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“Zimbabwe is the most literate nation in
Africa,” you will often hear it boasted. While we instinctively reject
not-so-flattering measures of our national performance as ‘machinations of the
imperialists,’ this one we eagerly, unquestioningly embrace as obviously true.
To ask how much we have used that high literacy to improve our national
condition is to risk being accused of being unpatriotic and counter-revolutionary.
So prized has become the generalised notion
of ‘being educated,’ or at least being perceived to be so, that it now matters
little whether we seek education as a means to live better lives or to be more
productive and innovative citizens. In Zimbabwe the idea of ‘education’ now is
to a great extent another means to satisfy our national obsession with
‘status;’ or convincing ourselves that we have more intrinsic human worth than
the people next door.
