My first job working overseas was in 1996 with Voluntary Service Overseas. I was recruited to teach mathematics and physics in Zimbabwe’s second city Bulawayo. I had done a little travelling up till then and had spent a month in South Africa two years previously. I had gone out to visit my eldest brother who lived there at the time. I liked the wide open spaces and the excitement of discovery. Although I was in my late twenties, I was still very much discovering who I was.
I travelled out on a British Airways flight to Harare with overweight bags one day in early January 1996. I had little idea then what Africa in general and Zimbabwe in particular would mean to me in time. The induction training lasted about three weeks and was located at a development centre called Silveira house about 20 km to the east of Harare. We had some language and cultural training there and got to meet other volunteers.
I started teaching at the school to which I was posted in early February 1996. It was called Mzilikazi High School and the headmaster was a Mr Cuthbert Chiromo. For the first few weeks, I stayed with an elderly white couple, the Pagets, in a suburb (called Suburbs) about 2 km to the south of the city centre. I used to get a lift to town every morning with Mr Paget and walk the rest of the way to school. The school was on the opposite side of town, opposite Mpilo Hospital. At first, I walked back but after I developed heat stroke one day, I decided that this wasn’t such a great idea so I would take a taxi. Now, a taxi doesn’t mean the same as what you are probably thinking. It meant sharing the cramped back of a Ford Escort Estate or something similar with perhaps seven others.
My teaching was divided between A-level mathematics and physics. The equipment was limited but we made do. I also taught a top set maths class of fourteen year olds.
The school was just outside Bulawayo near Mpilo Hospital on the Old Falls Road. It had 1800 students on its rolls, mostly in the 11-16 age group. The A-level department was very selective and difficult to get into. The academic year ran from February just after the end of the long summer holiday. I arrived about two weeks into the beginning of the new academic year.
I had no teaching experience and was comfortably naive in my lack of appreciation of the difficulties in teaching generally. All the volunteers had been sent on a short training course and mine had been a week or so based at a school in Abingdon as I was living in Oxford at the time that I was recruited to VSO.
The classrooms were bare and dusty. Blackboards were the norm and the chalk commonly available was hopelessly ineffective at writing on them. I used to buy my own chalk because the chalk provided by the school was of such poor quality.
The days could be long. I taught one class in the lower school and they operated on an alternating biweekly timetable which ran from 7.30 to 12.30 on one week and 12.30 – 5.30 on the next. This was the system called ‘hotseating’ that ensured that all children of secondary school age had a school place. The A-level classes had a fixed timetable however.
The headmaster ran the place with an iron rod and corporal punishment was the norm. The students were genuinely afraid of him as were the staff as he held a lot of power over them. He was hardly if ever seen in the staff room. He had his morning tea brought to him in his office, which had an electric heater on during the winter months. His desk was orderly. Anxious parents who could not afford to pay the school fees lined up outside his office for an audience. With me, he faked an air of false conviviality. The deputy head on the other hand had a ramshackle office with stacks of disordered papers on his desk.
There are a lot of misconceptions about ‘Africa’. A friend of mine wanted me to give him my best pullover because he thought that I wouldn’t need it there. The thing that got me first was the climate. Bulawayo, like Johannesburg, is on a plateau. The air is thin so that the sun can burn all year round. In winter time, the temperature at night-time can drop to a few degrees Celsius but it does not feel so cold because the air is dry at this time. In summer-time there are many thunder storms. By mid-afternoon, there is usually a downpour. This clears the air and is very welcome.
When I moved to Zimbabwe, the economy was doing relatively fine. There were about 10 Zimbabwe dollars to the pound. There was plenty of food in the shops. Of course there were poor people and beggars in the streets, often looking filthy dirty and emaciated. But most people had enough to eat and transport was affordable. As an expatriate, Zimbabwe was very cheap. Soon after starting work at Mzilikazi High School, the government doubled the salary for teachers. I was earning enough to support myself and go on holidays to neighbouring countries so long as I was careful. There was a good health-care scheme. Medication was subsidised and to see a doctor was free. Bulawayo had a range of good cafes and shops that seemed a throw-back to the fifties. Haddon and Sly was a classic example. The shop displays were very old-fashioned.
You could buy luxury goods such as olives, imported beer and so forth if you looked. There were good locally -grown coffees and vegetables could be bought for very little at the market on Fourth Street. To get about town, we would catch taxis which would just cost a few dollars to drive the couple of miles from the big supermarket where we did most of our shopping back to Parkview. Some of the taxis could be incredibly dilapidated. Once, when my mother and step-father were visiting, we caught a taxi that had a problem with the accelerator cable. The driver had connected a piece of string from the carburetor and controlled the engine speed by pulling on it. The string passed through the driver’s window.
After a few months, I began sharing a house in Parkview with three other volunteers, one Australian and two British people. The Australian worked as a physiotherapist at Mplio Hospital. The other two were teachers like myself. Most of the VSO volunteers in Zimbabwe at that time were employed as unqualified teachers as I was at the time. There was a shortage of teachers at that time partly due to the low salary. VSO mostly recruited to the rural areas where teaching staff were hardest to retain. Headmasters had a lot of control over their staff. They could recommend to the Ministry of Education that a teacher be moved to another school. This sometimes happened as a form of punishment. For example, a teacher who dared to speak out during a meeting where the headmaster and officials from the Ministry of Education were present said that there was a shortage of furniture and what was going to be done about it. He was moved to a rural school as a result of that.
Most teachers taught by rote. Discipline was very poor in many of the older classes. Students took examinations in the third year of their secondary education which were set locally. The mathematics examinations were ridiculously hard for such an age-group and I really don’t know what they hoped to achieve by this. Students set O-levels in the fifth year which were set by examination boards in the UK however this changed a few years later.
Having said that discipline was very poor, punishment was very harsh. Boys could be beaten with a cane by any teacher although it was only supposed to be the headmaster who did this. I recall that during assembly once, which was held outside due to the lack of space, some boys at the back of the crowd began throwing stones towards the front. There was little that even the headmaster could do because if he had yelled and shouted, he would have lost face.