The Sunday Mail
Minister Christopher Mutsvangwa
It is befitting that the Kutama Old Boys Association has seen it right to hold a centenary of this venerated institution of learning in Zimbabwe.
The event has acquired another auspicious honour that an old student President Mugabe has seen to it that he graces the occasion courtesy of an eventful long life that keeps being bestowed by divine benevolence.
Mere mortals like us can only see divine design in this arrangement. Being a scientific socialist, I want to be too busy savouring the occasion rather than wander into metaphysical debate. For this moment all I do is shout Allahu Akbar: God is great! Kutama was good to me.
I did some of schooling at Masawi and Marirangwe. My father valued education. He had himself gone to Tegwani Mission in Matabeleland. His father got to know the value of education by being an early associate of the colonial business interests that were implanting themselves is this bountiful land that gave humanity the UNESCO heritage citadel sites of Mapungubwe, Great Zimbabwe, Khami, Dhodhlo etc.
Alas the victory of Britain in the Second World War would deal a mortal blow to the nascent class of a black bourgeoisie in co-existence with the new community of the white colonial minority settlers.
Decommissioned officers of the bankrupted British government were sent to overseas imperial territories as a pension.
Those who found their way to Rhodesia had another assignment — grow an economy on tobacco, timber, tea and coffee so as to help over-borrowed England pay war-time debts owed to America.
The deployment of these post-war settlers to Southern Rhodesia translated into ruthless enforcement of racial discrimination and the nascent black bourgeoisie paid a very high price.
They were cruelly and ruthlessly squeezed out of the settler economy as opportunities were transferred to new white immigrants.
My grandfather’s tennis court business, which had afforded him the status of shopping even at highbrow HM Barbours, was ruined.
With it were the aspirations of my father who had to prematurely terminate his education at Tegwani.
All we now have as a memoir of this early effort at stunted enterprise is a bungalow in Zambe Street in Mbare, the first suburb paying homage to enforced permanence of the African as an urban dweller, unencumbered by the fiction that he is a transient eventually returning to his rural ancestry once his servitude is dispensed by old age.
My placement with Kutama in 1969 was thus the fulfilment of a deferred family dream.
As I look back, I not only place value on great teaching, but I also marvel at how those gritty Marist Brothers always sought ways to push the envelope of learning beyond the suffocating confines of the menacing Rhodesian settler education inspectors.
These indeed were trained spies who were ever wary of the subversive nature of modern knowledge and its influence on the majority African population.
Ignorance – or at most a narrow educational curricula – was such a potent weapon in their professed goal to hold onto ill-gotten power for eternity.
The most infamous of those spying education investors from that era was a TEN Tindall, who posited as a historian propounding Nazi racial bigotry in an effort at propaganda.
The overburdened Jesuits had bequeathed Kutama pedagogy to the Marist Brothers.
The Marists, originating from France which itself never had much love for its perfidious Albion neighbour, bore an anti-British colonial streak.
After all, their “homeland”, Quebec, had been colonised in the Seven Years War when Marquis de Montcalm lost to General Wolf in 1790.
Though the brothers never openly preached to us the evils of Rhodesian settler rule, their day-to-day attitudes and nuances gave us clear signals as to where their sympathies lay.
This anti-colonial world view was also abetted by the national leadership of the Catholic Church which was acutely conscious of the disproportionate favour given to the Anglican Church as the promoter of the Liturgy of the British Empire. I remember distinctly how the Marist Brothers did their best to organise the 1969 “no” vote on the infamous Document of the Peace Commission which sought to foist a neo-colonial order on Zimbabwe.
I am highlighting this rebellious streak in my secondary education which I shared with many remarkable personalities who would go on to play roles of prominence in society.
By the time I left Kutama for St Augustine’s Penhalonga, my world view was complete.
Samuel Marume, our History teacher, had done his job to demolish the myth of British imperial reverence. He had revealed how even the Japanese had kicked mighty imperial England out of its Asian empire in World War II.
Stanley Chigwedere, who would become a big recruiter of students to the war cause, had grafted into us the Pan-Africanist world view of Malcolm X tinged with the richness of the dominant North American Diaspora experience of slavery and civil rights denial.
And Ibbo Joseph Mandaza had added petrol to flaming fires with his radicalism that had seen him expelled from the University of Rhodesia. And in it all there was Cuthbert Masiwa showering us with cadences of a new cultural revival as he recited the poems of the immortal Wilson Chivaura in a rebirth of our besieged local languages.
Ibbo Mandaza told us of the slain Argentinian doctor Che Guevara and his rock star cult status as an anti-imperialist revolutionary.
One fellow student I distinctly remember during my four years at Kutama to 1972 was Charles Tazviyaya.
His heartthrob good looks would melt any woman. Indeed that was the case when on surviving the war he was part of the maiden new Zimbabwe delegation to the United Nations in New York in 1980.
It is said Charles Tazvishaya caused a stir usually reserved for movie stars.
Besides good looks, he had a sportsman’s physique and commanded great skill as a soccer player in addition to being a fine basketball player. Added to this was a brilliant mind given to conscientious study and diligent conduct. All said Tazvishaya was an All-Zimbabwean Boy.
It would filter to me that he was also carrying the mental burden of a father who was a long-term political detainee of the cruel, racist regime of Ian Smith.
There were other Kutama alumni who I would end up meeting on the Zanla Forces guerilla frontline war in Mozambique.
There are Charles Mukudu, and Alexander Kanengoni, the author. I recall Lawrence Siziba who came in from Makerere University, Uganda. The two brothers, Wonder and Chester Mutizwa, who were nephews to Senator Chizema of another Highfield political family.
These joined Zipra. I also heard Abboud Gweshe, who like me absconded from University of Rhodesia Law school, could have been at Kutama. He died in heroic battle to be recalled and honoured by fellow comrade Josiah Tungamirai.
