively highlight the ﬂames within a written
text that may be problematic for some learners.

In 1992 at a primary teacher training college outside of Harare, I asked the head of
English subject training, “What theories or approaches do you utilize in your teaching of
reading?” The response was “I’m not sure what you mean, we teach reading here.” For
this teacher’s college, there was lack of an explicit conceptualization of the reading
process, or at least of alternatives to the approach currently employed. A preliminary
examination of the national English syllabus shows deﬁnite evidence of a naturalization
of symbolic dominance in the early reading curriculum; when joined with an analysis of
the English 0 level examination, a more complete view of language education becomes
possible. I would agree with former Education Minister Chung that one must take the
examination system into account -- especially the 0 level examination -- in order to
understand its inﬂuence upon the shape of the early reading syllabus.

The Zimbabwean-UCLES Ordinary Level Examination System

One European critic, Henry Latham (1877) pointed out that teaching in England was becoming
(just as it was, he said in France) subordinate to examinations rather than its master. (Spolsky
1995,21)

The secondary school cycle is comprised of three two year stages: Form 1 and 2;
Form 3 and 4; and Form 5 and 6. The result of the ZJ C examinations, taken at the end of
Form 2, are used to determine pupils’ interest and capabilities in order to channel them

into the appropriate Form 3 classes. Form 4 is not only terminal for the majority of

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pupils who attempt it, but it also controls access to tertiary institutions and to a better
paying job in the modern sector. Form 5 and 6 (Advanced level) studies prepare students
for entry into the university and other institutions of higher learning (Colclough 1990, 6).

The inﬂuence of the 0 level is felt much earlier in the system. The Zimbabwean
Junior Certiﬁcate (ZJ C), taken by primary school leavers, utilizes approaches similar to
the Zimbabwean-Cambridge 0 level system. At present, the ZJ C is a simpliﬁed version
of the 0 level English exam and is used as a practice exercise for the 0 level. In view of
examination pass rates (5% for an elementary cohort), the 0 level can be seen as the
highest goal that most school children can hope to achieve.

The 0 level examination system was fully localized by 1994. As mentioned in
Chapter two, localization meant a change-over to Zimbabweans of exam administration
duties and an inclusion of Aﬁican/Zimbabwean themes in some curriculum content areas;
it did not change any of the ways in which the English subject examinations, especially
the reading section, are formed or marked. The control that UCLES exerts over the
examination formation and marking process is considerable. A Chief Subject Examiner,
usually a headmaster who has taught English, drafts questions and marking schemes
collected by regional and local examiners. These examiners attend training sessions
conducted under the auspices of UCLES (Sadler 1996d, Rakuni, 1995). Questions and
marking schemes are then sent to the UCLES chief. The UCLES representative makes
comments, and the draft exam is amended in the light of those comments. The
examination is then printed, proof—read and vetted [approved] by a UCLES examiner

(Saddler, l996d). Once the exam has been administered by local Zimbabwean education

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ofﬁcials, local markers, paid by UCLES, mark the exams over a three-week period.
Roughly 600 exams are marked by every examiner (Sadler, 1996d).

The English 0 level exam formation and marking procedure before localization
and after were virtually identical (Sadler, 1996d). This consistency with earlier
examination marking procedures was initially seen to make sense as the training for
marking (during the localization process) was carried out by examiners ﬂom UCLES,
who would have followed the pattern as it is administered in the United Kingdom (Sadler,
l996d). The only change was the insertion of a second part to the comprehension paper,
which substitutes for an oral examination. It is a test of register in a variety of situational
responses. For example, the student is given a social scenario, and then asked to select
ﬂom several possible responses that would reﬂect his or her knowledge about social
register (usually level of formality) in speech. The marks available for this register
section slightly decreased the overall weighting of the rest of the comprehension section.

To give a feel for the reading section of the 0 level English section before and
after localization, I will provide a brief preliminary analysis of the reading sections of
exams ﬂom 1984 (UCLES), 1988 (UCLES), and 1994 (UCLES and Zimbabwean
Ministry of Education and Culture). It should be noted that the reading section forms
only one part of the English language exam. Other parts include graph interpretation,
guided writing, and social register judgment skills. This analysis will show that the
contextual ﬂaming of the readings and the reading questions have not been altered after
localization. The context and required background knowledge of the readings are
distinctly non-Zimbabwean. The questions require lexical knowledge (based on the text)

with a balance of schema comprehension skill required for short answer questions.

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The text of the 1984 reading section is an excerpt of a short story (source not cited
in examination) about three male mountain climbers traversing a gorge. The story is
written ﬂom the perspective of one of the climbers and describes, through detail and
dialogue, the harrowing experience of a climbing trip gone wrong. The questions
following the reading included 17 lexical and 8 comprehension item questions. The
lexical items ranged ﬂom synonym identiﬁcation to idiomatic explanation: “write a short
phrase that means the same as heldhimup”(UCLES 1984, 4). The comprehension
questions ranged ﬂom speciﬁc detail comprehension/inference, such as “which of the
men who held on to the rope was in ﬂont?”(4) To larger level, “Quote a short phrase and
a short sentence in which he does so [climber mentions his feelings], and in each case
explain in your own words what the feeling was” (4).

The 1988 reading is about the experiences of a male hunter turned photographer
in a wildlife reserve in Northern India. The story is written ﬂom the perspective of the
hunter and describes, mainly through reﬂection, the life of a hunter. The questions
following the reading included 18 lexical and 7 comprehension items. Lexical questions,
similar to the 1984 exam, included synonym items such as “Suggest one word or a short
phrase which could replace practically without changing the meaning” (U CLES 1988, 4)
and idiom questions such as “shQQLiLcleanly What does this mean?” (4) Comprehension
questions were also similarly formed with a speciﬁc schema focus such as “Say why
there was a ban on tiger-shooting” (4) to “explain why this [the title] is the title of the
story” (5).

The 1994 reading (part of the ﬁrst exam to be ofﬁcially localized) is about the

social effects of the 19th century industrial revolution and mass production. The excerpt

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is written ﬂom an historian’s point of view and describes the social life of workers of the
period in detail. The questions following the reading included seventeen lexical
information questions and three questions based on comprehension. Lexical questions
were similar to prior examinations: “Give one word or phrase which means the same as
again in line 16”(4). Comprehension questions were similar to earlier versions in that
they required short answers: “Apart ﬂom the advantages of being employed as a factory
worker, why did the weaver have to go to the machine?”(4).

Thus, beyond a shift in narrative voice (to historian), the 1994 localized exam
remains consistent with previous exams. The reading excerpts remain non-Zimbabwean
(mountain climbing, tiger hunting, and 19th century industrial setting) and require highly
non-Zimbabwean contextual knowledge for over-all schema comprehension. The
questions, lexical and comprehension, are based on full schema recognition. Each exam
requires about the same load of lexical and text comprehension, within two or three items.
This preliminary view of the exams shows that very little has changed before and alter
localization. The conformity in lexical and schema items of these examinations suggests
that a priority has been placed upon consistency and thus the maintenance of the “English
standar ” legitimation. That is, while history may be contextualized, English language is
a non-Zimbabwean context oriented subject.

This ﬁnding weakens Spolsky’s claim (Spolsky, 1995) that the 1987 international
Cambridge syllabus reﬂects the major trends in language teaching -- speciﬁcally in the
areas of authenticity of reading texts, and the need to avoid culture bias. These principles
are not evidenced in the reading section before or after localization. As the 0 level

localization was a collaborative effort, it is difﬁcult to know to what degree Zimbabwean

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scholars shaped the localization of the reading section. It may be the case that
Zimbabweans overrode possible UCLES concerns about textual authenticity and cultural
sensitivity in favor of consistency with previous English language examination content.

The distinctly “non-local” and narrow vocabulary-schema nature of the English
language section has an impact upon examination results and even upon approaches to
English language teaching. Teachers aware of the general 0 level format and content are
likely to have students engage in isolated word memorization without regard to
Zimbabwean contextual relevance. The inﬂuential non-Zimbabwean nature of the 0
level English language section has yet to be reshaped as History and other subjects were
in the initial localization efforts. A true English language localization would entail two
main approaches: 1) selecting reading texts that are more closely related to background
knowledge to which a majority of Zimbabwean candidates have access; 2) offering
lexical and comprehension items that emanate ﬂom those texts. In addition, localization
of English cuniculum and examination practice would include a reshaped notion literacy
that draws upon previously discussed psycholinguistic theories of reading.

This discussion of relevance in the curriculum and testing raises a larger question
about reading evaluation in general. What if these questions were to be given to British
or American students? Would the same non-local argument still hold? I believe it
would. The concepts of background knowledge and ﬂames of reference remain salient.
Frames of reference are a part of background knowledge as they draw upon a student’s
language learning experience. Beyond this issue, there is one critical difference between
a US/British contexts and Zimbabwe: English is a second language to a majority of

Zimbabweans. An adherent to the psycholinguistic approach to reading would suggest

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that a Zimbabwean student is engaging in two processes when a distinctly non-local text
is drawn upon for an examination: 1) lower level letter/word recognition, and; 2) higher
level schema formation and recognition that draws upon background knowledge. In view
of the linguistic market of English education in Zimbabwe, my position is that a true
localization of the 0 level reading section would include reading excerpts ﬂom
Zimbabwean authors that draw upon Zimbabwean background knowledge. Part of this
dissertations central thesis, to be developed in chapter four, is that Zimbabwean authors
tend to draw upon Zimbabwean background knowledge in their writing; speciﬁcally, they
produce a narrative discourse that has multiple levels of relevance for Zimbabweans.
Giroux’s advocacy of transformative pedagogy is an initial step in the
development of a resource for language education that addresses issues of relevance and
equity for the individual A further step needs to be made, especially in Aﬂican countries,
to expand the concept of literacy; this expansion must take into account both oral and
written modes of language socialization. It must recognize, as Moraes (1996) has pointed

out in her Bahktinian approach to language education, that

language is, in itself, social because language would not exist if there were no social
intercourses. The dialogic linguistic exchange, in which there occurs dynamic interrelations
among people’s consciousness, neither exists outside people’s context and their historical
location, nor outside interpenetrating relationships with another’s reactions or another’s word.
(40)

The current approach in Zimbabwean language education is monologic and monoglotic in
the sense that it values one speciﬁc form of one language over all others: standard British
English. Failure to engage in a reconceptualization of literacy and to unite literacy policy

and practice would probably lead to a treatment of surface issues, and even possibly

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legitimate the current status quo of English symbolic domination by ﬁrst language
speakers of English.
Agents of Change?

One could argue that, once independence was achieved in 1980, schools have not
been viewed as sites for social change but rather social maintenance. The central issue,
ﬂom a transfonnative perspective, is to what degree schools can be expected to be sites
for social change. Dzvimbo (1988) has pointed out that even if teachers start out viewing
themselves as agents of social change, the school environment that they enter can be
extremely constraining (cited in Graham-Brown, 1991). To what degree would teachers,
usually underpaid and overworked, feel motivated to adopt a dialogic approach to literacy
in their classrooms?

VanSlyck (1997) posits that Pratt’s concept of the contact zone is helpful for
teachers because it would allow them the opportunity to position more speciﬁcally in a
pedagogic space along with students. VanSlyck personalizes this approach when she
says,

I want students to acquire the analytic skills that will bring about a reﬂective, dialogic approach
to any given text and to the cultural issues it raises, and I want them to feel that we (all of the
members of the class, including the instructor) have shared in the construction and execution of
this dialogue. This can be achieved only if I identify myself, like everyone else, as an
individual speaking ﬂom a speciﬁc subject position and as someone who does not have all the
answers. ( 1 53)

Thus, the teacher is being included as an active member of the class; as an active
member, she is attempting to explore her own subject position in the contact zone along
with students. Whether or not teachers would be able to utilize such an approach as a
language teaching resource remains an open question. In my own observations and

questioning of Zimbabwean teachers and teacher trainers, I found a general lack of

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satisfaction with the centralized, decontextualized, test-driven nature of the language
curriculum.

The issues of whether teachers view themselves as “part of the class” as well as
agents of change points to larger political issues that have been discussed by F reire.
Known as the pioneer of movements that have been termed “popular education”
(Graham-Brown, 1991) and “liberation pedagogy,” Freire does not view literacy as a
simple skill or technique to be acquired. Rather, it is a means to empower people by
enabling them to understand, “name,” and eventually inﬂuence or change forces of
political and economic oppression that they encounter. F reire believed that is was the
role of educators to assist students by empowering them with a form of critical literacy
that would lead to eventual political change. During the mid-19703 Freire directly
participated in a collaborative popular literacy project with the government of Guinea-
Bissau. While not evaluative in nature, a collection of correspondence, Pedagogy in
Process: the letters to Guinea-Bissau (1978) provides evidence of his support of the
collaboration. Currently, there are collections of individual classroom studies, but there
are so far no documented works that systematically evaluate national approaches to
popular education in Aﬁica. The closest related works tend to combine individual
classroom experiences with a position of advocacy for popular education at the national
level (Rubagumya, 1994).

Freirian approaches to literacy education have been advocated in the Zimbabwean
context. Black resistance to the Rhodesian government in the 19703 was the backdrOp to
the intellectual formation of Zimbabwean reading theorist Toby Moyana. Moyana drew

extensively on Freire to discuss what he viewed as negative practices among the black

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Zimbabwean elite uncritically pursuing English language education. For Moyana, one
sign of this pursuit was the practice of artiﬁcially “speaking through the nose” with a
British accent (Moyana, 1988). He saw this practice as a sign of larger systematic issues.
Moyana noted that F reire saw the uncreativity of colonized people; a person is reduced to
a spectator not a recreator of the world. Moyana’s goal as an educator (he was a
secondary teacher in Zimbabwe) was to produce a meaningful form of literacy practice
that led to a “control of reality for one’s own betterment.” This approach included the
Freirian practice of listing and association to draw out bases of meaning for students to
pursue critical English literacy acquisition. According to Moyana, the language of
domination could turn into the language of new consciousness when focused on the
realities of the oppressed. Moyana’s work, Education, Liberation and the Creative Act
was published posthumously in 1988 after a tragic car accident silenced this important
voice in F reirian inspired scholarship. Until recently there have been no outstanding
literacy experts in Zimbabwe to continue Moyana’s line of Freirian inﬂuenced
scholarship. The most recent contribution is Natsa’s (1994) doctoral dissertation. Natsa
surveyed 810 English and Shona teachers and conducted classroom observations of 16 of
them in order to investigate secondary school language teachers’ conceptions of literacy
and how these conceptions relate to literacy instruction in Zimbabwe (N atsa, 1994).

At the national level, there is currently little support in government circles or at
University of Zimbabwe for research into Freirian approaches to education (N atsa,
1994). Graham-Brown (1991) has pointed out two main obstacles for the inclusion of
popular education experiments, especially in developing nations: 1) Organizations

involved ﬂequently need to rely on funding ﬂom external sources; 2) The concept of

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education as a received package of knowledge affects people as well as governments, and
there are often difﬁculties in persuading people that this is “proper” education, especially
if there is no certiﬁcation (72). For Zimbabwe, an additional obstacle for popular
education initiatives may be the highly centralized nature of educational planning. The
President and head of the one party state, Robert Mugabe, is also the head of the
University; all teacher training colleges are supervised by the University; the government
pays all teachers salaries and; all curriculum is state approved. Due to these close
linkages of the state and education, there may be an inherent conservatism built into
Zimbabwe’s system: when one questions the status quo in education (as popular
education does), one indirectly questions the legitimacy of the state.

Freire’s promise of a popular education that empowers language learners has a
clear role in the post-settler context of Zimbabwean society. That role is to make the
teaching and learning of reading more relevant by drawing upon reader background
knowledge. The direct implication ﬂom this view is that Zimbabwe needs to move away
ﬂom an examination system that disempowers students and teachers and forces them into
pursuing a monoglotic (British English) approach in language education. Texts that tap
directly into student background knowledge tend to emanate ﬂom Zimbabwean society,
not British. The speciﬁc shape of language education advocated by this chapter is one
that draws upon a sociocultural view of literacy and a contact zone pedagogy in the
classroom. This approach, which unites literacy theory and with practice, would have the
effect of opening up language education classrooms to an explicit examination of identity
that draws upon a dialogic approach to language, background knowledge, and historical

context.

TOWARD DIALOGUE: AN INVESTIGATION OF VOICES FROM THE
INSIDE

Clearly, it is one thing to advocate a new approach to language education, and
quite another to engage in an investigation of dialogue within a speciﬁc contact zone.
Zimbabwean novelists, through their investigation of identity in language and use of
different strategies in narration, represent a natural resource for pedagogy of the contact
zone. In addition, approaching Zimbabwean novelists ﬂom a language education
perspective furnishes a new dynamic for the interpretation of Zimbabwean literature. This
dynamic is generated through a relational interaction in which the reader, narrator, and
represented characters are shown to be simultaneously engaged in dialogue.

This approach to literary interpretation utilizes Pratt’s concept of “the pedagogical
arts of the contact zone” (1991). Because a contact zone is bounded by time and space, it
allows one to view a literary work in relation to all relevant material (literary, cultural,
historical, biographical, and others) within the zone (Bizzell, 1994). Pedagogical arts of

the contact zone then become, in Pratt’s words,

exercises in storytelling and in identifying with the ideas, interests, histories, and attitudes of
others; experiments in transculturation and collaborative work and in the arts of critique,
parody, and comparison (including unseemly comparisons between elite and vernacular cultural
forms); the redemption of the oral; ways for people to engage with suppressed aspects of history
(including their own histories); ways to move into and out of rhetorics of authenticity; ground
rules for communication across lines of difference and hierarchy that go beyond politeness but
maintain mutual respect; a systematic approach to the all-important concept of cultural
mediation. (4O - emphasis in original)

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125

By proposing a reshaping of literary study into contact zones, Pratt opens up a
pedagogical space for students and teachers to more ﬂeely investigate multiple levels of
identity--multiple voices-- in a speciﬁc social and historical context.

This approach is especially suited for an investigation of the intersection of
literary interpretation and pedagogy; the text is seen as a product of an individual drawing
upon multiple levels of identity in an historical context. The speciﬁc contact zone for this
investigation will be the representation of Shona society in transition during the late
19603 and early 19703, at the peak of Aﬁican resistance to the Rhodesian white settler
regime. This strategy, related to Miller’s (1990) project to engage in a dialogic
interpretation, is aimed primarily at understanding the interpretive space of Zimbabwean
readers.

It is important to note that this analysis should not be interpreted as an all
encompassing “how to” guide for Zimbabwean secondary teachers for the teaching of
literature. To be prescriptive in this area would be to engage in the same top-down
approach that has been highlighted as a key problem in Zimbabwean education. Teachers
need to build upon the background knowledge represented in their classrooms. Rather
than a prescription then, the implications of this analysis will be understood differently by
Zimbabwean educators at various levels and in various contexts. As will be discussed in
the chapter, all of these authors come ﬂom Shona backgrounds; all are at least secondary
school educated; all have written complex novels that are internationally famous. Due to
the level of language, an appropriate target audience for these novels would be students in

their second or third year of secondary education. Teachers and students wishing to fully

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tap into suggested themes would also want to ﬁnd additional interpretive resources to
bring to this speciﬁc contact zone (as this dissertation does).

While the incorporation of the concept of contact zone may contribute to the
reshaping of critical literary study and language education pedagogy, it is also important
to focus on what the author actually does in his or her narrative. Gennette’s narratolology
will be utilized as a way of engaging in a closer reading that recognizes the formal
aspects of each author’s unique narrative approach. Zimbabwean authors ﬂame time and
space in importantly different ways in their narratives. Zimbabwe’s most inﬂuential
English authors, Mungoshi, Marechera, Chinodya, Hove, and Dangarembga, create
markedly different narratives, all set in the period of the second Chimurenga. These
distinct narrative styles have speciﬁc implications for how Zimbabwean readers may
enter into dialogue with the novels.

Authors, Teachers and Audience

Before engaging in literary interpretation, three important issues must be
addressed: Who is the audience for Zimbabwean writers who write in English? Can
traditionally powerful Western market forces be “decentered” or “reshaped” in a
Zimbabwean language education context? Even if we accept that a reshaping can take
place, is its transformative potential grossly overrated?

Harrow (1994) posits that two major themes, present in early Aﬁican literary
works, are recuperation (in the French sense of salvaging), and education. These themes
are represented through the use of devices of rrrimetism, intended to serve the need for
education or social meliorism (61). Harrow views Achebe as a prime example of an

author who views his work this way: “[T]he past needs to be created not only for the

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enlightenment of our detractors but even more for our own education”(cited in Harrow,
61). Of the three Zimbabwean authors chosen for this chapter’s narrative analysis, Hove
is the one that comes closest to viewing (and discussing) his own writing in this way:
“Writers have this immense responsibility of persuading the world to listen to the many
cries of Aﬂica. . . . Aﬁican writers have to perform the task of helping to awaken the
consciences of the world. . . ..”(Hove in Veit-Wild 1993, 314). In addition to his sense of
“writer as representative,” Hove has a speciﬁc view of how Aﬁican writers can
rediscover oral forms through the act of creation in writing: “We owe the world the
complex fusion of the arts so ably celebrated in our dances and rituals. . . combined in a
unique artistic harmony. . .which makes fascinating reading today” (314). Hove’s
intention is to “cleanse” the colonial language (English), “to the extent of representing
them [oral forms] to our former colonizers as languages which can be used to depict
human dignity, not human slavery and anger”(3 14 - emphasis mine). As inspiration,
Hove invokes “the great masters of oral narrative to whom we are accountable” (314).
When discussing “salvage,” “education,” and “cleansing,” Harrow, Achebe, and even
Hove tend to emphasize the “double voice” of Aﬂican literature: Aﬂican novels are
directed at a former colonial audience as well as an Aﬁican one.

In order for literature to be dialogical, however, it must have a literate audience in
a shared language. The debate over who the audience is for writers who write in English
has traditionally been represented by two key authors: Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Chinua
Achebe. Ngugi, often termed an “idealist” for his views, asserts that only Aﬂican

languages can represent Aﬁican thoughts:

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An African writer should write in a language that will allow him to communicate effectively
with peasants and workers in Aﬁica - in other words, he should write in an African language. . .
. Literature published in African languages will have to be meaningful to the masses and
therefore much closer to the realities of their situation. (N gugi 1986, 153).

Ngugi’s position is that African writers who write in a former metropolitan
language should be called “anglophone,” “ﬂancophone,” or “lusophone writers.” For
Ngugi, the natural development of Aﬂican languages and cultures was violently displaced
in the late 19th century by European colonial powers. He posits that the proliferation of a
“Euro-African literature” in Aﬁica is evidence of the continuation of cultural
imperialism. This literature is written primarily for the consumption of a small Aﬁican
elite and wider international audience. While this view is initially persuasive, it is
distinctly non-Bakhtinian in the sense that it omits the concept of double-voicedness. For
Ngugi, multiple voices (Aﬂican and European) are not present in a narrative discourse
written in a European language: the discourse is European, and therefore foreign to a
majority of Aﬂicans. Ngugi de-emphasizes the polyglot nature of most Aﬁican societies.
Furthermore, Ngugi does not draw upon the concept of inﬂuential market forces -- forces
that affect the work of even ideologically committed authors. As Miller (1990) points
out, “Ngugi’s anti-imperialist intention may be subverted by the forces of the market; the
material text may be appropriated for mass consumption in English” (286).

Achebe offers what has been termed a more “pragmatic” view: “I have been
given this language, and I intend to use it” (Achebe 1977, 55). He states, “the conscious
creative Aﬂican writer who wishes to use English as a literary medirun has to struggle to
adapt this medium to the sociocultural environment” (Achebe 1965, 29). Rather than

writing in standard English however, Achebe has chosen to “Aﬁicanize” the language by

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integrating proverbs and utilize some syntactic features that are “at once acceptable and
able to carry his particular experience” (29). Ngugi views this attempt to Aﬁicanize
English as accepting a “fatalistic logic” -- i.e., that English occupies an unassailable
position in Aﬂican literature. Unlike Ngugi, Achebe draws upon a sense of polyphony:
he believes that Aﬁican voices can be evoked in English. In addition, the concept of
market forces is implied by Achebe’s acceptance of the market position of English in
Nigeria; however, he fails to elaborate on how those forces may directly inﬂuence his
own work.

While Ngugi points out the contradictions of a “Euro-Aﬂican literature” and an
accompanying publishing/scholar industry, Amove (1993) posits that Ngugi “quickly
falls back on a conﬂation of a)cultural imperialism, or the incorporation of the educated
classes into the colonial educational and political institutions; and b)imperialism as a
speciﬁc historical mode of capitalist exploitation that establishes particular forms of
political domination in the interest of its stability of and expansion (282). In other words,
it may be the case that there is a limited effect upon Aﬂican language practices, while
wider colony/nation-state integration into the global economic system is taking place.
For Amove, Ngugi’s Decolonizing the Mind (1986) rests upon a confusion between the
categories of hegemonization (incorporation), domination, exploitation, and on a
generalization ﬂom Ngugi’s experience as a member of the educated elite (283). This
distinction between categories is relevant when one considers that colonial hegemony, in
the systematic form of educational institutions, was unevenly achieved among different

colonies (284).

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In the case of Zimbabwe, the actual numbers of those who readily draw upon
English as a language of communication and expression remains uncertain. There are
few detailed studies about the full extent of European language use and literacy. As
previously noted, literacy rates in 1980 were estimated between 30-40%, while they are
currently estimated at around 60-70% (Colclough, 1990). These estimates, if even
roughly accurate (within 20%), would put general English literacy in a different position
ﬂom that in Kenya or Nigeria, where literacy rates are much lower. It is important to
note that these percentages reﬂect potential access to English reading; being literate does
not necessarily imply that one will read novels. As shown in chapter two, Zimbabwean
parents and children have overwhelmingly chosen (probably for economic reasons) an
English based education since the early 19003. Regardless of the percentages and
attitudes, Amove raises the important point, especially for Zimbabwean readers, that
English use is undeniably reﬂective of a superior market position for the user.

Miller views these issues of audience dialogue as fundamental to the success of
his project in Theories of Africans (1990). For Miller, a careful approach to Aﬂican
literature is one in which the interpreter recognizes his relative position and attempts to

dialogue with the text:

[T]he failure to relativize one’s own beliefs is more dangerous than the failure to stay within
them. Unless the Western critic attempts to suspend-hold in at least temporary abeyance-the
systematic criteria and judgments that emanate ﬂom Western culture, ethnocentrism will persist
forever. . . The Western critic must, of course, avoid the converse error, that of being deluded
into thinking his/her beliefs have been completely suspended and that his/her analysis is
transcendentally “free.”. . . my response to the bind of relativism is neither to seek some
miraculous solution to it nor to ignore the real problems it poses; relativism both underpins and
undercuts an intellectual endeavor like this one. . . .I will therefore not pretend to transcend or
abandon the American academic scene, but ﬂom within it I will attempt a dialogue with another
scene, whose issues and language are partially, problematically different. (65 - emphasis
Miller’s)

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At a 1994 ASA conference panel on new approaches to African literature, the differences
in the critical stances of Miller and Harrow were discussed metaphorically. Miller
compared his approach to viewing Aﬁican literature “through a glass” -- with
accompanying reﬂactions and difference for readers outside of the cultural context.
Harrow related his approach to engaging in an “embrace” -- with its accompanying love
enabling and arising ﬂom direct contact (ASA, 1994).

While both metaphors highlight an ongoing discussion in literary criticism, this
representation of the reading transaction may be of more use to Western critics than
Aﬂican readers. The context or ﬁeld of literary interpretation itself, largely dominated by
Western critics, can pose problems in approaching African literature: the “double voice”
of Aﬁican narratives (addressed to both an Aﬂican and Western audience) may become
more monologic due to a number of factors. After examining Kouromna’s attempts to
subvert elite ﬂancophone patriarchy in Les Soleils des independances (1970), Miller
(1990) recognizes that historical, national and market forces themselves inﬂuence the

ﬂames of interpretation for a work:

Dialogism within a certain ﬂame can ultimately serve a monological end; reciprocity may be a
trap. . . . A critical novel such as Les Soleils des independances can be coopted, and it has been
in the Ivory Coast, in the sense that the book now circulates ﬂeely and poses no threat to the
regime. (244-5)

As a separate but related issue, can a close reading of Zimbabwean novels be
expected to be educationally transformative? According to Holquist (1990), Bakhtin was

optimistic about the potential of novels in this regard:

On this account [the pedagogical potential of dialogic reading], literary texts do not merely
reﬂect changes in development, but also serve to bring them about. Literary texts are tools;
they serve as a prosthesis of the mind. As such, they have a tutoring capacity that materially
effects change by getting from one stage of development . . .Novelness, and not just the novel,

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is the name of Bakhtin’s hero because it enables such particular texts [polyphonic ones] . . . .to
be “great expectations,” i.e. good education in the Bakhtinian sense of putting the future into
dialogue by being always in advance of current states of consciousness. (83)

This view of the pedagogic potential of novels is one that is in agreement with a contact
zone view of literary works; the use of polyphonic texts allow an individual to explore
“states of consciousness” in language. Zimbabwean language curriculum does not
currently offer the opportunity to speciﬁcally engage in dialogic language education.
For Eagleton (1983), the belief in the transformative capacity of literary study is

overrated, especially by what he terms the “liberal humanist” establishment:

[This belief] is weak because it usually grossly overestimates this tranformative power,
considers it in isolation ﬂom any determining social context, and can formulate what it means
by a “better person” only in the most narrow and abstract of terms. . . .Liberal humanism is a
suburban moral ideology, limited in practice to largely interpersonal matters. (207)

While Eagleton’s position is concerned mainly with the practice of literary study at
Western universities, his critique is appropriate: it points to a need to be skeptical of
literary approaches that emanate ﬂom an academy composed mainly of Western critics.
By ﬂaming the analysis within the secondary language education context of Zimbabwe,
this chapter’s analysis will be decentered ﬂom a purely academic literary approach. At
the same time, two approaches that are utilized in the Academy -- dialogism and
narratology -- will be drawn upon as speciﬁc ways of focusing the interpretation on an

investigation of levels of identity relevant to Zimbabwean readers.

Narrative focus: Genette’s Narratology

While social-historical context is important for investigating the dialogue between

Zimbabwean writers and readers, it is important to analyze the speciﬁc shape of the

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narrative itself. How are time and space brought together? How is polyphony speciﬁcally
evoked? Who is the narrator? Who is the implied narratee? Genette proposes ﬁve main
categories (with accompanying subcategories) for narrative investigation: order, duration,
ﬂequency, mood, and voice. Two categories that are most salient for this analysis are

“mood” and “voice.”

According to Eagleton (1983), “mood” can be subdivided into “distance” and

“perspective.”

Distance concerns the relation of the narration to its own materials: is it a matter of recounting
the story (diegesis) or representing it (mirnesis), is the narrative told in “direct,” “indirect” or
“free indirect” speech? “Perspective” is what might be called “point of view,” and can also be
subdivided: the narrator may know more than the characters, less then them, or on the same
level; the narrative may be ‘non-focalized,” delivered by an omniscient narrator outside the
action, or “internally focalized,” recounted by one character ﬂom a ﬁxed position, ﬂom variable
positions, or ﬂom several character-viewpoints. (105-6)

When attempting to understand the nature of a narrative, speciﬁc attention must be paid
to the constantly shifting nature of who is doing the speaking (narrator, character) and the
speaker’s represented position (within or outside the text). The narrative can be focalized
completely through a character in the text (for internal focalization) or upon a character
(for external focalization). The latter refers to a focus upon the actions and dialogue of a

character without the reader knowing what he is thinking or feeling.

“Voice” concerns the act of narrating itself -- what kind of narrator and narratee

are implied?

Various combinations are possible here between the “time of the narrative” and the “narrated
time” between the action of recounting the story and the events which you recount: you may tell
of the events before, after or while they happen. A narrator may be “heterodiegetic” (absent
ﬂom his own narrative), homodiegetic” (inside his narrative as in ﬁrst-person stories), or
“autodiegetic” (in which he is not only inside the narrative but ﬁgures as its principal character).
( 106)

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In Genette’s (1980) view, “I” in a narrative is identiﬁable only in reference to the person
who is the source of the utterance, and the action described is understood in relation to
the implied moment of the utterance (212). One must necessarily tell a story in a present,
past, or future tense - temporal determinations of the narrating instance are manifestly
more important than spatial determinations (215). In combination with temporal markers,
Gennette views the novelist’s choice of narrative postures as inﬂuential; i.e., the story
may be told by one of its characters or by a narrator outside of the story. From this
general distinction, Gennette goes on to classify three types of narratives: heterodiegetic,
homodiegtic, or autodiegetic. From a Bakhtinian perspective, these modes of narrative
representation become important for investigating voices that may enter the text at
different levels (narrator, character) and refer to different historical ﬂames. These ﬂames

can enter the story ﬂom national and international levels.

The analysis of this chapter utilizes Gennette’s narratology as a way of moving
the discussion of Zimbabwean novels away ﬂom subjective historical j udgment. Rather,
the focus will be upon the formal features of how authors evoke Zimbabwean polyphony
in their narratives. Mungoshi employs an omniscient narrative voice that explores the
thoughts and feelings of his characters when facing settler inﬂuenced social constraints
across several generations of characters. Hove creates a unique (Shona-evoking)
homodiegetic narrative in several characters while examining the life of a farm worker in
search of her son. Dangarembga’s autodiegetic narrator reﬂects upon her social
conditions and the development of her feminist consciousness.

Zimbabwean Literary Analysis

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Writers in Zimbabwe write ﬂom a full range of subjective historical ﬂames, ﬂom
Rhodesian expatriate Doris Lessing to Zimbabwean nationalist Chenjerai Hove. The
focus here will be upon writers who write in English, and who also evoke an Aﬂophonic
subtext that emerges ﬂom the interstices of the text (Harrow, 1994). Expanding upon
Bakhtin’s concept of dialogization of heteroglossia in the novel, Harrow (1994) posits
that Aﬂican writers produce polyphonic texts. Polyphony requires speciﬁc attention in
Aﬂican literature: “[I]n Africa, this basis is what is most heavily overlaid with
palirnpsests and echoes, voices that are forceﬁrlly unspoken” (51). In essence, different
languages (European and African) and different forms of language socialization (written
and oral) are represented in the narrative. This characteristic shapes a narrative in which
there is a “complex weave of voices and registers, with full heteroglossia ”(52). A direct
implication for readers of these texts is educational function. Voices dialogue with and
educate readers about the world they live in. While Hove has been explicit about the
mimetic shaping of his work, it will be shown that both Mungoshi and Dangarembga

engage in the creation of mimetic art as well.

Within the polyphonic narratives in Zimbabwean literature, there are speciﬁc
historical inﬂuences upon the negotiation of identity. In contrast to many Aﬁican states,
Zimbabwe has a history of strong internal European settler inﬂuence -- white settler
inﬂuence transformed the economy and society of what is now Zimbabwe. While this
historical experience leads Zimbabwean writers to thematize conﬂicts and tensions
between Aﬁican and European culture (a feature of Aﬁican literature posited by Harrow,

1994), it can also lead them to represent such conﬂict at the level of individual identity.

136

This is especially the case for Mungoshi and Dangarembga, with their attention on the
internal psychological effects of an oppressive settler inﬂuence upon their characters.
Within the oppressive settler context, formal educational experience (with attention to
issues of English language socialization and historical context) has played an important
role in inﬂuencing Zimbabwean writers in the development of their narrative styles and
themes.

A pioneer in the social history of Zimbabwean literary production, Flora Veit-
Wild has amassed a wealth of biographical and social history in her work Teachers,
Preachers, Non-Believers (1993). Inspired by Irele’s advocacy for utilizing an
understanding of socio-political factors and authors’ responses to these factors (Irele,
1991), Veit -Wild attempts to create a comprehensive view of Zimbabwean literature in
the vernacular and English. Administering an open-ended questionnaire to ninety-six
published Zimbabwean authors, she has roughly classiﬁed this massive number of
authors into three generations in order to discuss generational trends in Zimbabwean
social history and literature. The authors chosen for this dissertation include authors ﬂom
those born in Veit-Wild’s second (1940-59 Mungoshi, Hove) and third (1960-later
Dangarembga) generational categories of Zimbabwean writers.

In attempting to make generalizations across such an expanse of material, Veit-
Wild has simpliﬁed certain levels of biographical/historical interpretation. One
consequence of this approach is for Veit-Wild to classify authors according to whether
they have “succeeded” or “failed” to represent Zimbabwean “reality” (in the singular).
Chennels (1993) has characterized this tendency in Veit-Wild’s work as “political

correctness”:

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These remarks, however assume that perceived formal failures in the novel derive from perceived
political incorrectness. She is, of course being “politically correct” in suggesting that there was
only one possible way of looking at the events of the late 19703; that is her prerogative. But as a
critic I have to protest at the simplistic political judgments being offered as cause for ill-analyzed
defects at the formal level. (116)

Veit-Wild’s ability to read Zimbabwean literature tends to rest less upon her ability to
“open” a text for Zimbabweans, and more upon her personal view of historical reality.
Veit-Wild sets up a seemingly static relationship between the individual and history; that
relationship is marked by acceptance of English cultural hegemony. Those writers whom
Veit-Wild interprets as deferring to the inevitability of English cultural hegemony over
the Zimbabwean majority become more “authentic” (Mungoshi and Dangarembga) while

those who resist it are portrayed as “faking it” (Hove).

How each author depicts English hegemony is also highlighted by their
representation of language socialization among different characters and in the narrative
voice. Through an omniscient narrator speaking in the present tense, Mungoshi
mimetically represents contrasts in language socialization between different generations.
Hove creates a Shona-like narrative voice that is shared by all of the narrative positions,
thereby suppressing difference. In a shifting “dream time,” the different narrators address
the reader and other characters, leaving the impression of ongoing oral participation in a
Shona community. Dangarembga, due to her employment of autodiegetic narration, also
suppresses difference in language socialization by focalizing represented dialogue
through an analytical retrospective English voice. In the case of Hove and
Dangarembga’s works, the prominence “English voice” is represented more at the level

of the character’s negotiation of different socio-ideological forces.

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Charles Mungoshi

Born in 1947 in a village in Manyene Tribal Trust Land near current day Chivhu
(central Eastern Zimbabwe), Mungoshi’s early years were spent helping his father on a
small plot of land between large European farms (V eit-Wild 1992, 269). By 1959 he
went to Daramombe boarding school for standard four. From 1963 to 1966 Mungoshi,
attended St. Augustine’s secondary school. St. Augustine's was and is a school with a
reputation of hard work, often leading to admittance to the University of Zimbabwe
(Tsodzo, 1997). Unlike most other writers, especially those writing in English, Mungoshi
did not pursue further education beyond 0 levels. He is also an exception among most
Zimbabwean writers because he never worked as a teacher (V eit-Wild 1992, 273). One
of the most inﬂuential and proliﬁc of Zimbabwean writers, Mungoshi has published over
forty novels and short stories in both English and Shona, and his Shona stories are often
used as readers for primary and secondary school (274).

The period in which Mungoshi received his primary and secondary schooling --
the 19503 through the 703 -- was a period not only of political but also racially based
economic stress. Aﬁican parents were expected to ﬁnance their children’s education
while white education was ﬁrlly subsidized. In 1965, missions and parents shouldered
half of the entire African educational budget of the year (Moyana, 1979) . Regardless of
blatant ﬁnancial and social discrimination based on race, Zimbabwean parents viewed
education as a priority for their children. Sometimes the whole family stepped in to
secure the education of a child. Veit-Wild (1993) has noted that parents and other
relatives had the highest expectations of the results of their investment; this, in turn could

create great tension in the beneﬁciaries. According to Veit-Wild, the emotional strain of

139

high expectations was aggravated by the bottlenecked selection process to which the
Aﬁican pupil was subjected. Black students could watch their white age-mates
comfortably pursuing their “right” to education up to ﬁfteen years of age, while they had
try their utmost to be among the 12.5 per cent [among a small school population to begin
with] who were allowed to progress up to O level.

Mungoshi, a pre-O level student in the 19603, may have ended up choosing a
writing career as a result of this institutionalized racial selection process. In an interview

with Veit Wild (1993), he states:

When I discovered that I wanted to be an “inventor” and was told that no Africans ever became
“inventors” (wrong information probably) I was so depressed I concentrated on writing
(politics). Also when I discovered that all I wanted to do was write, I found this conﬂicting
with my teachers’ (later parents’) expectations and when I didn’t do other subjects there was a
never-ending conﬂict in me. (184)

While Mungoshi employs irony in his parenthesis, his comments on being directed into a
different stream of education correspond to a retention of Phelps-Stokesism in the
educational system during the early 19603. The Unilateral Declaration of Independence
(UDI) in 1967 intensiﬁed racial segregation in education. In 1967, the Rhodesian
government spent 15 times as much on a European child (120 pounds) as on an Aﬂican
child (eight pounds) (V eit-Wild, 1993). Mungoshi, who did not progress beyond the 0
level, comments on the degree to which societal pressure (and the curriculum that

accompanied it), affected his self-image:

Our reading of English stories was making us painfully feel backward in the creative art of story
-writing. I say painfully to emphasize the psychological anguish we were undergoing - the
background from which we carved our stories and novels, especially those written in English
and Shona.. . I felt, could not adequately express half of what I felt. It was a real feeling; that
Shona was inadequate. . .I personally experienced something more than just an uneasiness over
my uncertain, identityless existence as the no-longer-exact great-great-grandson of Mungoshi,
nor as yet the white-black boy that I was being groomed into. There had been that black class
teach in Std 1 who had written this motto on the classroom blackboard: ‘Think, Talk, Act in

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English’. . . ..I felt very desolate. It was the feeling that I always had for someone whom I knew
to be an orphan. (190)

Veit-Wild’s interpretation of Mungoshi’s comments about this period of his life is that
they are representative of a wider sentiment of estrangement among members of his
generation in Zimbabwe. How representative Mungoshi might have been, however,
needs to be placed in context. An 0 level candidate in the mid 19603, Mungoshi was a
member of a very small cohort. This feeling of intense alienation, while perhaps
representative of this group, cannot be extrapolated to the wider population.

The ﬁrrther students progressed up the educational ladder and into the selective
bottleneck of the 0 level, the more race became a salient issue to many students whose
parents were making economic sacriﬁces. This awareness, as expressed by Mungoshi,
may have reached into a self-conscious linguistic and cultural “split” between
“Englishness” and home language and culture. Mungoshi has been quoted by Veit-Wild
(1993) as saying, “You are caught in between the old and the new. You are not yet in
western ways, nor do you belong to your parents any longer” (192). At this time (19503
and 603), there was also a split between poorer rural and more elite urban educated Black
groups. Rural Blacks were struggling for access to basic primary schooling while better
educated and politically active urban groups were pushing for access to quality secondary
education (Kuster, 1994).

As previously noted in Chapter Two, Ian Smith’s UDI government maintained
strict political control over the curriculrun and promoted the use of home languages in
primary schools well into the 19703. This meant that there was very little tolerance for

the emergence of critical voices in either English or Shona writing. Due to state

141

censorship, Mungoshi’s initial English works, Coming of the Dry Season (1972) and
Waiting for the Rain (1974), had to be published abroad. Mungoshi explores the theme
of alienation at the individual and societal level through a heterodiegetic standard English
narrative in his early short stories. While still employing a heterodiegetic narrative, his
novel Waiting for the Rain (1974) is a site of more Shona inﬂuenced experimentation.
“Ten Shillings”

“Ten Shillings” (Mungoshi, 1972) centers around Paul Masaga, a young man with

a Junior Certiﬁcate (J C), desperately looking for work in Salisbury (now Harare):

He was tired. He did not care what kind of work he did now. Two years of walking up and
down the city. Two years of being kicked here and there in the locations. Two years of
begging for food. Two years of sleeping in gutters and drainpipes. Mararapaipi, they called

him, pipe sleeper. (38)
The mainly omniscient standard English narrative voice, with some internal focalization
upon Paul’s thoughts, highlights the racial and economic tension Paul experiences as an
unemployed man with a J C. English inﬂuenced Shona is shown with the Shona-English

6

compound of‘ marara” (one who sleeps) and “paipi” (pipes). After two years of looking
for a job, Paul’s “heart had not beaten as it would have done two years ago when he was
still new to the city. He had grown up since then” (3 8). In an initial heterodiegetic
analepses (reference to antecedent information that is separate ﬂom, but related to the
primary time line of the narrative) focusing upon his “growing up,” Paul has two main
realizations about life in Salisbury: that Europeans are racist and that his education is

worthless. As previously mentioned, the reader learns of Paul’s experiences through a

heterodiegetic narrative voice that is omniscient, but often focalized through Paul :

It had depressed him at the start, but he had learned to accept it, as he had learned to accept
many more situations in life. The thing to know was that a JC was not important. It was a
mistake to have ever thought so. The price one paid for going to a missionary school with a

142

motto and believing all that they told one. Education, Paul thought sardonically, it awes us as
did the bicycle, the motorcar and the aeroplane. It is a Western thing and we throw away
brother and sister for it but when it fails we are lost. (39-emphasis mine)

Here, at the point of focalization (italicized), it is possible to see an omniscient
(heterodiegetic) narrator entering into a dialogue with the character Paul, and by
extension, the reader. The reader is put in a position to witness two voices (narrator’s and
Paul’s) agreeing with the negative assessment of a Western mission education. For a
Zimbabwean reader, one that has probably received or is about to receive the equivalent
of a J C level of language education, the narrator-character dialogue immediately demands
a response. What is the reader’s experience? Are they in agreement?

The theme of class differences among black Zimbabweans is brieﬂy touched upon
by the narrator’s analeptic representation of dialogue between Paul and gatekeepers at
j ob-sites:

It used to embarrass him in the ﬁrst days. He would approach those stuck up gatekeepers who
would ask him, “What kind of job are you looking for?”

“A clerical job.”

“Oh, you educated boys! Everyone out of his mothers’ belly talks of being a clerk! Do you
think Salisbury is run by an army of clerks? Why don’t you be humble like me and go dig on
the road?” They would gather round him and laugh. (40-emphasis mine)

What makes the iterative narrative (narrating one time what happened a number of times,
Genette, 1980, 116) interesting (see emphasis in above) is that it is not clear through
who the narrative is being focalized. Without further clariﬁcation between who is
portraying the gatekeepers (a seemingly generic group), it would seem that there is a
convergence between the consciousness of the narrator and Paul. Thus, this instance of
narrative convergence, or perhaps a more focalized narrative (through Paul), may be
perceived as more monologic (converging narrator and character) for a Western rather

than Zimbabwean reader.

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After the initial analepsis, the story line becomes more temporally deﬁned. In
addition, there is a marked increase in directly represented dialogue, and an increased
focalization of the narrative upon Paul’s experience. This shift takes place in the story
when he applies for and gets a job in a tobacco company. On his ﬁrst day at work, he
reports to his foreman, Mr. Thomson, “who Paul could not think of anything to call him
except a Rhodesian farmer” (sic). Attempting to hand Thomson the letter of

employment, the Rhodesian exclaims,

God! And a deaf one too! I said are you the bugger who is going to work for me?. . . .I’m not
talking about your bloody letter. I can’t read. All I want to know is whether you have come to
work for me or not. A simple question. Can’t you answer that? (40).

Later, Paul is ﬁred by Thomson but is given ten shillings compensation ﬂom the man
who originally hired him. Surprised by this act, Paul “was so used to Mr. Thomson’s
type of settler that this other one came as a surprise to him and he did not know what to
think” (40). Mungoshi, through the heterodiegetic narrator, ends the story largely

focalized through Paul’s thoughts:

He looked at the note. A crisp new note. The ﬁrst he had owned in two years. He felt sad and
generous. People cannot help being what they are, he said to himself. With tears of goodwill
he forgave everybody for the misery of the world. (43)

Here, the reader is placed in a position to witness a man, traumatized and depressed,
forgiving “everybody” for the misery he is experiencing.

It is through Paul’s interaction with Thomson that the theme of language
socialization is ironically highlighted in the text. Paul has difﬁculty understanding
Thomson, not because of Paul’s skills in standard English language but because of
Thomson’s illiteracy and his employment of an abusive and colloquial form of Rhodesian

English: “Listen churn. . .Don’t tell me you think. I do all the thinking for all of you

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bunheads here and you listen and do, see? My, I think, I think. You think my ass” (41 ).
Paul’s superior education and use of standard English evokes only anger and hatred on
the part of the white Rhodesian. Through Paul and a heterodiegetic narrator, Mungoshi
represents the ﬂustration and desperation of a J C certiﬁcate holder during the period of
Rhodesian white settler rule. Unable to ﬁnd work in an agricultural cash-crop economy,
Paul is at the mercy of an illiterate and racist Rhodesian farmer in a tobacco grading
operation. His education is in fact shown to be a liability as he irritates the boss,
Thomson, with his questions

This story of a jobless “JC” is still resonant in Zimbabwean society. The
character of the curriculum remains very academic and not linked to economic production
in Zimbabwe. There is a vast number of secondary - school leavers, many with ZJCs
(Zimbabwean Junior Certiﬁcate), who make up the ﬂustrated population of those, like
Paul, looking for work for at least two years. As a resource for English literary and
language educators, “Ten Shillings” directly addresses the issues of race and class that
students may encounter by their second year of secondary when attempting to ﬁnd a job.
“Coming of the Dry Season”

In “Coming of the Dry Season”(1972) a heterodiegetic narrator represents the
inner conﬂict Moab Gwati experiences between his wage job and his mother’s needs.
This conﬂict is later reenacted with a prostitute. After sleeping with Chipo, “a girl he had
picked up in Mutanga’s” (44), Moab sends her home because he has no more money and
does not want her to know about it: “he gave her a shilling for bus fare and a two-shilling
piece for the ﬁne weekend and patted her back in farewell. She said she had never been

so happy in all her life” (44). While watching her bus depart, remembering he is

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penniless until his next paycheck, Moab falls into a deep depression, trying to forget his
responsibilities to what he perceives as an overly demanding mother who lives in a rural

area. He remembers her words as he enters a deep depression:

“Zindonga mwan’ngu, remember where you come from.” A warning, a remonstrance, a curse,
and an epitaph. With it, he could never have a good time in peace. Guilt, ﬂustration and fury

ate at his nerves. (45)
The narrator alludes to the cause of Moab’s guilt ridden feelings toward his mother when
referring in heterodiegetic analepses back to the relation between Moab’s current

employment and his mother:

When he spent four years without employment she had almost died ﬂom despair. She had
cooked beer to the ancestors and then he told her he was working. And her health improved.
He knew that she had stood on her thin little legs and danced the mbaviarira, which is both a

praise to the ancestors and a prayer for the dead. He knew she had burned good luck roots for
him. (45)

Here, through reference to the already existing linkage between the character’s
employment and his mother’s utilization of traditional ceremony, the heterodiegetic
narrator educates the reader about Shona customs; thus, the implied reader is either non-
Zimbabwean, or not familiar with Shona custom. Another interpretation is that it is a
“reminder” to a Shona audience that attempts to forget or suppress ties to family located
in rural areas -- much the way Moab does. Moab perceives himself to be trapped by his
traditional obligations to his mother and experiences a deep sense of guilt.

As in the previously analyzed work, the narrative voice in “Coming of the Dry
Season” seems to merge with that of the main character (see emphasis below) when

discussing Moab’s inner conﬂict is described:

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It seemed he could never do enough for her. He had sent her money and clothes and a hundred
- pound bag of mealie meal with his ﬁrst pay. . .yet there seemed no end to the things she
needed. Her voice asked for far more than he could give. (45-emphasis mine)

Again, this places the reader in direct dialogue with (potentially) an increasingly
monologized voice. It is a position that may lead the reader, especially one in Moab’s
position, into questioning the reasonableness of the mother’s demands. As if in reply to

the Moab’s narrative voice, the mother’s voice is presented directly:

Couldn’t you ﬁnd work somewhere near me? You know it won’t be long and as you are my
ﬁrst born you must know all that you must do for me - for your own good - before I am gone.
When I am gone you won’t set anything right yourself. (45-6)

Here the reader “hears” Moab’s mother reminding Moab of his family responsibility as
eldest, thus highlighting the conﬂict between Moab’s responsibility as wage earner (in a
colonial economy) and ﬁrst born son (traditional family head). This opens up the
originally monologic narrative for the reader, especially a non-Zimbabwean one, because
a previously unknown traditional family tie is referred back to. For a Zimbabwean
reader, this tie may be commonly assumed, and therefore would reinforce the narrative’s
effect as a reminder traditional responsibilities.

After reading a telegram that his mother has died, Moab enters his room to ﬁnd
Chipo naked and in his bed: Chipo says,

“I came yesterday evening. your door was unlocked. I waited for you all night. Where have
you been?” She sounded exactly like his mother. He hated her (48).

Moab, dumbfounded, questions why she is in his house. Chipo responds:

“But. . . .but. . . you slept with me.”

“So what’s that? Haven’t you slept with many others? Why do you come to me?”

“But you are different. Moab, I wish you would marry me. I ask for nothing else.”

She looked at him sadly and her mouth twisted as if she had a pain somewhere. “I have been
alone too long.” (48)

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Assuming she wants money and feeling “trapped,” as he did with his now dead mother,
Moab tells her he is penniless. Chipo says, “I didn’t come for your money. I have too
much of that” (48) Moab, not comprehending, responds, “ Then why did you come back?

Your type always comes back for money!” (48) Quickly dressing,

“she took her handbag from the peg above the bed. From it she took a purse. Tilting the purse
towards the light, so that Moab saw the thick wad of pound notes in it, Chipo extracted a
shilling and two shilling piece [the three shillings that he had given her the weekend before]
and slapped them on the table beside Moab’s right elbow.” (49)

Suddenly weak, “He felt damned” (49).

Moab’s deep sense of guilt over perceived neglect of his mother has led him to a
more destructive life style where he attempts to forget his problems through drink and
abuse of women. After the death of his mother, he cannot escape this sense of guilt as
Chipo comes to symbolize his dead mother. Through Moab’s participation in the cash-
labor economy (in the background of the story), the narrator shows its damaging effects
upon the traditional family roles of mother/son and husband/wife. Moab, despite his
ability to ﬁnd work and send support back to his mother, cannot escape the guilt of “not
doing enough.” In the story’s background, Mungoshi engages in social commentary by
representing the pressure and objectiﬁcation that women may experience due to brutal
economic forces of a cash economy (that can lead to prostitution) and the traditional
search for a husband. As previously highlighted in Chapter Two, in the extremely
restrictive white-settler economy, one of the few economic avenues open to women was

the teaching profession.

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As in much of his work, Mungoshi’s employs the heterodiegetic narrative voice
of an educated/educating Zimbabwean. This voice tends to contrast with Moab’s
intemally focalized dialogue and consciousness. This contrast become evident with the
previously discussed transposition to Shona; “ ‘Zindoga, mwana’ngu, remember where
you come ﬂom.’ A warning, (1 remonstrance, a curse and an epitaph” (45 - emphasis
mine). Here one sees a clear separation between Shona and English. There is little
representation of a Shona echo within English, but rather a split represented by direct
character dialogue and a few Shona words sprinkled in the internally focalized narrative.

As an accomplished author in both English and Shona, Mungoshi clearly has
mastery over both languages and chooses to keep them separate for most of the stories of
this collection. He does so by giving primacy to an English educated heterodiegetic
narrative voice. Drawing upon Mungoshi’s own language socialization experience, one
can see how this tendency for a Standard English omniscient voice at the highest
narrative level may have developed. His early childhood was one spent in more rural
isolation with his Shona speaking family. From form four he was enrolled as a boarder in
an English Mission setting, often with British priests as teachers. By 1972, Mungoshi,
still at the beginning of his writing career, may have been attempting to establish his
English and Shona narrative voice along separate lines. In an interview with Sichennan
(1990), Mungoshi expressed his views about writing in Shona and English: “The Shona
experience would be slightly different ﬂom what I would write in English, so ﬂom this
material [collected notes, chunks of dialogue or description] you would have two books,

one in English and one in Shona” (125). Mungoshi successfully uses a dominant English

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narrative to portray characters that are experiencing societal alienation, often due to their
formal (English) educational experience.
Waiting for the Rain

Mungoshi’s ﬁrst novel in English, Waiting for the Rain, was originally banned by
Rhodesian Prime Minister Smith’s UDI government, and it was published in 1975 in
England. The mid 19703 were an intense period of ﬁghting in the war for black
Zimbabwean independence. According to Cheney, 1972 marked the real beginning of
the second Chimurenga (war of liberation). It was the beginning of a dirty war that
brutalized both sides and led to the deaths of almost thirty thousand people (Stoneman
and Cliffe, 1989). During the 19703, Zimbabwean society was undergoing a process of
decolonization in which traditional as well as western values were being questioned.

According to Moyana (1989), the arrival of Mungoshi on the literary scene with
Waiting for the Rain (1975) heralded a new kind of writing for Zimbabweans. For
Moyana, it is a liberatory language that “tells it like it is,” for it is a language of
indictment, a language that sets out to capture the raw realities of exploitation with a
concreteness that gives ﬂeshness to old words (Moyana 1989, 33). As evidence of this

“new language,” Moyana cites Mungoshi’s portrayal of the land:

Not until you cross Chambara River into the old village with rooﬂess huts and gaping doorways
and the smell of dog shit and burnt rags are you at home. And then the signature of time truly
appears in the work-scarred body of an abandoned oxcart with its shaft pointing an accusing
ﬁnger at the empty heavens, and inevitable stray dog-all ribs and the fur worn down to the sore
skin - rummaging for something to eat among the ruins. (Mungoshi 1974, 40)

The “indictment” to which Moyana is referring is Mungoshi’s indirect representation of

the white regime’s economic exploitation of the rich high and middle veldt regions and

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its effects upon Aﬂican society. While the theme of alienation -- geographic and
psychological -- runs throughout most of Mungoshi’s works, it is intensely focalized
through three generations of characters. Waiting for the Rain is a polyphonic novel:
contextualized social themes, themes that are still relevant to Zimbabweans, are
highlighted in the dialogic interaction of the characters, narrator, and the reader. With
one marked exception, the generationally oriented voices are represented through an
English heterodiegetic narrative voice, partially focalized through the characters. In
contrast to what we ﬁnd in previous works, the narrative voice of Waiting for the Rain is
in the present, thereby having the effect of lessening narrative distance and enhancing the
dialogic interaction between the narrator, characters and reader.

The novel opens with an heterodiegetic representation of Sekuru’s (Lucifer’s

grandfather) recurring dream:

Things are happening here and there and whether you can see them or not you can’t certamly
say the old Man doesn’t see them. The air trembles with roaring thunder and the earth grumbles
with earthquakes and shrieking lightning splits the darkness into quivering shreds of light and
he is a lonely whirling little dot who has to hold his own to stay alive. Way, way ahead of him
is a pinpoint ﬂash which keeps on going farther and farther, but it’s all right. . . .It is under
there, together with the feeling of being very near to, and involved in, the pulsing and ﬂashing
brilliant centre. This is the Old Man’s drum. (1)

However, in the next part of Sekuru’s dream, the narrative brieﬂy becomes homodiegetic
and potentially more internally focalized; the narrator, perhaps unknown, directly

addresses the reader directly as you:

But you don’t hear it because you are making so much noise with your cracked little tin toys.

. . . . If you could only stop and listen, you would hear it. It has the very rhythm of
something disturbing the deep bowels of the earth. You don't hear it? It is there! Always has
been there! Once you hear it , it ﬁlls you up, it shakes you down to the roots, then you realize
in a ﬂash that it’s not itself that has been absent but you: it is it that hears you and answers.

(1)

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This section of narrative, taking place in the dream time of Sekuru’s nightmare, is the
only point in the novel when the narrative may become homodiegetic, with a voice
inﬂected by the Shona community emanating ﬂom the dream of Sekuru. For Mungoshi’s
work, this represents a marked, if brief, departure ﬂom the usual narrative. The voice
seems to be attempting to address a Zimbabwean who is making too much noise with
“cracked little tin toys.” In a direct appeal, the voice is attempting to persuade the reader
to get in touch with him or herself, to listen to his or her “drum.” Usually associated
with Sekuru, the drum is the central metaphor in the novel that stands for recuperation of
a dynamic tradition. It is also shown as a way of educating characters and the
Zimbabwean reader about themselves.

Sekuru is represented as the senior keeper of history and tradition -- he is the calm
eye within the storm of generational conﬂict. According to Mungoshi in an interview

with Sicherrnan (1990), this is the assumed role of an elder:

He’s the oldest one, and if parents panic, then what do you expect of the children? This is not
only theory but something an African man or woman must experience in life. You must grow
up; when you are that age, you must have a kind of wisdom, so the Old Man has thought of
things. He sees what’s happening; he doesn’t panic as the others do. The rest of the family is
rather confused. (119)

As someone who remembers the ﬁrst Chimurenga, he is skeptical of the newest
generation’s resistance efforts. He warns a member of the young generation, his nephew
John, about the hidden dangers of assimilation when resisting the current white-settler
regime : “I am only thinking it will be a long ﬁght - what with the snares they have set -
sugar, that talking machine of yours, all those other things they have brought and their

gods you have taken as your own drum. Its going to be a long ﬁght” (32). As Stratton

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(1986) points out, resistance to white settler oppression is seen by Sekuru as less political
and more ideological. It is a conﬂict between values invested in the land by opposing
forces -- between Western capitalism and Shona communalism. While the present war
may be won by John’s generation, the battle will be lost if they take the enemy’s “drum”
as their own (14).

Throughout the novel, Sekuru constantly refers to his understanding of the
underlying conﬂict of values, and how they are manifested in a blind pursuit of consumer
goods. One item that is represented as both a consumer good and a direct inﬂuence upon
world view is the radio that John intends to give to Lucifer. While his questions about
the radio seem at ﬁrst naive, “I have often wondered - tell me: are there any people in
that thing [the radio] of yours?” (29), Sekuru insightfully identiﬁes the world
view/perspective presented by the commentator’s broadcasts (in Shona): “Oh, so they are
really playing someone else’s drum?”(30). This comment reﬂects a basic understanding
of mass commrmication and state ideology, especially in Rhodesia during the period of

the early seventies. According to Cheney,

Rhodesia’s whites were convinced they were ﬁghting communism, not their compatriots, and
with heavy press censorship and complete control of radio and television, Smith was able to
keep them in a state of ignorance. (113)

Attempting to explain what the commentators are talking about in a headline summary,
John says, “It’s the news, Sekuru. . . .All over the world, Sekuru, All over the world”(31).
Anderson (1983) posits that a national news medium (in this case radio broadcasts) is an
essential contributor to a sense of nationally shared communities, for literate as well as

illiterate commrmity members:

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[W]ith increasing speed capitalism transformed the means of physical and intellectual
communication, and intelligentsias found ways to bypass print in propagating the imagined
community, not merely to illiterate masses, but even to literate masses reading different
languages. (128)

Thus, Mungoshi is representing a speciﬁc trend in national identiﬁcation, facilitated
through technology: in twentieth century colonial states, mass media provides a sense of
language community and national membership by refening to the boundaries (what is
“outside” and “inside”) of a community. Sekuru points out the fact that this sense of
imagined commtmity can be inﬂuenced by taking on the “enemy’s drum.” Sekuru is an
elder and participant in the ﬁrst struggle against white-settler alienation of land. His

communal referent points include his family and a wider community referred to as we:

The Old Man is quiet. He tastes humiliation again. Then he says: “We were defeated.” Pause.
“And we have stayed defeated.” And that’s all about that because you don’t try and revive the
experience of a toothache. (31)

Later in the novel, when describing the speciﬁcs of the initial Chimurenga, Sekuru refers

to how they originally organized behind their chief, Ishe Moromo:

We still had our own gods of whom we were proud. And because these gods meant the same
thing to all of us, we rose like one man to ﬁght the white men. . . .So we fought them. We
fought hard. Four days and four nights we harassed them at Garapo’s Hill. But they laid us
low. . . .Most of our people gave themselves up. And these were the same people - drunk on
whatever new kind of beer the white men had given them - our own people - who led the white
men in their hunt for those of us who had escaped. . . .We later heard the news of what the white
men did to those of our people whom they caught. . . .those who saw it swore that our people’s
heads were cutoff, kept in medicines and sent to the white men’s land. The same fate befell our
chief, Ishe Maromo. (115)

John’s social referent points extend beyond his immediate community to include
linkages that he has made with resistance ﬁghters across the country. These linkages
include members ﬂom different geographic and language groups (non-Shona). This is

referred to in the novel when he asks his grandfather to speak to his ﬁiends who “drove

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ﬂom Bulawayo,” a predominantly Ndebele speaking area. These alliances, formed
initially through education and/or work associations, are based on different economic,
social, and cultural levels of membership. These coalitions are informed with a new
sense of national identity. For Sekuru, members of this resistance face the danger of
unintentionally becoming sell-outs, due to the very foundations of their social and
political linkages.

In an extended speech that is focalized through Gharabha (as listener), Sekuru
says, “That is why I won’t listen to anyone who speaks the way John does, ﬁghting the
white men and yet praying to the white men’s gods. Because, once you do that, you will
die like Kwari” (116). In this direct address without intemal mediation -- Gharabha
listens to the entire story without internal or external comment -- Mungoshi is placing the
reader in the place of listener, along with Gharabha. This emphasizes the educational
dynamic of Sekuru’s story. According to Sekuru, Kwari chose to be the “white man’s
dog” and to “do his dirty work” during the ﬁrst Chimurenga. After going to ﬁght in

World War I for Britain, he returned home, wounded:

He had nothing. Those of his masters who had survived the war were given thousands of acres
of land. And they wouldn’t even give him the faithful dog’s bone. He came to us but we didn’t
know him. So he went back to his masters whom he had served so well and they spat in his
face. He persisted, and ﬁnally his masters were forced to do what they would do with a crippled
rabid dog: they killed him. They accused him of rape and shot him. His children and relatives

disowned him. And that is what comes from playing someone’s drum. (1 17)

When asked whether Mungoshi had drawn upon Kwari as an actual historical ﬁgure, he
replied that the “name is ﬁctional but the story is true” (Sicherrnan 1990, 124). After
telling the story of Kwari, Sekuru foregrounds its educational function for Gharabha (and

also the reader-listener) by saying,

155

Yes, I talk to you about this because I feel it’s going to help you some day. Times and events
change, but I don’t think people change at all. And if you remember this you won’t be in any
trouble at all because you will be playing your own drum. . . . Let them, or whoever wants it,
have the land. You keep your heart. Later on, you too will know that what grows on the land,
what you see outside, ﬁrst grows in the heart. Without ﬁrst taking root in the heart, whatever
grows outside quickly withers and dies. And they can touch you on the outside, but they can’t
touch your heart. That’s your drum. And that is my medicine to you. (117)

A division is thus established by Sekuru between “them” -- White settlers or Africans like
Kwari who desire simply to possess the land -- and “you” -- Gharabha and the
Zimbabwean reader/listener whose connection to the land is felt ﬂom the inside.

While John is likened to Kwari, Gharabha is linked to his great-great ancestor
Sambambwa. Gharabha tells the story of the Mandengu family’s founder (originally told
by Sekuru) through the dialogue of his drum and the wider community. After Mandisa
opens the ceremony with a call to the community, “Who will carry my arrow and spear
for me - ho?” and the community responds, Gharabha’s drum begins to invoke the story
of the founder. The omniscient narrator comments that Gharabha actually becomes his

great-great-ancestor while playing the drum:

His head snaps and he goes a long distance ﬂom this place and he can now see them - the
people: helpless, dancing, begging, groveling for mercy, and now the loneliness deepens the
further he goes and now he is his own great-great-ancestor in that story of the Founder of the
Tribe the Old Man has often told him. (128)

Attempting to offer the performance to Lucifer as a gift -- as a way of coming closer to
his estranged brother -- he is shocked and depressed to ﬁnd that his brother has left in the
middle of the performance, after ﬁnding the singing and dancing “monotone” and
“tiring.” After the performance, the village diviner, talking with Sekuru, can see
that Gharabha has been with Sarnambwa. Sekuru sees that Gharabha is depressed, and

attributes it to his inability to ﬁt into his parents’ expectations: “His parents think a wife

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and children and going to church every Sunday would settle everything the matter with
him.” (130) The diviner replies,

Of course they would rather go to church where they pray to someone of another tribe who
doesn’t know anything about them. And here is their own ancestor, Founder of the tribe, asking
them to remember him and they turn their backs on him. Any wonder why this family is slowly
being eaten away. (130-1)

Even though he is encouraged to play his own drum by his grandfather, Gharabha cannot
ﬁt into a society in which he is expected to attend church, have a job and take a wife. As
a result, Gharabha seeks solace in drink, women, and his drum performances. Only by
“crying with his drum” does Gharabha ﬁnd catharsis, or sense of oneness with his

community and environment:

[I]n most cases the drink and women leave him tired and strangely lonely and sad. And there
are only one or two purgatives left: a big cry, or nightfall and the drum.

He prefers the drum to crying. Crying leaves him feeling weak and unprotected. Now with
the drum, there is a sense of quiet strength, the sﬂength of mountains and a hard and clear
morning vision. And when he cries with the drum, it’s because he suddenly sees - sees what? It
is not quite seeing as feeling—seeing-living-being the whole thing at the same time. (85)

This feeling -- of trying to be true to oneself while not ﬁtting in -- is also shared
by Lucifer. In contrast to Gharabha in his manner of production of art, Lucifer attempts
to isolate himself ﬂom his community through his drawing and poetry. Coming home in
preparation to travel overseas for his studies, Lucifer has difﬁculty relating to all

members of his family. For Mungoshi, Lucifer

represents an attitude, a crisis we found ourselves in, at that time [mid 19703]. . . . Lucifer is a
kind of exile, even while he’s in his own country. You are caught in between the old and the
new. You are not yet in the Western ways, nor do you belong to your parents any longer. (120)

While Ghrabha is connected to Sarnbambwa, the family’s traveling founder, Lucifer is
linked to the story of Magaba, a traveler who was bewitched by the voice of a strange

bird and led to his ultimate demise. After ignoring the elder’s and the diviner’s advice,

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T ongoona chooses Lucifer over Gharabha to inherit the position of head of the family.
Soon after, the story of Magaba is told to Lucifer by the village diviner in a section of the
narrative where Lucifer is not sure if he is dreaming. Magaba, the hunter who is
bewitched, is led to the Plain of Death by the voice of a strange bird, where he is eaten
alive by vultures and ants.

Contrasting the two stories of the travelers Samambwa and Magaba, Zimunya
(1983) has called their juxtaposition by Mungoshi the “mythic” structure of the novel

(85). A Zimbabwean writer and critic, Zimunya feels that

Gharabha is a sadder and more tragic ﬁgure than Lucifer. His ignorant self-enclosure
drastically undermines his role. . . .Because they have succumbed to reactionary spiritual
fatalisrrr, the Old Man and Garabha have surrendered their destiny to more powerful elements. .
. .This brave new world has taken many a sacriﬁce of lost savages. (92)

Stratton (1986) takes issue with Zimunya for this evaluation, especially in light of the
educational message of the plight of the two mythic heroes. By focalizing the story of
Samambwa through Sekuru’s recounting of the story to Gharabha, the reader is placed in
a position to view Gharabha as an individual true to himself and his family/community
tradition. The diviner’s recounting of Magaba to Lucifer in his dreamlike state enables
the reader to view Lucifer’s path as one leading to further separation and even death.

This reading depends on the variable position of the reader as well; a Zimbabwean is free
to identify with Lucifer when at the close of the novel he “watches the leprous skin of his
country slough off and fall back dead behind him” (180) or with Gharabha, who is able to
whistle a tune that he has made up himself, with “the unerring ear of the old musicians.”
This evaluation is focalized through Sekuru, who feels “the boy is home,” and therefore

dialoguing with the community. Lucifer’s perception of himself in relation to his

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community is completely internalized, isolated, and presented through the “eye of an
impartial tourist” (180). Only by removing himself ﬂom his family and community can
Lucifer ﬁnd relief ﬂom the tension and guilt he feels.

Betty, the main female character of the third generation, ﬁnds her options are
constrained by traditional gender expectations and a lack of opportunity in the settler cash

economy. John refers to the lack of opportunity when he initially greets Betty:

Hello Betty! I thought the last time I was here I heard you say you were going to Salisbury to
look for a job. What happened? No luck, eh? Good for you. The city isn’t exactly the kind of
place I would recommend for our sisters these modern days, ha-ha-ha-ha! (28)

Upset at the insensitive sharing of her secret, Betty “hates John and she doesn’t take long
with her greetings before she returns to the kitchen” (28). Thus, Betty, like Chipo and
other female characters in Mungoshi’s works (Stratton, 1987), is expected to live up to
the rest of the family’s expectations, while males are essentially independent. Most
important, Betty must carry the burden of a family curse that has been passed down
through Raina’s mother Mandisa -- she cannot have children due to a displeased ancestor.
In deﬁance of tradition, Betty has an affair with the regional agricultural demonstrator
and gets pregnant. Her lover is portrayed as “distant, living in the home with an asbestos
gray roof” (37). Betty can only observe “the house hard ﬂom afar”(3 8), out of fear of
seeing his wife. The superior class and gender position of the ofﬁcial (not thoroughly
developed by Mungoshi) presumably gives him the relative security to have an affair
with a local woman (Betty) without fear of reprisal ﬂom the community. Betty, caught
between the worst of traditional and settler economy constraints, is in a situation where
her ﬂustrations become unmanageable and eventually come out in her language

socialization strategies: angry violation of tradition (talking back to elders) or silence.

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Stratton points out that there is a tendency in Mungoshi’s work to represent
disrupted gender roles not as the result of a feminist challenge, but rather as occurring due
to disruptive effects of settler domination. In addition to women ﬁnding few places
besides prostitution in the cash economy, fathers lose their ability to parent their children.
This becomes apparent when Lucifer and Tongoona discuss Lucifer’s trip overseas.
Tongoona, asking Lucifer about the costs of the trip, is concerned that he is losing face as

a parent:

“Your European ﬁiend,” Tongoona says, scratching his head: “did you tell him that your
father is a very poor man?”
Lucifer looks up: “Why would I want to tell him that?”
“Well, I thought you might have been as indiscreet as to tell him that.” Pause, as if looking
for words then: “Anyway, I am not saying that he shouldn’t have done what he did - - I could
have sent you overseas myself if you had told me you wanted to go overseas.” (73)

By paying for Lucifer’s education, the white settler mission is subverting traditional
gender roles and parental involvement in education.

By the end of the novel Tongoona is symbolically displaced as head of his own
family. The only white person portrayed in the novel, a priest who is Lucifer’s academic
advisor, becomes more of a “father” to Lucifer than Tongoona. The parting of Lucifer at
the end of the novel with the “white father” is shown by Mungoshi as more of an

assimilation into a white family.

Old Mandisa, to forestall her own tears, says: “No use crying now. he is gone, no longer ours. . . .
The white Father is now in the car.” He blows the horn.

Raina starts forward and in a sudden outburst of motherly passion grabs and clasps Lucifer to her
breast. Lucifer quickly wrenches away ﬂom her and hurriedly enters the metal security of the car . .
. . He speaks to the white Father: “We can go now, Father” . . . . Like a false skin, the people peel
back as the car moves forward. . . . The car picks up speed and Lucifer watches the leprous skin of
his country slough off and fall back dead behind him. . . . Lucifer leans back and ﬂies to look at his
country through the eye of an impartial tourist. (197-180)

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In the context of leaving his village and heading toward Salisbury with his white father,
the imagery of “skin peeling off” can be seen as a metaphor for the changing of Lucifer’s
skin as well. This resonates with Mungoshi’s earlier comments about his self - image

during his formative secondary years.

This “white-black boy” phenomenon that Mungoshi comments on, while
highlighted during white colonial rule, is a theme that echoes current day Zimbabwe
realities. By the time students reach University, class divisions in language education
experience are socially manifested in derogatory terms utilized by student groups. When
students ﬂom different backgrounds come together for the ﬁrst time, there is tendency
among students to classify each other into two main groups based on ways of speaking:
“RB,” stands for rural background, and “Nose Brigades” refers to the relatively nasal
sound of British pronunciation English. These divisions have been translated into student
government organizations as well (Natsa, 1994).

Mungoshi’s views on the topic, as represented in his literary works, are that the
English education process leaves one neither “black” nor “white,” but rather “desolate.”
“I felt very desolate. It was the feeling that I always had for someone whom I knew to be
an orphan” (in Veit-Wild 1993, 190). Mungoshi has recognized that Lucifer may be an
autobiographical projection of the kind of thinking he was going through during the mid
19703 (Sicherman, 1990). In fact, he proposes that Lucifer may represent the position of

most Zimbabwean writers:

It’s interesting that none of us so far has written anything since Independence that you could
consider serious, except in poetry - and in poetry you can change your attitude. A sustained
work that examines who we are right now - no one has said anything. We have still to shed a
few of Lucifer’s feathers. (120)

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Mungoshi’s socio-historical question -- how many of Lucifer’s feathers Zimbabwean
writers have had to shed - is one that requires further investigation of other authors’
approaches.

Another important societal question that Mungoshi raises through his use of
narrative is gender roles. According to Stratton, through his portrayal of female
characters, Mungoshi makes it clear that Shona male chauvinism is a societal weakness.
Betty, doomed to spinsterhood and barrenness because of a family curse, is unable to
fulﬁll herself through the roles of wife and mother -- the only acceptable forms of self-
deﬁnition that her society affords to women. She remains home, unlike Chipo (in
“Coming of the Dry Season”), the drudge of the family and the butt of jokes (Stratton
1986, 16). By comparing societal impacts upon two members of the same family (Betty
and Lucifer), it is clear that gender more seriously constrains Betty in two ways: 1)as a
girl, she has not been given similar educational opportunities as Lucifer and; 2)traditiona1
family duties make her more of a servant to the family than an individual. Stratton
( 1986) posits that Mungoshi’s portrayal of women caught between two worlds places him
in the “pantheon” of men and women writers who raise their voices in protest against the
oppression of women. While it is clear that Mungoshi’s representation of women’s
issues is a part of much of his work, his contribution toward Zimbabwean feminism is
limited - no female characters are shown to be successfully asserting their agency. In
addition, through the use of heterodiegetic narration, Mungoshi maintains more distance

ﬂom female than ﬂom male characters; while present, the reader “sees” and “hears” less

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of the internal dialogue that occurs for female characters. As a result, Mungoshi’s male
characters are consistently more complex and are typically the focus of his stories.
Language Socialization

While the treatment of alienation and erosion of Shona society is powerﬁrlly
represented by Mungoshi, what makes the novel thoroughly polyphonic is its rich
portrayal of language socialization strategies across generations; different generations
show different language socialization values and skills. According to Bakhtin, the

highlighting of these differences is the essence of a novelistic plot:

The novelistic plot must organize the exposure of social languages and ideologies, the
exhibiting and experiencing of such languages: the experience of a discourse, a world view and
an ideologically based act, or the exhibiting of the everyday life of social, historical and
national worlds or micro worlds. . . .of age groups and generations linked with epochs and
socioideolgical worlds. . . . What is realized in the novel is the process of coming to know one’s
own language as it is perceived in someone else’s language, coming to know one’s own belief
system in someone else’s system. (365)

With the exception of Old J api, the eldest generation is portrayed as custodians of
traditional language socialization practices. They guide and correct the two younger
generations in traditional language socialization practice, a practice under stress ﬂom the
disruption of settler inﬂuence.

Throughout the novel, traditional morning greetings (asking how one has slept)
are exchanged within the family. It is way to show respect to one’s family members.
This greeting is shockingly absent when Betty, a member of the youngest generation,
bursts in on Old J api, her grandmother, to serve her breakfast. Without greeting her she
says, “If you don’t like it you can throw it out to Kutu, the dog ”(20). While this lack of
respect is breathtaking, it shows the ﬂustration and resentment Betty is experiencing over

her situation. When Mandisa asks Betty where she is going, Betty explodes, again

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violating language socialization tradition: “Who told you I am going to the township? Is
that why you dragged your dirty curse to this place to drag me into the mud with you?”
(34). As previously discussed, in deﬁance, Betty gets pregnant. The village diviner
“sees” that Betty is pregnant and declares the fetus already stillborn: “But the soil won’t
let you hold that baby” (145). Betty, responding only with silence, “bites her lower lip
and stares back at them. Her eyes are very bright” (145)

Gender is an additional factor in the enforcement hierarchy of language
socialization tradition. Old J api is interrupted constantly throughout the novel by her
husband, Sekuru. When attempting to recount a story, J api is cut off by Sekuru: “Why
don’t you shut up and let those who know how to talk tell him?” (55) Sekuru seems to
preside over all family wide dialogues. At the end of a family argument, the departure of
Sekuru seems to terminate the discussion, almost as if his presence were required for a

family discussion: Quietly, Sekuru stands up and says:

“Well - see you tomorrow sonny.”

He goes out, closing the door softly behind him.

A strange silence falls in the room.

Betty comes in quietly and sits down in her place, her face an inscrutable mask.

Outside, a dog barks: voices. Everyone turns towards the door, letting out their pent breath
gratefully. . . .. (58)

Both Mandisa and Sekuru ﬂequently interrupt and guide the discourse of the
middle generation. As soon as Lucifer enters the household, Raina berates him for not
writing home while he was at school. Quietly, Mandisa cautions Raina, “Aika Raina. . .
.Let him eat ﬁrst then you can ask him what it is you want to ask him.” (47) Later, when

Raina is irate at Lucifer, Mandisa steps in again:

“Don’t shout at him,” Old Mandisa says quietly.
“I am not shouting at him,” Raina retorts, her voice rising even higher.

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“You want to explain to him properly,” the old woman advises. (57)

When Tongoona berates Betty for assuming ownership over her own blankets (that are to
be used by her younger brothers and sisters), both Mandisa and Sekuru intervene: “Aika,
Tongoona,” Old Mandisa says and the Old Man makes a noise in his throat as if to say:
“You too are just another baby.” Tongoona keeps quiet (57). When Lucifer’s cousin
John presents him with the gift of a radio, the entire family becomes involved in a hand
clapping - giving thanks ceremony. When it is Lucifer’s turn to express thanks, he
stammers, “well-I don’t really know what to say. . . .I hope - I - shall be able to do as
much for you.” Mandisa, as a keeper of the traditional discourse, shakes her head and
says, “That’s not how we say it. The Earth hears you.” Raina, Lucifer’s mother goes on
to say “What you will do for him is a secret between your heart and the soil” (66).
During a family meeting, the village diviner tells Lucifer that he is being cursed by a
neighbor to marry his daughter. Lucifer’s responds in protest: “But this is unfair!”
Matandangoma, in disgust, reprimands him: “Where on earth did you get such language
ﬂom? We don’t know it here” (143). Both Lucifer and Betty seem unable or unwilling
to ﬁt into the older generations’ expectations of language socialization.

In addition to highlighting the violation of tradition in language, one can hear an
“echo” of Shona expression in the older generation’s dialogue. In a dispute about a
family decision, Mandisa says to her daughter, “Then you are only a woman. You have
no mouth. Let it be as his father wishes”(l6 ). Here both the content and form of the
cautionary remark evoke traditional language socialization strategies. While Mungoshi
has not directly “translated” Waiting for the Rain ﬂom Shona, he has evoked a Shona

way of communicating between generations that is under threat of being eroded by settler

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inﬂuence. Mungoshi links his attempts to evoke Shona in his novel to his use of present
tense:

I feel closer to things when I write in the present tense. . . .In the sections where there’s a kind
of translating ﬂom a Shona thought to English - Kuruku’s speech, for example - I felt myself
forced almost physically to write that way. (Sicherman 1990, 121)

In addition to Sekuru’s talks with Gharabha, Kuruku’s long talk to the Mandengu family
represents an important focal point for the opposition to settler inﬂuence; this opposition
is manifested in language style and thematic content. In this passage Kuruku, whose son
has been detained for eight years for suspected resistance, is lecturing Lucifer about the

curse of being black, and how he must resist:

Remember that you are black and that no soap on earth will wash that colour away. And out
there, where you are going, your heart is just the colour of your face: murky, dirty. And no
amount of sleeping with the whitest of their womenfolk nor any amount of eating at the same
table with them will ever make you clean enough in their eyes. So, go there, see everything and
envy nothing. Hear everything and reveal nothing. Come back to us here and true’s God we
will send them looking for shelter in the underbrush like so many rats. By Those-Long-Gone,
we will make them have a taste of their own medicine, the thankless grabbers. (63)

Here Kuruku is emphasizing the need for resistance to whites globally as opposed to
locally (as Sekuru does), because of their racial discrimination. When John attempts to
calm Kuruku (his father) by saying “now, now”, Kuruku becomes infuriated: “You talk to
me this way when I have brought seven children into a world that teaches them that the
name ‘Father’ is just an empty shell to hide nothing between the legs?” (64) Lucifer’s
white father is also represented through his language socialization. As the priest ﬁrst
enters the village, he immediately violates language socialization tradition. A stranger to
the village, he scolds a mother (“in very poor Shona”) for disciplining her daughter.

Talking to the child, he says, “Mother bad, huhn? Mother take you away, haahn?” (170).

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In contrast to his character’s dialogue, Mungoshi’s heterodiegetic narrative voice
tends to conform to English lines. In describing Raina’s (Lucifer’s mother) activities, the
language is efﬁciently descriptive: “She decides to leave the yard for Betty to do after
dispatching the children to school. She will do Lucifer’s room. She will personally
sweep out the chicken crut, smear the ﬂoor with cow dung to stay the dust, and clean the
cobwebs in the comers” (19). Mungoshi experiments with language mainly, and most
creatively, at the level of character dialogue. Moyanna’s claim, that Mungoshi employs
the same language as Achebe “that uniquely retains the burden of the Aﬂican idiom”
(Moyana, 123), is applicable only when coupled with the recognition that the evocation
of Shona is highlighted in contrast to the narrative voice. This contrast is reﬂective of
Mungoshi’s experience within a highly British inﬂuenced curriculum and examination
system.

Mungoshi’s ability to produce a polyphonic novel in English contradicts Veit-
Wild’s (1993) generalization of a required minimum educational achievement for writers
of English. According to Veit-Wild, “perfecting the pupils’ control of the English
language usually only took place in a full secondary school course; hence many
Zimbabwean writers with less education have felt unable to express themselves ﬂeely in
English” (V eit Wild, 220). It is interesting to note the irony that Mungoshi failed to

complete his upper secondary work due to his focus upon writing;

Charles continued to write with such concentration that he did very mediocre work in his “0-
levels” and did not qualify for Sixth Form. . . . I felt that school in his eyes was an irrelevancy. .
.I think he was right. It was; it really stood in the way of what he had to do and was an
irrelevancy (Father Pearce in Veit-Wild, 1993: 272)

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From one of the most proliﬁc Zimbabwean writers, there are clear patterns of
contextualized, dialogic, and relevant experience emanating ﬂom a reading of his texts.
In addition, Mungoshi’s masterfully represents language socialization practice across
several generations. Readers of Mungoshi, especially Zimbabwean reader, are able to
enter into the dialogic space of the second Chimurenga. That space is where readers can
come to understand historically relevant forces (white settler inﬂuence, African
resistance, class, patriarchy, gender roles) and their impact upon the negotiation of
individual identity across different generations, generations that they may not have direct
access to. In addition, because the narrative voice is heterodiegetic and focalized through
multiple characters, the negotiation of that identity can be seen to vary according to each
individual’s background. Due to the resulting polyphony that is represented, Mungoshi’s
works are an ideal resource for a dialogue oriented critical pedagogy that explores

Zimbabwe’s second Chimurenga contact zone.

Chenjerai Hove

The son of peasant farmers near Zvishanvane in the Midlands of Zimbabwe,
Chenjerai Hove was born seven years after Mungoshi in 1954. At age ten, Hove moved
with his parents to Kadomoa, a small town west of Harare. He went to school in this
area and was a graduate of Kutama mission school in 1966. In addition to having an
over-all high reputation and excellent Shona studies program, Kutama is also President
Robert Mugabe’s alrna matter (Tsodzo, 1997). After graduating as a teacher ﬂom Gweru
teachers’ College in 1977, Hove worked as a teacher until 1981, experiencing the effects

of civil war during this time. He actively participated in the armed resistance to Ian

 

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Smith’s regime. In 1981, he moved into editing, furthering his education at the same
time with two BA degrees in Language and Literature at the University of Zimbabwe
(Veit-Wild 1993, Tsodzo 1997).

Like Mungoshi, Hove writes both in English and Shona. Unlike most
Zimbabwean writers, however, he consciously and creatively evokes a Shona inﬂuenced
narrative voice in his novels. His ﬁrst English novel, Bones (1989), explores the
experience of a woman in search of her son during Zimbabwe’s second Chimurenga. His
second novel, Shadows (1991), is about a forbidden romance in a rural area. He has also
written several collections of poetry: Up in Arms (1982), Swimming in Floods of Tears,
( 1983) and Red Hills of Home (1985).

In his novels, Hove creates a homodiegetic English narrative voice that contains
the echoes and word play of Shona. In Bones, the narrative is internally focalized among
several individuals across thirteen chapters. A heterodiegetic narrative point of view for
the “spirits” is introduced for two chapters. The spirit voice evokes themes of natural and
human forces. It also makes historical allusions to the ﬁrst Chimurenga in 1896. The
connection between ancestors, earth, and human resistance is consistently highlighted by
the spirits:

What sky will not listen to the thunderous voice of the ancestors? What cloud will not shed its
tears to cool the earth when commanded by the thunderous voice of the ancestors? Rise all the
insects of the land. Sing the many torturous tunes of the land so that any strange cars will know
that an uprising is at hand. Rise you the colourful birds of the rivers and the hills. Sing all the
tunes of the land so that any stranger will know that this land is the land of rising bones. Rise all
the children of the land and refuse to suckle ﬂom strange beasts. Then all the strangers will know
that the power of the land is more than the power of any other miracle that can cheat the eye.
(Hove 1988, 48)

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This narrative voice represents a clear break ﬂom Hove’s earlier work in poetry, lending
strength to the observation of critics that Hove is consciously attempting to evoke a
Shona-ness in his novels.

Out of the collection Up in Arms (1982), the poem “The Other Syllabus,”

conforms much more to a standard English style:

I had the lab science, the ecology of texts
and language of the pages

I liked it all

as my joy spilled

with the test tube disasters

and the teacher’s harmless roar

like a trapped mouse.

Then I left the lab,

Vomited from the lab syllabus.

The streets, they had me also,

A scufﬂe followed: the other syllabus
Bosses ﬂowned

at my neat lab qualiﬁcations

only to declare them rubble.

Then I pocketed them,

now a wounded lion.

I crawled through the streets,

streets that yawn in my face

like starved ghosts turned bitter . . . (Hove, 1982: 47)

Though there is some non-standard usage (“Vornited ﬂom the lab syllabus”), the
narrative voice differs markedly ﬂom Hove’s later work in his novels. “The Other
Syllabus” shows the experience of a school leaver, and the way the syllabus must be
“absorbed” or “rejected” depending on economic utility for employment. This parallels
Mungoshi’s development in “Ten Shillings” of the disjunction between education and
economy, though Hove may be refening to continuation in independence.
Bones

In Bones (1988), Hove tells the story of a farm worker, Marita, looking for her son

who has gone off to ﬁght in the guerrilla war against the white settler regime. The

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narrative is focalized through four different characters: J anifa, the lover of Marita’s son,
narrates seven chapters; Marurne, Marita’s husband, narrates one chapter; Chisaga, the
white farmer Manyepo’s cook, narrates two chapters, and; The Unknown Woman, an
urban woman, narrates three chapters. Gunner (1991) has pointed out that Hove has “set
out a new ﬁctional mode intent on speaking with the voice of those who were not literate
but who were rich in courage and who were . . .at the center of the War as dispossessed
peasants” (79). In ever-shifting “dream time,” Marita’s life is recounted through the
interior voices of characters. Wylie (1991) posits that the constantly changing temporal
and character focalization of the homodiegetic narratives can be seen to be encompassed
by the heterodiegetic spirit voice, probably the mythical spirit of Ambuya Nehanda: this
spirit voice “links the different viewpoints with a stream of oral memory and collective
consciousness about the past struggles, the present, and the way this is all bound in a way
typical of oral rather than recorded memory, outside chronological tirne”(79).

A spirit medium of Ambuya Nehanda , Charwe, was a major leader of the 1896
rebellion against the new colonial state. After she was captured, she was executed by the

British for her part in the ﬁrst uprising or Chimurenga. According to Lan (1985):

A powerful and proliﬁc oral tradition grew up around her name, her part in the rebellion and
especially the last moments of her life after she was condemned: her refusal to accept
conversion to Christianity, her deﬁance on the scaffold and her prophecy that “my bones will
rise” to win back freedom from the Europeans. (6)

Guerrilla ﬁghters ﬂom the second Chimurenga ﬂequently invoked Nehanda and honored
her medium as a way of showing spiritual and cultural continuity ﬂom the ﬁrst

Chimurenga to the second. In Bones, the spirit narrator clearly draws upon a mythical

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oral tradition, merging the second Chimurenga (19603 to 703) with the ﬁrst ( mid 18903).

As the spirit’s voice is manifested in this passage, it clearly comes across as a anti-settler:

Arise all the bones of the land. Arise all the bones of the dying cattle. Arise all the bones of the
locusts. Wield the power of the many bones scattered across the land and ﬁght so that the land of
the ancestors is not deﬁled by strange feet and strange hands. (57)

By interweaving the other narratives with the spirit narrative, Hove is connecting an
emerging sense of nationhood with what Anderson (1983) has called an “immemorial
past.” In this case, the voice of a national spirit serves as the connection. What
hypothetically expands this sense of nationhood to all Zimbabweans (and not only Shona
speakers) is that Hove does this in English, focusing on the story of a woman isolated
ﬂom her immediate (Shona) community. In Marita’s search for her son, she sets an
example to a fellow worker (J arrifa), and an “unknown” urban woman. In this case,
language may be, according to Anderson (1983), “building in effect particular
solidarities.” For Anderson, Hove’s version of English may serve this function because
“imperial languages are still vemaculars, and thus particular vemaculars among many”
(122 - emphasis Anderson’s). This is a universal characteristic of how nations are in fact
imagined communities:

It may appear paradoxical that the objects of all these attachments are “imagined”- anonymous,
faceless fellow-Tagalogs, exterminated tribes, Mother Russia, or the tanah air. But amor
partriae does not differ in this respect from the other affections, in which there is always an
element of fond imagining. (140)

Hove’s utilization of “dream time” and spirit narrative is an important way in which the
characters dialogue indirectly with the reader. In contrast to Sekuru’s skeptical view of
the younger generation “playing someone else’s drum,” the directly represented spirit

narrative provides more of a shared world view among the characters. Also, contributing

 

172

to this sense of unity, there is an absence of allusions to western signiﬁers that are found
in Mungoshi’s work -- sugar, radio, cars, planes, all are noticeably absent.

This sense of unity, while possible, must be further examined ﬂom the point of
view of a speciﬁc Zimbabwean reader for whom the evocation of Shona in English and
use of Shona spirit Nehanda can place the reader in a different position, depending on his
or her background (Shona, Ndebele, other ethnicities, or white). Lan (1985) has
remarked that so far, only the religious and political institutions of the Shona have
contributed to the symbolism of the new state. This implies that underlying a white
settler inﬂuence, there may be a potential hegemonic layer of Shona inﬂuence in national
literature. Most well known Zimbabwean authors that write in English (Mungoshi,
Marachera, Hove, Chinodya, and Dangarembga) also come ﬂom a Shona background. In
Zimbabwe, it is fair to say that Ndebele and other groups are underrepresented in literary
discourse in general. The double voice in Bones, inclusive at the level of access in
English, can also be seen to be addressed to a community of English literate readers that
are familiar with Shona community history and symbolism.

Similar to Achebe, Hove signals non-Shona readers with italics. The reader is
informed that a nhava is a “bag” (5), but not told that it is a “small woven bag” often used
for carrying small game (Harman 1987, 463); when J arrifa’s teacher condescendingly
refers to his students as vafana (6) or “imitators,” the reader can only infer that is a
negative term. When J anifa replies to Marita’s question with “Chokwadi” the non-Shona
speaker is left to infer its meaning (“that’s the truth”). Unless non-Shona readers have
read review articles of Bones or have a dictionary, they will not know that Marita’s name

means “wanderer,” Marume is “man,” and Manyepo is “one who lies.” When Marita

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tells J anifa that “I broke the water-pot which my ancestors asked me to bring home” the
non-Shona audience is probably not aware of the important symbolism of a failed wife.
(8) When the spirit voice talks of a “holy king” that accepts the gifts ﬂom the stranger
without knees.” (47) the reader may or may not be aware of the ﬁrst European-Portuguese
contact (“without knees” meaning Europeans wearing pants) and its ultimately
destabilizing inﬂuences upon the early Shona speaking kingdoms. Lexical items, names,
symbolism, historical references, and expressions are clearly not employed by Hove to
exclude the non-Shona reader (interested readers can seek out ﬁrrther information and
usually make inferences ﬂom the text). There is a uniqueness and richness of expression
that emanates ﬂom Hove’s employment of Shona expressions: J arrifa reprimands Marita
for leaving the farm by saying “a journey is for two people” (11). Marume scolds Marita
by saying “a man with a beard must control his wife”(16). While such sayings enhance
reader appreciation of Shona expression, speciﬁc lexical references do leave potential
gaps in reader comprehension.

The central ﬁgure in Bones, Marita, is driven by her desire to ﬁnd out about her
son. A representation of Marita and her life is built “around her” through multiple
external character dialogues that speak to Marita. She acquires the help of two other
women, J anifa and the character “Unknown Woman,” in her search. Marita asks J anifa to
read a letter her son wrote to J anifa in school so that she can remember her son, and

J anifa responds:

I start reading it, putting the boy’s voice into the words so that she can remember how he used to
speak. I read and read without looking at her, but what’s this breath that is moving the little bit of
grass near my mouth? She is already leaning against me, listening, her eyes glowing and her
breath bursting like a harsh wind. ( 6)

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Difﬁcult as it is for J anifa to share the words of her former sweetheart, she does so out of
respect and love for Marita. J anifa is able to share Marita’s pain of having lost her son,
and goes on to become the “daughter in-law” Marita might have had. As they are both
workers at Manyepo’s farm, Marita, as counseling ﬁgure, able to show J anifa a critical
voice that shows solidarity and also an awareness of the unfair treatment of farm workers.
After Marita’s death, Janifa continually remembers her voice: “Sit down and allow the
night to pass . . .. I hear you say , Marita . . . Rest the weary body. The work I did at
Manyepo’s farm is enough for you also” (6).

Meeting Marita only during a bus ride, the Unknown Woman represents Marita as a
supportive ﬁgure, full of spiritual grace:

Marita is not someone I met on the bus. She is much more than that. Imagine, just think of it, a
woman who gives me so much of what is inside her heart without crying. In our journey she
took me to the well, back into the kitchen, then to the forest to gather ﬁrewood. It does not
happen every day that someone you meet shows you the pain inside her heart, the troubles
inside her mind. The mind is a hidden thing. The heart also is a hidden thing. Do they not say
the mouth is a small cave with which to hide the things of inside. Many burdensome things
which weigh inside the breast of a person. Marita showed me all the burdens inside me, but she
did so without shedding even a little tear or making me feel sorry for her. . . .From the time
Marita sat beside me on the seat of the bus, I felt her warmth seep into me, tickling my heart
with a certain joy inside. (67 - emphasis mine)

Marita, able to open her heart without evoking pity for her position, is in a position to
offer a sense of emotional well being to an unknown woman returning to her urban home.
It is at this point in the story that the innovativeness and power of Hove’s Shona-like
narrative becomes clear. Through direct character dialogue, the reader is able to build a
perspective of a woman and individual in her world that might otherwise have no voice.
The Unknown Woman, and by extension the reader, is able view Marita as a strong and

loving human being, regardless of her illiteracy or poverty. Marita’s ability to relate to a

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member of the younger generation (J anifa) and also an urban woman represents a
powerful message of solidarity for Zimbabwean readers, presumably most of whom have
attained advanced English literacy in order to be reading Hove’s work. Hove is offering
Zimbabwean readers an opportunity to dialogue with an individual that has a lot to say,
but may not have the opportunity or ability to share her experience with a socially and
geographically separated literate Zimbabwean society. The narrative section with
Unknown Woman clearly supports Wylie’s (1991) position that in the “dream time of the
narrative, where voices of the living and the dead mingle, women give strength to each
other” (83). In both the narrative representation and story, Hove is opening up a
considerable amount of narrative space to traditionally marginalized voices. By building
a world of voices that surround her, he innovatively allows the reader to approach and
“hear” a woman who negotiates the historically located social constraints of gender, race
and illiteracy during a period of resistance.

Marita shows her critical awareness of race and gender as societal factors when
she considers her position on Manyepo’s farm. F ocalized through her husband Marume’s
thoughts (representing Marita’s original comments to Manyepo), Marita’s consciousness

of these constraints is evident:

Manyepo, look at my bare breasts, and these cracked feet, do you not think that my feet should
be covered so that I can work better in the muddy soil of your ﬁelds? All the children staring at
a woman’s bare breasts, do you not think it is shameful? Why do you not give your own wife
that chance to go around half-naked with ﬂies cleaning their coats on her nipples? These things
are not good, Manyepo. My own wife has been telling you these things for a long time, but you
dared call her wide-mouth. (17)

In a reversal of roles, Marita attempts to educate and humanize Manyepo -- to help him
to recognize the double standards based on race and gender. By directly addressing

Manyepo, reminding him of Marita’s protests, Marume is shown to be aware of these

 

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constraints as well. In essence, Marita is speaking for her husband and the wider Shona
farm-worker community; many of who still work on large white owned farms, called
purazi by Zimbabweans that are still in operation today. Thus, in addition to Hove’s use
of narrative to show the constraints women faced during this period, he evokes an
additional socially relevant layer of farm worker constraints. Marume shows the reader
how Marita, despite her personal obstacles, manages to become critical voice for workers
as well.

Hove adds another important voice to Marita’s world -- an oppressive but
compromised fellow farm worker. Chisaga, Manyepo’s cook, raises issues of race and
class ﬂom his own narrative perspective. Chisaga wonders of Manyepo, his white
employer, “do you not know that the poor also see the rich . . . look at me now, poverty is
like my stubborn ﬁiend . . .. Do you think I do not dream of riding in a car like yours
which ﬂows like water in the river?” (31). By and addressing the white farm owner
directly, Chisaga shifts the address (away ﬂom Marita) in a way that places the reader in

a position to focus on Manyepo:

“Chisaga, you bloody crook, too quiet for nothing.”[Manyepo]

“Yes baas.”[Chisaga]

“Yes baas, yes baas, can’t you say something more than yes baas? Bring us the whisky quick, the
madam is burning of thirst.”

“Yes baas.” (30)

Through his reported speech of Manyepo, Chisaga paints the picture of a drunken
employer, ignorant of the concerns of his workers, and dependent upon his cook to take

care of him.

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In relation to the rest of the farm workers, Chisaga is in a superior class position. He
uses this position as sexual weapon against Marita and J arrifa. Chisaga initially desires
Marita; “Yes, Marita, I have been wanting to sleep with you for a long time. I have been
wanting to see how I can help you for a long time. A very long time” (31). When she

runs away however, Chisaga ﬁnds and rapes J anifa;

Now listen to me. You make any noise and your body will be found in the dam after the dam has
dried. You are my wife and I will sleep with you now. Do you not know what you and Marita
did to make me miserable? I am the tree that never forgets its wounds while the axe sits at home
smiling after a day of eating into the tree’s ﬂesh. (92)

Rich in his use of “smiling axe” metaphor with Chisaga, Hove does not shy away ﬂom 1'
potential reader ambivalence and directly represents Chisaga’s sadistic intentions. In
addition, he adds an important voice to Marita’s world--that of the compromised worker
that attempts to secure a position in the farm hierarchy. Thus, the Zimbabwean reader is
placed in a position to react negatively to Chisaga’s rape of J anifa, but also comes to
understand Chisaga’s dilemma: by caring for Manyepo directly, he must accept the scorn
of his fellow farm workers in addition to the drunken rages of his white employer. Not
necessarily feeling sympathy for Chisaga, the reader comes to better understand the
constraints of world that Marita is negotiating. Despite her critical voice concerning farm
conditions, Marita cannot risk angering Chisaga too much for fear of rape. At the same
time, Chisaga feels constrained by Marita’s moral presence on the farm. This constraint
is evidenced by his Chisaga’s rape of J anifa after Marita’s departure for the city.

In a section narrated by J anifa, she realizes her mother may have consciously put
her in a position to be raped (going for water at an odd time of the day) in order to placate

Chisaga: “I laugh at all this Marita, but I think my own mother was behind what Chisaga

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did to me”(91). This interpretation, offered by J anifa, would greatly emphasize the level
of unequal power relations based on Chisaga’s position at the farm--mothers offering
their daughter as a sacriﬁce. Marita’s unique moral strength and inﬂuence is emphasized
by fact that it is Marita, not J anifa’s mother, who deters Chisaga ﬂom his plans of rape.
More importantly, J arrifa gains comfort by addressing Marita in her absence rather than
her own mother.

Hove’s approach to narrative in Bones has two important effects for readers. The
ﬁrst effect is that of mimesis; Hove is educating an audience about groups and a time
period that have traditionally not been represented and continue to be marginalized in
Zimbabwean society. Related to this educative ﬁrnction, Hove is creating a space in
which the reader may dialogue with a range of individual voices in a speciﬁc space and
time. Multiple voices combine to build a view of Marita and of her world through direct
character representation. It is this double effect that lends such power to Hove’s narrative

and makes his work an appropriate choice for a critical pedagogy.

Language Socialization

Thoroughly integrated into all narrative positions, language socialization is de-
emphasized at the surface of represented speech . According to Wylie (1991), Hove’s
efforts to project a Shona world-view in language result in “language itself becoming the
major protagonist” (50). As most of the story’s tension is derived ﬂom an interlocked
dialogue of interior voices, realism is de-emphasized. It is as if, as members of tight knit
community, there are few differences in language socialization strategies. Exceptions to

this occur mainly at the level of unequal interaction between whites and blacks.

 

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“What is the bitch’s name, ask her, in your language?”[Policeman]
“Marita. I work her in the ﬁelds. I am not a bitch.” [Marita] (57)

Language socialization differences in this context refer mainly to the differences in
language communities and power that emanates ﬂom those communities. Manyepo, a
white farmer, abuses his worker both verbally and physically. He speaks either English
or chilapalapa (referred to by Rhodesians as “kitchen kafﬁr”) -- a command based
language. For the police, the language of interrogation is English. With just these few
references to white language socialization practice in relation to Aﬁicans, Hove is clearly
highlighting the oppressive power relations in a farming context.

Within the Shona community, the main violation of language socialization occurs
at school. When a teacher ﬁnds J anifa with a love letter in her book, he is abusive in his
treatment of J anifa: “. . .You bitch, all you keep in your dirty mind is love letters, nothing
else. Take this rubbish and throw it in the rubbish pit, you prostitute of prostitutes” (3).

J anifa reports to the implied narratee (not Marita) that the teacher represents school as an
alternative to prison, and a place where he “would growl with the satisfaction of eating
what everybody else thirsted for but would not have” (7). Through the representation of
the interior voices of Aﬂican farm workers, Hove represents a Shona community and,
especially women, negotiating the societal constraints that were intensiﬁed during the
second Chimurenga.

Obj ecting to Hove’s portrayal, Veit-Wild has called Hove’s treatment of these

themes “romantic” and in a language

that encloses the reader, it imposes concepts and images which seem ﬁxed and closed, nothing
remains suggestive. The language recreates a world of sayings and proverbs and registers and a
sense of oneness with the land and with tradition. It celebrates a form of Aﬁicanness which does
not exist anymore. (Veit—Wild, 1993: 317)

 

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Veit -Wild fails to offer speciﬁc analysis of how the reader is enclosed and what
mechanisms Hove utilizes to ensure closure. What she may be referring to is the
collapsing of individual character language socialization strategies. In this sense,
Bakhtin’s parameters for a successful portrayal of the “exposure of social languages” are
perhaps less accentuated. Hove’s innovative linguistic strategy creates a less
differentiated narrative voice that tends to minimize difference between individual
character dialogue. This aspect of Hove’s work is especially disturbing for Veit-Wild

(1993) when she compares it to Mungoshi’s:

While in Waiting for the Rain Charles Mungoshi also expressed his love for his land and
people, he showed at the same time that the unity with the land has been destroyed; he depicted
the village community as sick and corroded. Hove seems to have chosen to ignore such
fundamental feelings of rupture. He does not acknowledge the changes in society, the
disruptions and the contradictions in people’s lives as reﬂected in their language, in modern
urban slang or new forms of oral culture. Ignoring all this, Hove’s language seems, ﬁnally ,
artiﬁcial, a pose. (317)

While the surface manifestations of polyphony in Bones are not as marked, Veit-Wild’s
argument does not hold for conﬂict at the ideological-identity level. Hove’s characters
could not be more disrupted in their language socialization tradition. Marurne,
constrained by a lack of education and his fear of going back to the locations, can voice
his identity only in relation to Marita. In contrast to her vocal resistance to Manyepo’s
treatment, Marume pleads, “What can we do Marita? We are sons in a strange land” (23).
Chisaga, obsessed with possessing Marita and her opinion, is cooking for a man:
“Cooking isn’t a good thing for a man, not a man like me. But Marita thinks the job I do
is the best on the farm” (29). J anifa, struggling to gain an education, is dependent upon
Marita for guidance. Alluding to her inner conﬂict that eventually leads to her

commitment to a sarritarium, J anifa says of Marita, “The things of inside are difﬁcult to

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understand all the time. The things of inside burn like a strong ﬁre, but I only look at
Marita and the ﬁre inside me stops burning me to dea ” (41). Thus, what Veit-Wild
seems to be objecting to in Hove is not language, but rather an interpretation of history
and a representation of reality in language. Veit-Wild’s view is that there are no
Zimbabweans who experience reality as do those in Hove’s novel.

With Bones, Hove has created Moyana’s (1988) desired “new language” -- one
that attempts to reﬂect Zimbabwean reality in a new way. A Zimbabwean scholar of
critical pedagogy, Moyana drew extensively on F reire and F anon to discuss his ideas of
avoiding class consciousness in blacks’ “aping of the white man” and artiﬁcially
“speaking through the nose” with British grammar (Moyana, 1988). Moyana’s goal was
to produce a meaningful form of literacy practice that led to a control of reality for one’s
own betterment. Following Moyana’s interpretation of Freire, the language of
domination can be turned into the language of new consciousness when focused on the
realities of the oppressed in Zimbabwe. While Moyana heralded Waiting for the Rain as
utilizing a “new language,” we have seen that Mungoshi’s portrayal of this new language
conﬁned itself mainly to the level of a character dialogue and some degree of
focalization. Going one step further with its homodiegetic narrators, Bones is a clear
example of a work focused upon the realities of the oppressed -- at the levels of language
style and content.

Hove’s work refers to a current Zimbabwean reality in which the early
accomplishments in educational access have not been extended to issues of relevance and
equity. In a work of social commentary, Shabeen Tales: Messages from Harare (1992),

Hove comments on this:

 

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Aﬁican leaders do not dare embark too seriously on dynamic literacy programmes; a reading
nation runs the risk of thinking about national affairs. To read is to infringe on the territory of
the rulers, whose monopoly of wisdom must not be disputed. As a result, the burden of
illiteracy will remain with the Aﬁican continent for many years to come. Another denial of the
people’s participation. (24)

Hove points to a political hegemony under the current ruling party that is hostile toward

the voicing of class criticisms:

When people cannot understand what their leaders say, they are daily subjected to pitiful forms
of popular participation. In their deafness, they are dragged to Harare International Airport to
dance when President Robert Mugabe arrives from a trip with gains to the country of which the
people are totally unaware. They are invited to cheer and shout in conference halls in which the
President might be saying some of the most undemocratic things a President could ever say to
an electorate. (24)

Evidence of highly uneven market relations is present in the current educational system.
Class divisions and their impact upon language education are manifested geographically
in Zimbabwe. Government and farm schools in rural areas farther out from Harare still
serve predominantly Shona and Ndebele speaking communities that engage in small scale
agriculture or work on large farms, as portrayed in the 19603 and 703 in Bones. Schools
in these areas often have difﬁculty in attracting qualiﬁed teachers due to a shortage of
housing. In 1987, the percentage of untrained teachers in district council schools (the
type that serve rural areas) was 50% at the primary level and 45% at the secondary level.
Reading and writing materials are not commonly available at these schools. There are
thus still a great number of students who have teachers “eating what everybody thirsted
for but could not have.”

One way of viewing Veit-Wild’s objection over Hove’s style is that it represents
the crux of the language use debate as it currently manifests itself in Zimbabwe: that is,

the degree to which a widespread penetration of the settler economy and education

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system has led to widespread European cultural hegemony in language use. In Bones,
European hegemony is reﬂective in the language choice of the novel (English and not
Shona), but is negotiated in the language socialization strategies of characters. While the
issue of how many people actively engage in English reading awaits further empirical
study in Zimbabwe, current evidence points to great differences between urban and rural
areas. As noted in the previous chapter, Anderson (1983) has identiﬁed this as a central
issue for developing countries in what he terms a “politically sufﬁcient diffusion of
billingualism”(122). Both Mungoshi’s and Hove’s contributions demand responses ﬂom
Zimbabwean readers who negotiate their identities within similar contact zones. In the
case of Bones, women in rural areas who struggle against immense social constraints of
gender and class are especially well represented. In building a heteroglossic world
around the ﬁgure of Marita, Hove forges a Shona-like narrative that has the double effect
for the reader--especially the literate Zimbabwean reader-~of mimesis and polyphony.
What makes Hove’s approach unique in Zimbabwean literature is his Shona-like
narrative that he employs through his characters, in what Harrow (1994) has referred to as
a the “meeting of two languages created by the extemalization of the project of a speaker
addressing the other through the voice of a character [in this case characters], through the
mask, as it were” (346). Through his creation of this narrative, Hove is inviting readers
(especially Zimbabwean ones), to dialogue in an under-represented social and historical
space - that of illiterate farm workers during the second Chimurenga.
Tsitsi Dangarembga

Born in 1959 in Mtoko (eastern Zimbabwe), Dangarembga is the ﬁrst Black

Zimbabwean woman to publish a novel in English. While Dangarembga’s parents were

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studying for their degrees in the 19603, she spent her early childhood in Britain. After
returning to Zimbabwe, she went on to enroll at Marymount Mission in Mutare. The
nuns of the school are very strict about morality and discipline and the school has some
reputation for being elitist (T sodzo, 1996). Dangarembga ﬁnished up her secondary
education at Arundale School in Salisbury (now Harare) in the mid 19703. After
graduating, Dangarembga attempted to study medicine at Cambridge, but soon came back
to do a degree in Psychology at University of Zimbabwe.

In Nervous Conditions (1988), Dangembga utilizes an autodiegetic English
narrative, internally focalized through the character Tarnbudzai (Tarnbu). The narrative
is analeptic (refening backward -- placing the narrator at some future point in time),
highly descriptive (much more so than Mungoshi or Hove’s work), and analytical. It
explores themes related to the construction of gender and psychological development of
individuals in pre-independence Zimbabwe.

Dangarembga decenters her own autobiographical experience (highly
Anglophone/urban) by locating the narrative voice in Tarnbu, a character ﬂom a Shona
rural area. Nyasha, Tambu’s cousin, is a character who experiences alienation ﬂom
Shona culture. This provides an autobiographical distance for Dangarembga that allows
her to creatively project how an urban/assimilated girl with a neurosis might appear to an
age mate ﬂom a rural background. Gender roles and the effects of patriarchy are
examined by a critical Tarnbu.

Consequences of Analepsis
The autodiegetic narrator, Tarnbu, begins the novel with an analeptic reference to

her brother’s death: “I was not sorry when my brother died. Nor am I apologizing for

 

185

my callousness, as you may deﬁne it, my lack of feeling” (1). Thus, in the ﬁrst sentence
of the novel, Tarnbu establishes a dialogue with the implied narratee (someone who may
react negatively to her lack of remorse) and paralepsis (that is, a situation in which the
narrator, in order to limit himself to the information held by the hero at the moment of the
action, has to suppress all the information he acquired later, information which very often
is vital - Genette, 1980).

One consequence of this approach is that the reader is often left uncertain about
important stages in the development of Tambu’s critical awareness. This becomes

evident with descriptions of Nhamo, Tambu’s brother:

The needs and sensibilities of the women in my family were not considered a priority, or even
legitimate. That was why I was in Standard Three in the year that Nhamo died, instead of in
Standard Five, as I should have been by that age. . .Thinking about it, feeling the injustice of it,
this is how I came to dislike my brother, and not only by brother, my father, my mother - in fact
everybody. (12 - emphasis mine)

From an undeﬁned future point in relation to the story, the narrator has arrived at the
critical awareness of the general societal oppression of women. In the present
progressive, Tarnbu is “thinking about it.” The reader is thus not certain at what point
Tarnbu comes to dislike her entire family.

As the novel progresses, the reader’s awareness of the narrator’s future
consciousness is reduced by increasingly less proleptic (future reference or “what will
happen”) narrative disclosure, but is still present due to her critically evaluative
comments. In a period before Nhamo’s death, when Tarnbu discovers for the ﬁrst time

that she cannot go to school for lack of family resources, she decides to grow her own

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maize to sell for school fees. Her father thinks she should not mind staying home since

she cannot “feed books” to her ﬁrture husband:

“13 that anything to worry about? Ha-a—a, it’s nothing,” be reassured me, with his usual ability

to jump whichever way was easiest. “Can you cook books and feed them to your husband?

Stay at home with your mother. Learn to cook and clean. grow vegetables.” (IS-emphasis

mine)
Here the paraleptic interference emanates ﬂom Tambu’s future narrative position,
interj ecting an evaluation of her father. Tarnbu grows enough mealies and her teacher
Mr. Matimba agrees to take her into town to sell them. Once in town, a white woman

named Doris, realizing Tarnbu needs school fees, is persuaded by Mr. Matimba to give

Tarnbu enough money for a year of school:

Mr. Matimba did speak for himself. He spoke most sorrowfully and most beseechingly.
Doris darkened like a chameleon. Money changed hands, paper money ﬂom Doris’ hands to
Mr. Matimba’s. (28)

During this time a crowd gathers around the transaction. It is ﬂom “the crowd” that the

race as an issue is highlighted for Tarnbu:

“They’re kafﬁrs,” interjected the youth. “They don’t want to learn anything. Too much like
hard work”. . . .

Money changed hands, paper money ﬂom Doris’ hands to Mr Matimba’s.

The beefy youth was disgusted. “’Ihat’s more than two crates of shumba. Wasted on a
kafﬁr!” (28)

This difﬁculty of securing school fees for many Aﬁicans in the early 19603
remains a relevant issue in current day Zimbabwe. Tarnbu highlights the common
practice of reserving ﬁnancial resources for male education, therefore making female
education extremely difﬁcult. The attitude of Tambu’s father is echoed in Bones by
J anifa’s father. J anifa’s mother, in represented speech through J anifa, berates her
husband: “No, do not use that piece of paper, it’s for the girl, the school girl, child of

school. Remember the other day you rolled your tobacco in her school report” (5).

 

187

Women’s History

Unlike Waiting for the Rain or Bones there is little speciﬁc Zimbabwean historical
or mythical allusion made by the characters or narrator in the novel. The setting is more
generally ﬂamed -- usually by the narrator -- with dates and geographical place names

that have little effect on the action:

I was thirteen years old when my brother died. It happened in 1968. (1)

My brother went to school at the mission where my uncle was headmaster and which was some
twenty miles away ﬂom the village, to the west, in the direction of Umtali town [now Mutare].
(1)

Then, just before Babamukuru went to England in 1960, he bought my father an ox-plough. (6)

Perhaps the most revealing temporal ﬂaming, especially in relation to gender roles,

comes ﬂom Maigugu when she compares Tarnbu’s situation to her own:

“Don’t you remember, when we went to South Aﬂica everybody was saying that we, the
women, were loose.” Babamukuru winced at this explicitrress. Maiguru continued. “It wasn’t a
question of associating with this race or that race at that time. People were prejudiced against
educated women. Prejudiced. That’s why they said we weren’t decent. That was in the ﬁfties.
Now we are into the seventies. I am disappointed that people still believe the same things.
(181)

From this reported speech, the narrator and the reader are placed in a position to compare
temporal ﬂaming of prejudice against educated women. Unchanged for over twenty
years (and perhaps more for the Zimbabwean reader), educated women are consistently
looked down upon by the partriarchal society. Though Maiguru is aware of the
discrimination against her, she nonetheless conforms to the traditional expectation that

she take care of her family:

“What it is,” she sighed, “to have to choose between self and security. When I was in England I
glimpsed for a little while the things I could have been, the things I could have done if - if - if
things were - different - But there were Babawa Chido [Babamukuru] and the children and the
family. And does anyone realize, does anyone appreciate, what sacriﬁces were made? As for
me, no one even thinks about the things I gave up.” She collected herself. “But that’s how it

 

188

goes, Sisi Tarnbu! And when you have a good man and lovely children, it makes it all worth
while.” (102)

In this passage the reader can see the conﬂict between Maiguru’s awareness of herself as
an individual (“self”) and as a traditional mother (“security”). After a glimpse of her
awareness of the things she gave up -- presumably an active career in teaching --she
suppresses her inner struggle with an effort. By drawing upon the legitimization of
family over self, Maiguru shows her own path of gender role negotiation.

While Maiguru highlights the geographic boundaries of South Aﬁica and the
Rhodesian gender roles in the 19503 to the 703, Nyasha discusses her experience in
England (ﬂom 1960-1965) in a different way, emphasizing her sense of alienation, rather

than Maiguru’s adaptation:

The parents ought to have packed us off home. They should have, you know. Lots of people

did that. Maybe that would have been best. For them at least, because now they’re stuck with

hybrids for children. And they don’t like it. They don’t like it at all. It offends them. They

think we do it on purpose, so it offends them. And I don’t know what to do about it , Tarnbu,

really I don’t. I can 't help having been there and grown into the me that has been there. (78-

emphasis mine)
While Maiguru is able to separate and suppress the questions that her experience in
England raised for her identity, they have “grown into” Nyasha’s very identity. To
separate and suppress parts of her identity that do not ﬁt into Zimbabwean life is to do
violence to Nyasha’s psyche.

Nyasha has difﬁculty ﬁtting in politically because she can separate out the
consequences of a settler inﬂuenced patriarchal culture. This is probably a result of an

English education and social experience that has taught her to ask critical questions. This

political awareness leads her to conform even less to gender role expectations of her

 

189

peers. While her ﬁiends are reading light romance, Nyasha’s reading is oriented toward
history:

She preferred reality. She was going through a historical phase. She read a lot of books that
were about real people, real peoples and their sufferings: the condition in South Africa, which
she asked Maiguru to compare with our own situation and ended up arguing with her when
Maiguru said we were better off. . . .She wanted to know many things: whether the Jews’ claim
to Palestine was valid, whether monarchy was a just form of government, the nature of life and
relations before colonization, exactly why UDI was declared and what it meant. (93)

Certain that if she knew the facts, she could ﬁnd the solutions, Nyasha is increasingly
traumatized by the realization that she and her family are caught up in a system of racial
oppression. The combination of identity related stresses manifests itself in Nyasha’s
eating disorder and uncontrollable rage. Toward the end of the novel, when Tarnbu is
visiting Nyashsa on school vacation, Nyasha’s “nervous condition” becomes apparent --
quoted extensively here to show Nyasha’s damaging realization that there are no easy
answers to the settler inﬂuenced patriarchy in Rhodesian history, and that she is a part of
it:

Then she sat on her bed and looked at me out of her sunken eyes, her bony knees pressed
together so that her nightdress fell through the space where her thighs had been, agitated and
nervous and picking her skin. “I don’t want to do it, Tarnbu, really I don’t, but it’s coming, I
feel it coming.” Her eyes dilated. “They’ve done it to me,” she accused, whispering still.
“Really they have.” And then she became stem. “It’s not their fault. They did it to them too.
You know they did.” she whispered. “To both of them, but especially to him. They put him
through it all. But it’s not his fault, he’s good.” Her voice took on a Rhodesian accent. “He’s a
good boy, a good munt. A bloody good kaffrr,” she informed in sneering sarcastic tones. . . .
.We 're groveling. Lucia for a job, Jeremiah for money. Daddy grovels to them. We gravel to
him.” She began to rock, her body quivering tensely. “I won’t grovel. Oh no, I won’t. I’m not
a good girl. I’m evil. . . .Nyasha was beside herself with fury. She rampaged, shredding her
history book between her teeth (“Their history. Fucking liars. Their bloody lies.”), breaking
mirrors, her clay pots. . ..(201- emphasis mine)

Taking on the voice of her oppressors, Nyasha has come to the realization that her family
is negatively inﬂuenced by settler inﬂuence. All family members, through Babamukuru,

are dependent in one way or another on a settler economy that is based on settler shaped

190

history. Still at an age when she is actively negotiating her identity in relation to society,
Nyasha’s young critical awareness impacts with the reality of the settler experience
during the second Chimurenga. Through her rejection of settler-oppression, Nyasha
highlights the ongoing negotiation of societal gender constraints that women face in
Zimbabwe. Nyasha’s critical awareness is established outside of her community’s and
country’s boundaries. For Nyasha, her inability to assert herself for “who she is” -- an
intelligent, ﬂee thinking, and independent young woman -- emanates ﬂom the settler
inﬂuenced patriarchy, not a pre-existing mental illness.

Cobham (1992) points out the importance of refocusing the discussion in Aﬁican
literary criticism to recognize how authors continually challenge overly simpliﬁed

interpretations of identity:

The transformation of the anti-imperialist struggle in Aﬁica into a nationalist movement
exacerbated a crisis of individual and collective identity that is staged in the Aﬂican novel. To
date most critics have seen these two levels of trauma in terms of an allegorical correspondence
between the psychic crisis of the (usually educated) individual and the socio-political crisis of
the modern nation state. However, we can also read the crisis of individual identity as a crisis
of gender and sexual identities that parallels and intersects with the socio-political
manifestations of disorder. ( Cobham in Parker and Russo 1992, 43)

While the novel is oddly silent about the actual events and direct suffering of the war,
Dangarrnebga is opening a new area of investigation into the issues surrounding the
second Chimurenga by focusing upon the way settler inﬂuenced patriarchy has affected
gender roles and sexual identity, in an especially negative way for girls. Observed and
reported by Tarnbu, Nyasha is a young girl whose expectations for intellectual and social
independence are dashed upon a settler inﬂuenced patriarchy. While perhaps unique
historically, the existence of “Nyashas” in the current social and educational system is

increasingly probable.

 

191

Early in novel, after the death of her brother, Tarnbu moves in with Babarnukuru’s
family at the mission in order to pursue her studies. Babamukuru’s immediate family has
just returned ﬂom a ﬁve year stay in England (for Maiguru and Babamukuru to complete
their master’s degrees). Upon their return, young Nyasha immediately experiences
difﬁculties readjusting to life in Zimbabwe. In contrast to Tarnbu’s passivity, Nyasha’s
posture is openly rebellious. Hill (1995) has noted that Nyasha’s speech “disrupts and
threatens the authority of gender- and race «determined status in colonial society -- a a;
society mastered by Babamukuru” (79). Her resistance, mainly to the patriarchal
Babamukuru, manifests itself in her dress, eating disorder, and language socialization. As
Babarnukuru’s tolerance for Nyasha’s behavior is generally low, a damaging cycle is
established in which his vehement reactions spark further resistance ﬂom Nyasha. In the
context of a power struggle with her father on most aspects of living, Nyasha intemalizes

her resistance in relation to food as well;

“What did you say?” cried Babamukuru, his voice cracking in disbelief.
“Didn’t you hear me tell you I don’t want to hear you answer back? Didn’t you hear me tell you
that just now? Now sit down and eat that food. All of it. I want to see you eat all of it.”

“I’ve had enough,” explained Nyasha. “Really, I’m full.” Her foot began to tap. Instead of
sitting down she walked out the dining-room. (83-84)

As Nyasha grows thinner due to bulimia, Tarnbu grows larger at the nutrient ﬁlled table
of Babamukuru: “I grew quite plump” (95). Later in the story, when Nyasha stays out
late with a boy, Babamukuru becomes enraged and physically strikes Nyasha. After

reminding Chido, his son, to stay out his quarrels with Nyasha,

Babamukuru, gathering himself within himself so that his whole weight was behind the blow be
dealt Nyasha’s face. “Never,” he hissed. “Never,” be repeated, striking the other check with the
back of his hand, “speak to me like that.” (114)

 

192

Thus, in spite of the personal consequences, Nyasha resists Babarnukuru’s position as a
patriarch in a white-settler dominated system. While Nyasha openly challenges
Babamukuru, Tarnbu quietly observes, and experiences a growth in her understanding of

the nature of oppression:

[I was] feeling bad for her [Nyasha] and thinking how dreadfully familiar that scene had been,
with Babamukuru condemning Nyasha to whoredonr, making her a victim of her femaleness,
just as I had felt victimized at home in the days when Nhamo went to school and I grew my
maize. The victimization, I saw, was universal. It didn’t depend on poverty, on lack of
education or on tradition. It didn’t depend on any of the things I had thought it depended on.
Men took it everywhere with them. (116)

rum.

Both Nyasha and Tarnbu indirectly come to their awareness of oppression through
education; however, they have different ways of handling the contradiction. Nyasha,
through her self-destructive behavior, seems to be burning herself out. Tambu, on the
other hand, is able to pursue the development of her critical voice without openly
rebelling.
Gender Roles and the Cash Economy

At the homestead, Maiguru’s interaction with the women of the extended family
highlights the intersection of class and gender in the novel. During a “males only” dare
or family meeting, all of the women are in the kitchen, attempting to listen through the

door. In the course of their listening, the women could, according to Tarnbu,

stop and consider the alternatives, but the matter was too intimate. It stung too saltily, too
sharply and agonizingly the sensitive images that the women had of themselves, images that
were really no more than reﬂections. (138)

While they could have chosen solidarity in the face of male dominance, the women

retreated more resolutely into their roles, pretending while they did that actually they were
advancing, had in fact initiated an offensive, when really, for each one of them , it was a last
solitary, hopeless defense of the security of their illusions. (138)

193

In an initial attempt to ﬁnd solidarity, many of the women look to Maiguru as a possible
model due to her husband’s place as head of the family. Her response is, “ I don’t want
to intrude into the affairs of my husband’s family. I shall keep quiet and go to bed”
(138). While Maiguru’s choice to stay out of the affair may have been personal, it is
interpreted by the other women as “proudness.” Maiguru’s class position at the mission
has isolated her ﬂom the daily difﬁculties that women experience in the rural area. While
Babamukuru has been called upon to resolve the situation as head patriarch, an equivalent
role does not exist for Maiguru and she has no intention of forging one.

This view of women contrasts markedly with both Hove’s and Mungoshi’s
portrayal of female involvement in the family decision making process. Marita, though
outside of her extended family, exercises her agency and independence in the face of
daunting social constraints. In addition, she forges links of feminist solidarity with J anifa,
a member of the younger generation, and the Unknown Woman, an urban woman. In
Waiting for the Rain, Mungoshi’s portrayal of the settler inﬂuenced conﬂict that
Mandisa, Raina, and Betty experience is similar to Tambu’s experience (with family
concern revolving around Lucifer and not Betty), but less class based; women are
portrayed as strong, even emasculating, but more generally oppressed as a group. Tarnbu
is shown to be much more successful than Betty at exercising her agency, able to enter
the cash economy by selling her mealies with the help of her teacher.

The cash economy also inﬂuences family relations between Babamukuru and
J erimiah, Tabudzai’s father. Interested in his brother’s success for the material beneﬁts it

will bring him, J erimiah is happy to call out Babamukuru’s praises;

194

Our father and benefactor has returned appeased, having devoured English letters with a ferocious
appetite! Did you think degrees were indigestible? If 30, Look at my brother. He has digested
them! If you want to see an educated man, look at my brother . . . Full of knowledge. Knowledge
that will beneﬁt us all. (36)

Hill (1995) has noted that J erimiah’s concept of gender roles is evidenced by his use of
the food - knowledge metaphor. Babamukuru may “consume” books while the concept
of Tarnbu “serving” books is seen as nonsensical. In an additional sign of subservience,
J erimiah essentially abdicates his direct role as Tambu’s father to Babamukuru (eldest
father). Against the expressed wishes of Tambu’s mother, J erimiah allows Tarnbu to be
sent away to school. J erimiah’s immediate compliance with Babamukuru’s wishes --
“Exactly! . . . She must be given the opportunity” (56) -- is more consistent with
Tongoona’s interaction with the white father, with his “blurred half-salute [that] becomes
more and more like that of the recruit in the presence of his superior ofﬁcers” (Mungoshi
1975, 169). Dangarembga, like Mungoshi, shows the impact that an education tied to the
cash economy has upon extended family relations. Babamukuru’s power as patriarch is
shown as absolute because of his superior access to the settler inﬂuenced economy.

Despite her immediate family’s lack of direct assistance, Tambu’s ability to take
advantage of rare settler-inﬂuenced societal opportunities is represented as working
according to a “larger plan.” Tarnbu’s description is markedly similar to Lucifer’s feeling
of leaving his community:

How can I describe the sensations that swamped me when Babamukuru started his car, with me
in the front seat beside him, on the day I left my home? It was relief, but more than that . . . .
What I experienced that day was a short cut, a rerouting of everything I had ever deﬁned as me
into fast lanes that would speedily lead me to my destination . . . . My horizons were saturated
with me, my leaving, my going. There was no room for what I left behind. My father, as
affably, shallowly agreeable as ever, was insigniﬁcant. My mother, my anxious mother, was no
more than another piece of surplus scenery to be maintained. (58)

 

 

195

Thus, Tarnbu, seeing her opportunity, looks forward with little concern for parents. As
for her sisters however,

They were watching me climb into Babamukuru’s car to be whisked away to limitless
horizons. It was up to them to Ieam the important lesson that circumstances were not
immutable, no burden so binding that it could not be dropped. The honour for teaching them
this emancipating lesson was mine. I claimed it all, for here I was, living proof of the moral.
There was no doubt in my mind that this was the case. (8 - emphasis mine)

Tarnbu, already by Form Four (fourth grade), has internalized her role as female liberator
for her sisters. She has found a way to negotiate a new gender role that includes
development of “horizons” through education. In addition, despite Tambu’s initial
certainty, the question of whether or not she is able to “liberate” her sisters is left open by
the end of the novel. Their presence, while never prominent, is absolutely minimal by the
second half of the novel. By the end of the novel, after ﬁnding out that she had been
admitted to an elite multiracial school, the narrator explains her attitude this way: “That
was how it was. That was how it would be. If you were clever, you slipped through any
loophole you could ﬁnd. I for one was going to take any opportunity that came my way”
(179).

Like the rest of the family, Tambu is dependent on Babamukuru’s generosity in a
patriarchal, settler inﬂuenced society. Unlike Nyasha, Tarnbu is more calmly and quietly
critical, not unlike Sekuru in Waiting for the Rain. She seems able to manage the
potential conﬂicts of Western education, Zimbabwean society, and her own psychological
development. This ability rests on her capacity to separate herself ﬂom her lack of
awareness in the early part of her life, and presumably her suppression of the ongoing

differences she experiences in maintaining contact with her family. How she manages

 

196

these psychological pressures is not developed in the novel. This is the “big question”
that Dangarembga has promised to answer numerous times in her “next” novel (George
and Scott, 1993).

One way of investigating how Tarnbudzai elides this psychological aspect is by
considering the gap between the author’s and the narrator’s autobiographical experience.
Dangarembga has never claimed to have experienced “traditional Shona” childhood. If
one looks at her background, one ﬁnds that her ﬁrst language is English and that she has
been educated in relatively elite institutions. It is possible that Dangarembga (as author)
used her own position as a model for Tambu’s retrospective narrative voice; this leap in
point of vie -- ﬂom a rural girl slowly becoming aware of her own oppression to a
woman who has developed a feminist consciousness through her education -- is one that
demands the Zimbabwean reader’s attention. Since paralepsis can never be fully
suppressed, Tarnbu’s future awareness stands in marked contrast to the presentation of
her “old-self.”

Language Socialization

Evidence of paraleptic contrast is present in the representation of language
socialization. Different levels of language socialization among characters in the novel are
painted with broad strokes by the narrator; the reader sees how different language
socialization strategies operate mainly between Nyasha and others. Early on this is
shown with Tarnbu’s difﬁculty in communicating with Nyasha. Nyasha and her brother
have just recently arrived ﬂom England: “They don’t understand Shona very well
anymore,” her mother explained. “They have been speaking nothing but English for so

long that most of their Shona has gone”(42). In addition, Nyasha has difﬁculty showing

197

respect through language, something proﬁcient Shona speakers accomplish through the
use of formal agreement markers (like “tu” and “vous” in French). As previously noted,
this has devastating psychological and physical consequences in her interaction with
Babamukuru. Babamukuru himself is affected in his language socialization; he has

developed a speech impediment when speaking with Nyasha:

“Er, Nyasha,” began Babamukuru, “can you tell me why you are back so late?” (112)

“And in that capacity I am telling you, I-am-telling-you, that I do not like the way you are always
walking about with these-er-these young men. (113)

“Er, Nyasha,” he asked, cutting her greeting short and not even seeing me, “can you tell me why
you are only coming in at this time at a quarter to seven?” (189)

Language socialization becomes especially noticeable in connection to the
narrator Tarnbu. In contrast to Nyasha’s inability to speak Shona, Tambu’s progression in
English is shown to operate as a seamless bilingual process, operating in concert with

other areas of socialization:

My English soon became ﬂuent ﬂom all the reading I was doing and ﬂom talking to Nyasha all
the time, but I spoke without an accent. I was not the headmaster’s daughter but a poor relative
whose background was as needy as anybody else’s, if not more so,. As far as boys were
concerned, I was obviously uninterested. (94)

By the end of the novel, Tarnbu masters even more languages:

I threw myself into everything: exotic languages, like Latin and French and Portuguese, with
unfamiliar sentence structures that told of brave legionnaires the enemy laying waste and a pupil
who wrote with the pen of their aunts. I wondered a while at such strange constructions, and then
remembered that I was no longer writing in English, ﬁnding on closer inspection that the structures
were quite similar to our own. Still, I mused those foreign people had strange things on their minds.
. ..( 195)

After Tarnbu enters the elite convent school by the end of the novel, she is represented as

interacting with her farmly at the homestead only once, and only through her mother’s

198

monologue. After her mother warns her of too much “Englishness,” Tarnbu initially
suppresses the warning, but concedes to the narratee that “seeds do grow.” While
differences in language socialization are witnessed by Tarnbu, they are not discussed by
the close of the novel when she returns for brief visits. This could be a result of the
narrator’s homodiegetic reduction of difference. Throughout the novel there is little

development of polyphony (except for Nyasha) in character dialogue. The future Tarnbu

 

(as narrator) is represented, through her narrative, as possessing more of a standard
English voice.
This interpretation stands in stark contrast to McWilliams’s (1991) reading of

Tambu’s narrative position:

Her desire is to be rid of the atmosphere of the homestead that seems to cling to and sully her in
her eyes. Yet this desire is intermixed with the surging realization that she can never forget her
past; that her life at the homestead with her parents cannot be shed like a second skin. She

vacillates between these two positions, never able to secure an absolute position on one or the
other side of this divide [rural Shana-urban English]. (104)

McWilliams’s reading of this “vacillation” rests upon a conﬂation of Tambu’s
represented character dialogue of Nyasha and the actual autodiegetic narrative position:

Tambu’s struggle for self-identity evolves into an awareness of her heteroglot complexity. She
comes to sense that her identity is a composite of shifting selves; she is not only obedient, hard-
working, self-abnegating, she is also adventurous, rebellious, strong-willed in her dialogically
enervated position as daughter, cousin, niece, schoolgirl, conﬁdante, and self. (105)

While it is true that Tarnbu cannot completely “forget” her home (an unrealistic
proposition to begin with), there is little evidence of vacillation in the autodiegetic
narrative. This narrator maintains her critical feminist position throughout, detailing the

process through which

[S]omething in my mind began to assert itself, to question things and refuse to be brainwashed,
bringing me to this time when I can set down this story. It was a long and painful process for

 

199

me, that process of expansion. It was a process whose events stretched over many years and
would ﬁll another volume. . ..(204 - emphasis mine)

By recognizing the temporal position of the autodiegetic narrator and the accompanying

 

paraleptic interference, any negotiation of Tarnbu’s identity is much less “heteroglot”
than McWilliams posits.

Tambu’s autodiegetic English narration represents the societal ﬂacture lines of

5

gender role negotiation in an extended Shona family. Through her represented external

(language breakdowns) and internal (eating disorder) deﬁance of Babamukuru, Nyasha

 

exhibits her resistance to patriarchy. Her resistance emanates ﬂom her socio-ideological
formation (linguistically and socially) in Britain. Tarnbu’s mother refers to this socio-
ideological interference when she discusses the socially damaging effects of English

language socialization or “Englishness” upon Chido and Nyasha:

“It’s the Englishness,” she said. It’ll kill them all if they aren’t careﬁrl,” and she snorted. “Look

at them. That boy Chido can hardly speak a word of his own mother’s tongue, and you’ll see,

his children will be worse. Running around with that white one, isn’t he, the rrrissionary’s I
daughter? His children will disgrace us. You’ll see. And himself, to look at him he may look '
all right, but there’s no telling what price he’s paying.” She wouldn’t say much about Nyasha.

“About that one we don’t even speak. It’s speaking for itself. Both of them, its the

Englishness. It’s a wonder it hasn’t affected the parents too.” (203)

Tarnbu, able to dialogue with Nyasha, calmly and conﬁdently builds her critical
awareness while furthering her formal education. She seamlessly integrates her rural
experience with that of the mission and eventually an elite boarding school. The reader,
especially the Zimbabwean one, wants to know the full trajectory and development of
Tarnbu’s critical consciousness. How does she negotiate all of the societal constraints

that face an Aﬂican woman in pre - (and presumably post) independence Zimbabwe.

200

Does she fulﬁll her original commitment to teach her sisters the “lessons of
emancipation”?

To what degree is Tambu’s narrative voice connected to her educational
background and education? As more and more upper-class families attempt to speak only
English in their daily lives, this issue is an important one for many Zimbabwean readers.
The negotiation of gender roles is also inﬂuenced by the language education process:
many younger women may perceive that the only way out of the oppressive Zimbabwean
patriarchal system is to seek out a superior language education that will afford them a
degree of economic independence. Whether or not this adoption of language
socialization strategy leads to community alienation is a question left open by
Dangarembga’s autodiegetic narrator.

Feminism in Zimbabwe

For the ﬁrst time in Zimbabwean literature, Dangarembga offers a Zimbabwean
ferrrinist centered novel written by a woman. Her main contribution to Zimbabwean
feminism is an explicit representation of how women may challenge gender roles and
patriarchy in Zimbabwean society. This “opening” in this speciﬁc contact zone is critical
to the feminist project of reconstructing femininity through the deconstruction of
dominant ideologies (colonialism and patriarchy) and through developing an
understanding of how these operate at the unconscious level in the Zimbabwean context.
Babamukuru, through his prodigious “consumption of words” and role as family leader,
represents the oppression that many women in Zimbabwe experience today. An
important part of a Chimurenga period contact zone would include a discussion of

patriarchal inﬂuence and women’s negotiations of it.

201

While there is yet to be a mass movement of feminist thought and literacy in
Zimbabwe, there is an extremely well articulated discourse emanating ﬂom writers such
as Dangarembga and Veit-Wild. Veit-Wild (not a Zimbabwean herself) has noted that
women in Zimbabwe ﬁnd themselves caught -- as with Mungoshi’s view on race --
between two worlds, the traditional and the modern. Migrant labor has steadily destroyed
the fabric of the extended family. Men go to work in the cities, leaving the women
behind to till the land, work hard to put their children through school, and to look after
the elderly (V cit-Wild, 1987). This sex-based division of labor is constantly reproduced
because the majority of the children that attend school are still boys. While the
percentages of males and females attending school are roughly equivalent in primary
levels, sex becomes an important differential factor in secondary school. By the time a
1982 form 1 (1 st year of secondary) cohort reached upper sixth (12th grade), 31% were
female. Drop out rates are aggravated by region as well: whereas in Harare only 6.8% of
the girls drop out ﬂom primary school, the corresponding ﬁgure for Manicaland is 39.6%
(Colclough, 1990). Graham-Brown (1991) reports that interviews with Zimbabwean
families and school administrators in 1987 revealed that, in early secondary school,
parents begin favoring boys. In addition, heavy demands are made on girls to do
domestic and farm work while still attending school. Other obstacles for women that
were mentioned included gender discrimination in the classroom (boys being called upon
more) and teen pregnancy (194).

In Nervous Conditions, Tarnbu experiences all of these societal constraints
through her struggle to achieve critical consciousness; yet, when examined closely, her

own agency is only realized through unique events: the assistance of an empowering

 

 

k

 

202

teacher (Mr. Matimba); the generous gift of a white woman (Doris); the death of a male
member of the family (Nhamo), the ﬁrll ﬁnancial support of an extended family member
(Babamukuru); and, the recruitment drive and the provision of full scholarship at an elite
convent school. How do Zimbabwean readers respond to this rare combination of life
circumstances for Tarnbu? Are these “strokes of luck” the only openings women can
hope for in their negotiation with patriarchy?

At a 1985 conference in Harare on “Women and Books” Akwe Amosu noted

(cited by Veit-Wild, 1987) the often gender based discriminatory nature of literacy:

We can say that literacy, while we talk about it as a tool, a neutral technology, is never neutral.
The ability to read and write cannot be learned without practicing the skill as you go; women
who learn on texts which continually undervalue women and ignore their existence will absorb
a sense of their own insigniﬁcance both among the literate and wider terms. (172)

A major agent for social change in Zimbabwe, the war of liberation and independence
ﬂom the early 19703 to 1980, promised to recast the traditional roles of women. Yet,
despite the participation of women in Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle, Veit-Wild (1987)
posits that they may in fact be worse off:

[During the War] in which the relation between men and women underwent a change, in which
they saw each other in different roles and different contexts . . .the old ones [stereotypes],
deeply rooted, still ﬂourish. Excombatant women are not appreciated in the new Zimbabwe,
many men regard them as women of easy virtue. (176)

Veit-Wild comments that over a decade later, Zimbabwe has many young girls who leave
their rural homes to live in town. There, in the cities, traditional views of the inferiority
of women mix and double-up with male chauvinist attitudes of Western origin (V eit-

Wild, 1987).

203

Taylor (1993) points out difﬁculties and even dependencies that women readers
may develop (Christian-Smith, 1993). She notes that the kind of romantic love portrayed
in the romance genre leads to subordination of women and that needs and desires are
socially constructed and naturalized by texts. Furthermore, romantic ideology, with
marriage and motherhood as implicit goals, are found in many young reading books
designed by publishers for girls. Dangarembga highlights this when Nyasha writes

Tarnbu a letter in which she states:

I ﬁnd it more and more difﬁcult to speak with the girls at school. I try, Tarnbu, but there is not
much to speak of between us. They resent the fact that I do not read their romance stories and if
I do not read them, then of course I cannot talk about them. (196)

For Taylor, one way to avert this undermining of women is to widen the range of
discourses and forms of textual analysis available to girls. A Chimurenga contact zone
discussion for girls in Zimbabwean classrooms would perhaps highlight the historically
located negotiation of Tambu’s and Nyasha’s identities. What leads Nyasha to read more
“serious” books (like history) and to do well in math? Why do her classmates resent her?
A discussion of Nyasha and Tarnbu’s negotiation would necessarily draw upon an
understanding of feminist thought and gender role negotiation in Zimbabwe.

In a recent interview (George and Scott, 1993), Dangarembga voiced the need to
develop a Zimbabwean based theory of feminism that moves away ﬂom possible

dependency upon Western feminist theory:

[F eminism is a] woman’s consciousness deﬁnitely, and I think the woman’s consciousness does
have to deﬁne its position in society in terms of how much power women have and how much
power women do not have. It has to be informed by the conditions of that society. . .this has
been a problem for some young women of my generation who needed some kind of liberating
theory to guide us, and then it was good, at that time, to have the Western theories there. But I
think that we have to move beyond that and ﬁnd our own point of departure, and that’s where
I’m at now. (314 )

 

204

According to Dangarembga, there is a danger that Western theories, such as a Western
theory of feminism that pursues Western women’s goals, are not necessarily relevant for
Zimbabwean women’s reality. Rather than rejecting Western feminist theories outright

however, she calls it, matter of “interrogating and ﬁxing” theories:

It is a process of thinking about something that shapes your consciousness and your perceptions.
. . . .I don’t think this is something that people in my part of the world did develop in relation to
the western ideas and material culture that were brought in. I also think that theory has to
become much more wide and particularly within the women’s movement it has to really
broaden its reach. (316)

Western concepts of feminism, perhaps tied to issues of class membership, are
inﬂuences upon the nature of reading in Zimbabwe. In Zimbabwe women encounter a
combination of race, class, and gender factors when pursuing literacy. These issues,
while shown to be initially addressed by an increasingly critical young Tarnbu, are
ultimately left undeveloped by the isolated and older Tarnbu. At the same time, by
locating the narrative in the growing consciousness of Tambu, Dangarembga is
refocusing the discourse away from a simple juxtaposition of traditional and modern
themes, and more toward an interrogation of how an individual may negotiate gender
roles in an emerging Aﬂican nation. When approached dialogically, Dangarembga has
constructed a novel that requires the reader’s response to a number of “seeds that have
been “planted” in Tarnbu’s feminist consciousness. As Dangarembga has pointed out,
these responses must emanate ﬂom Zimbabwean readers if a discussion of gender roles in

the national ﬂame of Zimbabwe is to take place.

205

Summary

Mungoshi, Hove and Dangarembga depict the dialogic negotiation of identity in
the contact of zone of Shona and Rhodesian society during the 19603 and 703 -— a
negotiation still relevant to Zimbabweans. The boundaries of the imagined communities
in these works ﬂame an ongoing interaction between the narrator, characters and readers
of these narratives. In Waiting for the Rain, Mungoshi represents this inside/outside
negotiation taking place at the boundaries of several generations of a Shona family.
Through the direct address of multiple characters, Hove builds a world full of Shona —
evoking voices in Bones. These voices, usually silenced by their inability to cross into an
Standard English speaking world, transcend traditional language barriers in Zimbabwean
literature to build a sympathetic view of a strong yet societally marginalized woman.
From a more isolated and analytical narrative position, Tambudzai’s autodiegetic
narration in Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions exposes settler inﬂuence and patriarchy
at the level of gender role negotiation and resistance.

This chapter has shown how an investigation of these narratives offers readers,
especially Zimbabwean readers, an opportunity to engage in dialogic encounters in the
historically and socially important contact zone of Zimbabwe’s second Chimurenga.
Mungoshi, Hove, and Dangarembga are creatively producing mimetic art through their
thematic representation of second Chimurenga societal conﬂict. Although in English,
these narratives represent several negotiations of identity in language -- several distinct
styles of dialogized heteroglossia -- that emanate ﬂom the Zimbabwean socio-historical
context. Introduction of these authors in the literature and language section of a new

curriculum, especially in the context of localization, could lead to the reorienting of

 

 

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language education toward the exploration of mimetic themes relevant to Zimbabwean
students and teachers. The dialogic space created by their introduction would offer a new
opportunity for students to encounter under-represented voices--voices that belong to a
national majority.

From the perspective of an ongoing discussion in the pedagogic arts of the contact
zone, it is relevant to note that Zimbabweans will soon observe the tenth anniversary of
Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions and the twenty-third for Mungoshi’s Waiting for the
Rain; while Hove has continued to write novels (Shadows, 1993), it would seem that
Mungoshi’s and Dangarembga’s ability to dialogue with current Zimbabwean society in
more novelistic form is currently uncertain. At the same time, it should be recognized
that a pedagogy of the contact zone draws upon all relevant resources. While Mungoshi
and Dangarembga have moved into ﬁlm writing and directing (Mungoshi has written
Nada and Dangarembga directed W), Hove has taken up social
commentary (Shabeen T ales: Messages from Harare, 1994). These sources, in
combination with Zimbabwe’s numerous literary, dramatic, and academic works, are

promising ones for a further development of the pedagogic arts of the contact zone.

CONCLUSIONS

Our aim is to forge for ourselves, a form of expression through which we could consciously
face our ambiguities and ﬁx ourselves fumly in the uncertain possibilities of the word made
ours. (Glissant 1989, 168)

In his discussion of the educational system in Martinique, Glissant has identiﬁed
three groups that have been created in a politically “insufﬁcient” distribution of

bilingualism. His characterization of these groups is relevant to the Zimbabwean context:

3. Members of the liberal professions and functionaries (teachers, academics, doctors, lawyers,
etc.) generally smug in their alienation-that is, who do not ask questions (except at the level of
unconscious reﬂex) about the teaching they were offered and that they in turn retransmit. b. A
small number of individuals, who, through the grid created by the system, and in more or less
lucid way, begin to question it. This leaves behind an excluded majority that, after some formal
training in elementary school, reverts to chronic illiteracy . . . . This illiteracy is strengthened,
ﬁrst, by the isolation of the country, and then through the absence of any kind of cultural
organization to encourage the curiosity and passion for learning in an informal environment.
Popular culture is not one of development of transcendence, it is a culture of survival, parallel to
the economy of survival. (Glissant, 175)

 

Glissant goes on to state:

If the community does not pay attention to its own psychological and social dilemma by
lucidly isolating the contradictions that torment it and trying to resolve them-that is, by
collectively entering the world of cultural responsibility-the revival of dynamism among the
youth will never happen . . . . in this matter no director, no teacher - no matter how competent
and skilled they are-should willfully underestimate the absence of a consensus, or the positive
advantage of a revolution at the mental as well as the structural level. (Glissant, 181)

This dissertation has attempted to isolate some of the contradictions in Zimbabwe’s
language education system. It has done so by critically examining the institutional forces
in Zimbabwe’s uneven linguistic market. Market relations that were established during

the settler period have continued into present day Zimbabwe. Speciﬁcally, groups in

 

207

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Zimbabwe have linked the continuation of institutionalized language education to their
interests.

The critical approach of this dissertation examines the ﬁelds of educational
language planning and literacy studies; these ﬁelds supply legitimations for the
continuation of institutionalized language education. From an institutional perspective,
language planners in education favor the legitimations of “unity” and “modernity” over
equity and relevance. This has resulted in a language education policy that maintains the
status quo. From a reading theory perspective, literacy has been conceptualized as a
decoding, decontextualizing, reading act at the expense of reader background and orality;
literacy needs to be contextualized to include Zimbabwean language socialization
practice. This notion of literacy and reading is not reﬂected in Zimbabwean or UCLES

reading cuniculum. I am in agreement with Street (1993) when he states,

Literacy practices vary with cultural context, there is not a single, monolithic, autonomous
literacy, whose consequences for individuals and societies can be read off as a result of its
intrinsic characteristics: rather there are “literacices whose character and consequences have to
be speciﬁed for each context. (Street 41)

Drawing upon a literary and pedagogic perspective, this dissertation develops the dialogic
space of the second Chimurenga for Zimbabweans; Zimbabwean authors, through the
creation of their polyphonic novels, uncover multiple layers of identity within a historical
context relevant to a majority of Zimbabweans. Pratt’s (1991) conceptualization of this
multi-voiced, contextualized space of cultural negotiation -- a contact zone -- offers
teachers a new approach and set of resources for the language classroom.

The material resource for the pedagogic application of a new conception of

reading is Zimbabwean literature itself: Zimbabwean authors uniquely examine the

 

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interaction of identity and historical forces in their work. In the case of Mungoshi, Hove,
and Dangarembga, there are clear patterns that emerge ﬂom their representations of
identity in the second Chimurenga contact zone. Hove’s approach in Bones is especially
innovative due to his unique attempt to represent the interior voices of illiterate
Zimbabweans. Glissant’s comments about the possible national role of authors are
especially pertinent: “Perhaps in the face of the numbed linguistic sterility imposed on
Martinicans [and perhaps Zimbabweans], the writer’s ﬁrnction is perhaps to propose
language as shock, language as antidote, a noneutral one, through which the problems of
the community can be restated” (Glissant, 190).

From his narrative position, Mungoshi attempts to create a more holistic view of
society during the second Chimurenga. This is a world in which a wide range of voices
across generations is partially focalized by an omniscient narrator. This places the reader
in a position to gain a holistic social perspective, with full access to character thoughts,
attitudes, and secrets. The protagonist Lucifer serves as a focal point for family conﬂict,
thus showing the reader the difﬁculties associated with a family member who gains an
advanced education during the second Chimurenga period. For Zimbabwean readers, the
main theme that they have the opportunity to explore through a close reading of the
omniscient narrator is alienation, a theme that is extremely relevant for the minority that
actually succeed in secondary education.

Moving ﬂom the outside to the inside, Hove creates a ring of narratives that
revolves around the main character, Marita. This builds a view for the reader of not only

Marita, but the under-represented social space (that of farm workers during the second

210

Chimurenga) that she inhabits. This space is one that is ﬁrll of severe constraints based
on race, class, and gender. These constraints are shown to be aggravated not only by war,
but also by illiteracy. Despite the constraints she faces, Marita is directly shown by
characters around her to be a strong ﬁgure with moral grace and authority. For the ﬁrst
time in Zimbabwean literature, Hove offers readers the Opportunity to dialogue with
characters that they otherwise may not encounter in a “new” language. This places
Zimbabwean readers, trained more in a variety British English, in a position to question
Hove’s and their own use of language. This type of dialogue, at the level of language and
society, is especially salient for Zimbabwean readers with advanced English competence-
- especially when one views the geographic and class separation connected with language
education.

In an opposite narrative direction, Dangarembga moves ﬂom the inside out. She
utilizes the dialogic space created by an individual -- a critically aware Tarnbudzai -- to
represent (through reported speech) the speciﬁc gender role negotiation of an extended
family, especially the women members. The effect this has on the reader is to enable him
or her to witness the story as it unfolds, but it also puts the reader at the same critical
distance Tarnbudzai maintains through analepsis. From a more analytic perspective, a
women’s history is created in which major characters such as Mai guru and Nyasha are
compared across time. By focusing upon Babamukuru, Dangarembga shows how the
settler cash economy shapes not only gender roles, but also the entire extended family
network; through his over-reactions and stuttering, the patriarch Babamakuru can be seen
to be shaped and inﬂuenced by the same settler society that drives Nyasha to her

“nervous condition.” Due to the narrative position of Tarnbudzai, however, the

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representation of Zimbabwean society remains woman-centered. Dangarembga is in fact
offering a new form of novelistic dialogue in Zimbabwean literature, one that has a
woman as the narrator. The importance of such a voice for Zimbabwean readers,
especially female ones, cannot be underestimated. As a group, girls continue to be under-
represented in Zimbabwean education.

Zimbabwean language educators may draw upon the voices represented by these
authors. They are a vital resource for teachers to practice critical pedagogy in language
education. Introduction of these authors’ works in the 0 level examination may be the
most inﬂuential as examination “backwash effect” is so powerful in the curriculum. If
the current efforts toward examination localization include relevance and equity as goals,
the current 0 level reading section, could be injected with Zimbabwean authorship.

It is not enough that “writers write,” “readers read,” and “teachers teach.”
Language education is a process that has a great potential to reinforce unequal linguistic
market relations. In the context of Zimbabwe, the subordinate relations of the majority
have been accentuated by the establishment and continuation of a white settler language
education system. Through their popular recognition and integration into school reading
lists, Zimbabwean writers could be seen less as “products” and more as inﬂuential
“participants” in the Zimbabwean language education process. The inﬂuence of a
national literature upon language education, while hardly unique to Zimbabwe, becomes
an important dynamic to examine in the context of a formerly colonial educational
system. While there have been some changes in the sphere of language education since
independence, Zimbabwe continues to utilize a largely Cambridge designed curriculum

and examination system. This system may be one factor that mitigates against the

212

foundation and maintenance of ties between a national literature and the formal language
education system. In many ways, this dissertation is an opening to a long overdue
discussion about equity and relevance in Zimbabwean language education. It has been
shown that there has been some discussion among Zimbabwean educators in this area
(Moyana 1988, Natsa 1994). Further contributions ﬂom Zimbabwean students,
educators, and literary ﬁgures need to be made in the application of theory to practice.
The application of a critical pedagogy can take place at numerous levels: among teacher
educators, teachers, and students. This dissertation lays the necessary groundwork for
this dialogue in three important ways.

First, this dissertation provides a theoretical ﬂamework for understanding the
process of state legitrnation of language education; this ﬂamework takes into account the
exercise of power through language education and individual negotiation of societal
market forces; it avoids a monolithic view of the exercise of power in language. This
ﬂamework shows how all societal members contribute to the reproduction of relations in
the linguistic market. In addition to offering a more process oriented view of language
institutionalization, this ﬂamework is important if one is to realistically represent the
transformative potential of critical educational practices. One does not “transform” an
institution as established as language education. An additional contribution of this
ﬂamework is the creation of potential for the development of a comparative approach in
language education studies. Currently, collections of writings on language education take
a wide variety of theoretical approaches that make comparison between social contexts

(classroom, local, and national) difﬁcult (see Rubagumya, 1994).

213

Secondly, this dissertation historically contextualizes the institutionalization of
language education in Zimbabwe; without this contextualization, there is an inadequate
understanding of how education speciﬁcally functions as a primary site for the
reproduction of unequal market relations. While deinstitutionalization can take place in
many sectors of society, language education is shown to be an enduring facet of the
European settler experience in Zimbabwe. In addition, Zimbabwean groups, especially in
urban areas and sites of secondary education, have actively lobbied for the establishment
of English as the language of education. Aware of the inappropriate settler inﬂuenced
curriculum at independence, the Zimbabwean govenunent initiated a localization of the
curriculum in all areas except for English. UCLES, a private international examination
service that was hired by the Zimbabwean government to assist in localization, has
understandably not taken the initiative to localize the English curriculum without
government support. This is a task that requires Zimbabwean initiative.

Thirdly, this dissertation develops an alternative approach to language education
practice that is pluralistic and more locally relevant to Zimbabweans. In order for a
dialogic pedagogy to ﬁmction, speciﬁc pedagogic approaches must be outlined. A
contact zone approach to Zimbabwean literature appropriate for secondary age students
has been developed in this dissertation; however, each teacher must contextualize and
develop his or her own approach to reading. In order for a pedagogy to be more
inclusive, teachers must take into account societal factors (age, language background,
etc.) that are unique to student compositions of classrooms. Including Zimbabwean
writers is ideal for this concern, as mimetic themes relevant to a full spectrum of

Zimbabwean readers (in English) are present. The inclusion of Zimbabwean writers who

214

write in English also recognizes the central position that English occupies in the
curriculum —- a position that is shown to be historically demanded by Zimbabwean
students and parents. By including Zimbabwean authors in the reading cuniculum (rather
than British or international writers), a more inclusive space -- consistent with the
demands of an inﬂuential examination-- is created for students and teachers.

The speciﬁc approach offered in this dissertation calls for the localization of the
reading skill curriculum to include second Chimurenga period Zimbabwean authors.
These authors represent themes that are extremely relevant to young Zimbabweans who
are negotiating their identities in a competitive and inequitable educational system; this
system has roots directly traceable to Zimbabwe’s white settler period that was openly
resisted in the second Chimurenga period. Through the positioning of their narratives,
Mungoshi, Hove, and Dangarembga portray multi-voiced encounters in Zimbabwean
communities; these encounters take place in the interaction between the narrator,
characters and readers of these narratives. When reading these authors, readers--
especially Zimbabwean ones -- are drawn into an examination of the negotiation of
identity in Zimbabwe.

I agree with Eagleton (1983) that the transformative capacity of literary study has
a tendency to be overrated. In addition, I would extend this evaluation to include
decontextualized calls for critical pedagogy. While proposing detailed theories of critical
pedagogy, Feire, Giroux and McLaren all fail to make a sufﬁcient amount of the
important historical and local connections necessary for a dialogic pedagogy to work.
This dissertation’s analysis has aimed toward laying the groundwork for critical language

educators interested in praxis — the joining of theory and practice. This requires a

 

 

215

detailed understanding of the historical roots and current practice of institutionalized
language education of a speciﬁc country. In contrast to this view of praxis, Freire’s
(1978) call for praxis in Guinea-Bissau rests on political activism and solidarity with the
“people.” Discussing his experience in Chile, and how it is related to his collaboration in

Guinea-Bissau, F reire states,

Our political choice [not to be seen as foreign experts] and its praxis keeps us from even thinking
that we could teach the educators and learners of Guinea-Bissau anything unless we were also
learning with and from them . . .In our ﬁrst meetings with Chilean educators, we listened much
more than we spoke. When we did speak, it was in order to describe the praxis which was our in
Brazil-not to prescribe for Chilean educators but simply to present the negative and positive
aspects of our experience. In learning with them and with the workers in the ﬁelds and factories,
it became possible for us also to teach. (Freire 9-emphasis mine)

A political activist stance, while not necessarily mitigating against the development of
praxis, does not in itself lead to praxis in language education. The proposal of a critical
pedagogy can and should be speciﬁcally adapted by local language educators. While
Moyana (1988) is a Zimbabwean example of an educator who drew upon F reire for a
contextualized view of language education, Guinea-Bissau has yet to produce a
contributor to critical pedagogy. Evidence of a lack of concern for contextualization for
F eire is that he has not followed up on his own collaboration: there has been no attempt to
actually evaluate the impact of his collaboration on language education practice in
Guinea-Bissau. F reire seems only partly aware of the importance of a contextualized

view of language education, when in the “Final Word” section of Pedagogy, he states,

As the experience described in the book progresses, I will feel obliged to continue to report
experiences that may deepen the afﬁrmations and analyses already offered or, indeed, correct
some of them. I may add points not treated in this ﬁrst report . . . One of the points to which I
will need to return is that of language. The deeper I go in the Guinean experience, the more
importance this problem assumes. It demands different responses under different
circumstances. The fact is that language is inevitably one of the major preoccupations of a
society which, liberating itself from colonialism and refusing to be drawn into neocolonialism,
searches for its own re-creation. (Freire - Final Word)

 

216

No ﬁrrther reports incorporating this observation have been made by Freire. Thus,
Freire’s proposal for implementing a critical pedagogy, while politically sound (in a
Marxist oriented revolutionary movement), remains outside a contextualized view of
language education. As a result, Freire’s proposed critical pedagogy is extremely limited
in its usefulness for Guineans.

While a contextualized or contact zone approach has been developed in this

_ i“!

dissertation, the systematic practice of utilizing this approach in the teaching of reading is

F

currently undeveloped in Zimbabwe. Chapter three’s analysis of Zimbabwe’s
educational system shows that language education is extremely centralized and test-
driven. Language education practice reaching into primary schools can be seen to be
inﬂuenced by concerns of 0 level English language performance. Despite the
localization of other sections of the exam, the English section has not been noticeably
changed (Sadler, 1995a). In the context of localization (and accompanying Cambridge
certiﬁcation), Zimbabwean educational representatives could be called upon to consult on
the question of “What does localization mean for language education?” Until this
question is addressed at the national curriculum-examination level, it is unrealistic to
assume that teachers would systematically adopt an approach that is not reﬂective of
centralized guidelines.

This does not mean that individual teachers or teacher educators could not use the
approach advocated in this dissertation as a resource in their classrooms. This approach
draws upon recent research in reading theory and pedagogy. A model of language

learning that takes children’s background knowledge into account should be seen as

217

useful for teachers who are developing approaches to teaching English as a second
language in diverse classrooms. By focusing the teaching of reading upon levels of
identity relevant to Zimbabwean readers, teachers are able to assist students in developing
their own reading skills by tapping into background knowledge as a resource. In essence,
a psycholinguistic approach to reading (with attention to background knowledge) lends
itself well to secondary second language settings. There are a number of ways in which
this approach can enter secondary language education contexts.

For example, a ﬁrst form secondary teacher in a rural area may receive a diverse
class made up of students ﬂom a number of different local primary schools. Those
students may have received three years of English education, and still may be weak in
English language skills. Dangarmembga’s Tarnbudzai in Nervous Conditions has a
similar experience when she moves in with Nyasha. A teacher may choose to assign, or
read to the class, Tambudzai’s experience of coming to the new school and working on
her language skills. By understanding that the story is written ﬂom a point in the future,
the teacher and the students can make sense of the reﬂective anglophone tone of
Tambudzai’s narrative. In addition, the teacher could use the excerpt as a resource for
students to discuss, write, and read about a number of issues: What does it mean to be a
girl in school? What does it mean to be the eldest girl in a family? How does it feel to
come to a new school where you realize your English is not as good as you thought?
These issues are all central points of contact between Tarnbudzai’s identity and
Rhodesian society. For more advanced secondary students, the teacher could introduce
some of Dangarembga’s biographical background (i.e., British education) as a way of

problematizing the ways in which Tambudzai’s narrative position is represented: How

218

realistic is Dangarembga’s portrayal of Tambudzai’s negotiation of Rhodesian society?
How are social and historical factors that were relevant during this period portrayed as
affecting Tarnbudzai?

Questions such as these are invitations for students to enter into a dialogue about
the role of English in the negotiation of gender roles in Zimbabwean society. Statistics
show that girls, especially in rural areas, gain less access to advanced English competence
than do boys. Despite this inequity, teaching, historically and currently, has been a
critical profession for the advancement of Zimbabwean women. As part of their
profession, women have been drawing upon their competence in English (a central part of
the teaching curriculum) as a key resource. From the early 19203, teaching positions
have allowed women to negotiate a more independent social and economic space in
Zimbabwean society. This space is immediately present when students enter the
classroom with a female teacher. From a student perspective, a female reader of Nervous
Conditions would read Tarnbudzai’s resentment of the unquestioned priority of her
brother’s education over her own (because he is the senior male in the family) ﬂom a
different position (one that includes possible personal experience) than a male reader.
That same reader might also have a less critical attitude of Tambudzai’s desire to pursue
her own development through advanced education and to de-emphasize familial
responsibility.

Another major language education context in Zimbabwe is that of an urban
secondary setting. Teachers often have students who have grown up in an urban setting
(usually Harare) that sometimes have difﬁculty making connections to family members in

rural areas. Mungoshi’s themes of alienation among urban dwellers (i.e. in “Ten

219

Shillings”) and those who leave the rural area to live permanently in the urban area (in
Waiting for the Rain) would be possible narrative positions to explore. Paul, as a Junior
Certiﬁcate (J C) holder desperately looking for a job, could tap directly into student
concerns of the connection between education and employment. 13 a J C currently
marketable in the current job market in Zimbabwe? What issues does Paul deal with that
are historically located? Are there similarities to today’s education and employment
context? In Waiting in the Rain, readers can see three members of the younger generation
that are alienated ﬂom their family, all for different reasons; by discussing the characters’
sources of alienation, readers can encounter many issues related to education and
generational conﬂict that they themselves encounter. Do girls experience pressure to
serve the family at the expense of their educations (as Betty does)? Do younger sons
(like Garabha) often have difﬁculty ﬁtting into the educational and employment
expectations of the family? Are an inordinate amount of expectations loaded onto the
eldest son as they are for Lucifer?

All Zimbabweans —- male, female, young and old experience a generational and
geographic ﬂiction related to English language education. Students immediately
experience differences in expectations (ﬂom parents, teachers and classmates) when
entering the classroom. A teacher with expectations of mastery of English for
comprehension may be faced with a classroom of students who have family and personal
expectations of mastery for short-term economic returns. Students who adjust to a
school culture that promotes learning English as a goal in itself (i.e., literary studies, and

creative writing) can run directly counter to parental and extended family expectations of

returns (in the form of economic support) upon their substantial sacriﬁces. Students

 

220

reading Mungoshi’s Waiting for the Rain may be intimately familiar with Lucifer’s
conﬂict with his parents -- his feelings of doubt about being designated the family head
and his desire to be ﬂee to pursue his artwork as far away ﬂom home (in urban Salisbury
or overseas) as possible. From a different perspective, students with parents who practice
“English only” at home will experience differences with classmates who use Shona or
Ndebele as their ﬁrst language. These differences can lead to a sense of distinct class and
even political separation (i.e., previously discussed “RB” and “Nose Brigades” at
University). Participation in English language education is thus loaded with wider social
implications and the potential for a sense of conﬂict for the individual.

One community that is certainly under-represented in formal education, but
remains a sizeable group in Zimbabwe, is that of rural-based illiterate laborers. Hove
represents this position through his portrayal of Marita. He effectively shows the
immense societal obstacles an illiterate rural woman faces when attempting to navigate
urban Harare. In essence, the community Marita represents is a silent one in the world of
English literacy. From this silent community perspective, there are numerous themes that
teachers in all secondary settings could tap into: What obstacles or forms of oppression
do illiterate rural people face in current day Zimbabwe? How did the second Chimurenga
intensify oppression for this group? Do students have any contacts with this community?
How do they interact with these community members? Do students perceive that they
experience forms of oppression related to their levels of proﬁciency in English?

This level of community interaction based on English competence is perhaps the
most striking and most socially important in Zimbabwean society. Entire societal

experiences are directly inﬂuenced by English competence in Zimbabwe. From a

 

221

historical perspective, 1980 was a fundamental turning point for the role of English
language education in Zimbabwe’s national and social experience. The introduction of
mass education in a system that aims toward English competence means that entire
segments of society over school age have more limited access to resources that require
competency in English.

Related to the generational implications of English language education, illiterate
parents and grandparents may be dependent upon sons and daughters (educated post-

1980) for access to national resources. A student whose parents and grandparents have

 

limited to no English proﬁciency might read Nervous Conditions and immediately
identify with Tarnbudzai’s negative reaction to her parents’ economic dependency upon
Babamakuru. The same patriarchy that initially limited her educational opportunity
comes to depend upon her: more speciﬁcally, upon the possibility of economic
remuneration connected to her advanced education. From a different societal perspective,
Black Zimbabweans who gained advanced competence in English prior to independence
saw the value of their competence increase; furthermore, their children’s chances of
access (through home support) increased as well. When reading the same novel by
Dangarembga, students who come ﬂom such a background might sympathize with
Nyasha’s conﬂict with her parents over becoming too “English.”

In all of these language education contexts there is a need to discuss the issue of
how English interacts with Aﬁican languages. In the speciﬁc case of Shona in
Zimbabwe, do children and adults negotiate speciﬁc ways in which they use English?
Hove consciously raises this question in his use of Shona-evoking English. This provides

an opening for teachers to raise the issue in English language classes. Clearly, there are

222

speciﬁc ways in which Shona enters the English learning experience. 13 there room in the
English speaking community for the inclusion of a Shona inﬂuenced variety of English?
Do other groups with different home languages have the potential to create different
varieties?

This discussion of language varieties taps into the important issue of linguistic
and ethnic diversity in Zimbabwean society. All authors discussed in this dissertation
come ﬂom homes where Shona was a language of personal communication. While
English is a resource for interethnic communication, this does not mean that there is one
universal variety used by all Zimbabweans. Teachers ﬂom speciﬁc ethnic and linguistic
backgrounds can highlight differences in varieties that children may bring to the
classroom. In addition, speciﬁc cultural practices and expectations enter the classroom.
While the potential for interethnic rivalry exists, diversity can be viewed as a resource for
English language education. One example of this would be when authors use speciﬁc
home language terms in their English writing. Equivalents or even more interesting
differences in other languages could be discussed among students and teachers. One
speciﬁc example is Mungoshi’s English inﬂuenced Shona (“mararapaipi”-- pipe sleeper)
in “Ten Shillings.” Students ﬂom a Shona background may understand and identify with
texts written by authors ﬂom a similar background in ways that differ ﬂom other
students.

All authors offer numerous Opportunities to engage in dialogue related to the
negotiation of identity in language. By fostering that dialogue in classrooms, English
language learning becomes immensely more relevant to Zimbabweans. Individuals have

the opportunity to discuss and understand a myriad of experiences — many of which are

223

shared in the Zimbabwean context. The remaining factor that represents an obstacle to
critical pedagogy and continues to be perceived as a threat to legitimacy, would be the
notion that examination expectations were not being met. At that point it would be
incumbent upon the teacher to make clear to parents and students how this approach
would assist language learning through increased connections to background knowledge.
Regardless of adoption at the national level, this approach offers teachers and students an
opportunity to make meaningful connections in the classroom between their use of
English in education and their own background knowledge. In a national context where
language education is currently functioning as a gatekeeper to higher education and
employment opportunity, teachers and students are in need of space for such a dialogue.
Without a national discussion concerning language education, the current failure
rate in 0 levels -- as high as 90% in rural areas (Graham-Brown, 1991) -- may eventually
lead to an increased disillusionment in the educational system in Zimbabwe. Due to the
centralized nature of the education system, this in turn would call into question the
legitimacy of the government. It remains an empirical question as to whether or not the
utilization of Zimbabwean authors in the classroom will necessarily lead to better 0 level
examination results -- attention to this question would satisfy the state legitimation of
efﬁciency. What the inclusion of Zimbabwean authors in the language curriculum can
offer is an opportunity for the creation of a dialogic space for teachers and students in
language education; the creation of this space is consistent with an interactional view of
language education. This view rests on the assumption that English language education

is a key site in the negotiation of social identity and power in Zimbabwe.

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Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster.
London: New Left Books. 1971.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition. CD-ROM.
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Amuta, Chidi. The Theory of African Literature. New Jersey: Zed Books, 1989.

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