ZIMBABWE FIRST AND LAST

 

Some snapshots from 1981, August /September when I first arrived as a volunteer building teacher. Cultural symbols absorbed during my first couple of weeks acclimatisation when I was put up in a rented house in a rented house in a formerly white suburb of what was then still called Salisbury. Zimbabwe TV logo with drums beating in the background. Oil drums and the flag.

The skyline at Rusununguko secondary school on Blue Waters Farm, 2000 hectares of prime agricultural land bought with Dutch aid money for an Education With Production experiment. There's a radio mast on the hill, barely visible. The graffiti is by Kundai, a precocious young niece of the teacher who would become my wife.

Sister Janice was tied up with ZIMFEP, the organisation behind six new schools dotted around the country, pursuing this educational experiment. I was brought up fundamentalist protestant and by 1981 was basically Atheist, but was recruited by a Catholic organisation, CIIR, which later changed its name to Progressio 👀 and then fizzled out. I found this out while trying to make contact with the organisation to share experience.

The mixture of youths and teenagers clearing ground for a building became students of mine. They had been in the Bush in Mozambique during the war and one year into independence were trying to catch up on missed education. Great guys, but I was swamped by numbers.

 

This was one of the last projects I designed before I moved from Zimbabwe to Dubai. It's not very far from the first house we bought in Harare. I was looking on Google Earth for an image of that house and strayed across to look for the living units that were under construction when I left.

 

To my surprise the Nursery school was also there, just based on these concept sketches. It's a home for Aids Orphans. No idea how it has developed over the past 23 years.

This was put together very rapidly using Autocad and Photoshop (or similar) I was quite proud of it at the time, but put it out of my mind because it never went beyond early concept design.

 

The project was brought to us by Gardini and Sons a building company with strong connections to Clinton and Evans, who had done the work on Victoria Falls Hotel that I had been involved a few years earlier. They were always willing to work from basic drawings plus discussions on Site.

That's an excellent way to build if you have mutual trust.