The Sunday Mail
IN our previous instalment, Cde Hoyini Samuel Bhila concluded his narration by telling us how fate spared him from the Chimoio massacre after being transferred to a school in Chibawawa barely a few days before Rhodesian forces bombed the refugee camp. In this week’s discussion, which is the last one of this series, Cde Bhila narrates to our Senior Reporter TENDAI CHARA about his experiences as a teacher at a refugee camp in Tete. He highlights how the teaching methods that were devised during the liberation war contributed to the development of the education system in a free Zimbabwe.
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Q: Cde, if you can continue narrating what happened after the Chimoio bombing.
A: Like I said last time, I had been transferred to Chibawawa a few days before the Chimoio attack.
We lost so many teachers and children, the majority of whom I personally knew and interacted with on a daily basis.
We lost some of our people who had gone through teacher training.
Q: Do you still remember the names of some of the teachers that died during the attack?
A: Among them was Cde Tsorai, who was the director of education at the camp.
He was the one who was moulding the education system.
Q: So the bombing was a major drawback to the development of the education system?
A: It was a major drawback. As you know, Chimoio was the headquarters and all the others schools in Mozambique were getting all their educational supplies from Chimoio.
The curriculum and syllabuses were being developed at Chimoio.
The loss of the director for education was a very big loss.
Almost everything was centred at Chimoio.
Q: Did you return to Chimoio after the massacre?
A: I did not return to Chimoio after the attack. No-one returned.
The camp was abandoned after the massacre and those that were there were relocated to other camps depending on the department they were attached to before the bombing.
The survivors of the massacre assembled at a place called Gondola.
That is where I met some of my colleagues who had survived the bombing.
The harrowing stories of how they survived the bombing still haunt me up to this day.
Q: What were the effects of the bombing on you and the other survivors?
A: We were greatly affected, psychologically.
Imagine young children seeing mutilated dead bodies; youngsters seeing people they knew lying there, dying. It was traumatising.
It was extremely bad. People died in their thousands and the situation at the camp was very bad.
These were people that I had worked with and known for a long time.
Q: After Gondola, where did you go?
A: From Gondola, we were taken to Tete province, up in the north where we established another headquarters.
It was called Matenje base. At Matenje, we had Cde Dzingai Mutumbuka as our secretary for education and Cde Enerst Kadungure’s wife, Rejoice, was the schools’ secretary.
She is now late.
We had Cde Sheba Tawarwisa who was in charge of the education activities.
I still remember we had Captain Johns Mhlanga, who was a teacher.
One of the commanders at the base was Cde Marble; she is still alive today and is a colonel in the army.
Cde Ephraim Chitofu, the director of the Zimbabwe Foundation for Education with Production (ZIMFEP), was at Matenje during this period.
At Matenje we went further and produced textbooks. Cde Fay Chung, who later became Minister of Education after Independence, was responsible for all this.
We pushed on with this education with production system extensively until we got our independence.
Q: Were the conditions at Matenje any better than those Chindunduma?
A: You should take note that this was a war situation and there was no camp where living conditions were luxurious. We were living in thatched huts.
We were stalked by diseases and people were dying every now and then.
There was a shortage of medicine.
In fact, we had a shortage of almost everything.
One positive thing about Matenje was that we were almost self-sufficient.
We had our own maize fields and we were producing our own food.
Q: Where did you go after Matenje?
A: When the war ended, we remained behind with the children at Matenje.
We came to Zimbabwe after April 18.
We had youngsters and we were not sure of the situation at home.
We were suspicious of the Rhodesians.
Q: What did you do with the children when you finally returned?
A: The children could not fit into the formal schools.
So we had to start our own schools like Chindunduma in Shamva, Rusununguko in Bromley, Mavhudzi in Nyazura and Nkululeko in Matabeleland.
We used these schools as pilots for education with production.
We had to change the curriculum to accommodate education with production.
Also, there was a need to increase the number of trained teachers since most of our schools were then filled with temporary teachers.
So this Zintec programme that we introduced could speed up the production of trained teachers.
The education system was expanding so we had to expand the teacher training programme as well.
I moved away from the implementation of such programmes after I was assigned to a department which was responsible for the education of Mozambican refugees.
This had nothing to do with formal education.
Q: Was it really necessary to educate children when a brutal war was ongoing?
A: The schools that we opened and ran played a very important role during the war.
We had so many children and there was no way they were going to be trained in order to fight in the war.
It was necessary to have the schools, which kept the children occupied.
When they came home after the war, they were better off than they were.
Q: How difficult was it for teachers in refugee camps to convince the children that education was the way to go?
A: During the war, Zanu acted as a government-in-exile.
Everything we did was focusing on how we could contribute to an independent Zimbabwe.
We told the children how important education would be in a free Zimbabwe.
I am happy to say that our education system during the war was very successful.
We had some of them completing A-Level, with some going for further training elsewhere.
Some of the children that we taught in Mozambique ended up being engineers at Air Zimbabwe and pilots in the air force among other professions.
Q: So basically fighting the war was not only through the barrel of the gun?
A: The war was a collective effort and there were so many ways of fighting the war.
Those who carried the war materials, those who cooked, who sew uniforms, all in a different ways contributed to the war efforts.
We had the masses, the mujibhas, the chimbwidos.
Even animals, in a way, also contributed to the war effort.
The behaviour of baboons, for example, would signal to us whether things would be fine or we were headed for trouble.
Q: On another note, was it all gloomy during the war?
A: It was not always gloomy. We also had time for fun.
We sometimes sneaked out of camp and went for beer drinking.
This was, however, strictly prohibited.
As youngsters, we sometimes took the risks and got severely punished after getting caught.
When we were at Matenje, for example, we often sneaked out and interacted with the locals.
The locals valued what they called chibwenzi, meaning sahwira.
So if you had a local sahwira, you could sneak out of camp and you would be welcomed with a frothy pot of beer.
Q: Thank you very much for taking your time to share with us your experiences during our hard-fought war of independence.
A: Thank you for giving people like us the opportunity to narrate the history of the liberation war as it is.
Cde Hoyini Samuel Bhila is the chairperson of the Zimbabwe National Liberation War Veterans Association (ZNLWVA) Harare province.
