Goromonzi – Digby Hartridge

Goromonzi

by Digby Hartridge

Now, I could sanitise this, make it more acceptable to 2025 sensibilities, like so many people do, Whites and Blacks. But that would make it unhistorical, and it’s already been through the wringers of Time and Rationalisation. [spacer height=”5px”]
I hadn’t wanted to become, even briefly, a school teacher: after all, I’d been a schoolboy. But at this stage of my life, September 1966, my options were limited. My intention had been, after taking a Diploma in Adult Education at Manchester University, to stay on longer in Britain and test the waters. But several factors had complicated the matter. First, Ian Smith had brought the world’s attention to Rhodesia by declaring UDI and I loved Rhodesia and I wanted to see what would happen, how I could contribute to the opposition. Then there was some chance that sanctions would work in time for the Rhodesian Front to collapse and our leaders be forced to the table and to compromise before it was too late. I knew that if the thing dragged on the end result would be polarisation and the dread ascension to power of a black nationalist zealot – but then I believed that of South Africa, too, and they got lucky with Mandela. Second, family was set against my staying in England. Third, I was undoubtedly immature and untutored in the tougher ways of the English world, still a stranger there, with no connections – some instinct told me that. [spacer height=”5px”]
So back to the familiar, though I reproached myself for not finding out more about housing and jobs in the exotic, cold, dirty country my ancestors had hailed from. But at home everything was changed. You can’t go back, says the wise adage, for of course Rhodesia seemed even more blinkered than ever and it was trying to work out how to deal with the gathering storm clouds. Political positions had hardened. I remembered too fondly a mythic handsome body, albeit always a minority, of thinking people in the Rhodesian establishment, who could understand the situation from the point of view of realpolitik or the weakened state of Empire or whatever – conceivably from the point of view of the underclass. Now there were only bigots in government, and civil servants concentrated on survival. [spacer height=”5px”]
At a pragmatic level, there were few jobs and none that could be counted, even in a wide interpretation, as adult education. I was directed to teaching, and there there were immediate vacancies. I did not qualify, without supervised experience, for work in European Education but African Education wanted me. Not my subjects, but African Education was in a shambles and they were perilously short of teachers. I could see that right away, but the full extent of the fiasco only slowly revealed itself. The department seized upon the fact that I’d gained distinctions in O-level Maths and Physics, that I’d passed A-levels comfortably and that I had a BA, any bloody BA. Surely, I thought, I could do better than my old maths teacher! Accordingly, I took a temporary post at Goromonzi High School as 4B Form Master, teaching Maths to Forms 3 and 4, Physics to 4 and the General Paper to the 6th, living on the campus. [spacer height=”5px”]
Let me describe Goromonzi campus. It was a fair distance from any town and for all intents and purposes built in the bush. There were few trees in the immediate vicinity and the playing fields were hard and well-stomped. At the front there was an attempt at a garden, flower beds surrounded by stones and set around a flagpole. The school buildings with their high-floored verandahs were not dissimilar to those of white schools of the era, albeit more in need of paint. [spacer height=”5px”]
Our accommodation was at first sight acceptable, an old-style asbestos-roofed bungalow with inevitable verandah, but the bungalow turned out to be linked to two others, all three facing outward. The floors were Grano. (Grano was granolithic concrete made of cement and a fine aggregate of granite, usually coloured red or green.) Outside walls were washed a yellowy magnolia. The furniture was minimal and faintly dirty (though I was told it could have been much worse). The outstanding features were the kitchen and the ceilings. The kitchen was dark and the stove and fridge dated. And it was extremely dirty, cobwebs solidified with grease, grime thick on all surfaces. My wife, for her sanity’s sake, while I went to the school and frantically read and re-read the syllabi, the textbooks and my O-level notes – yes, I’d kept them! – spent a day pluckily chiselling away hunks of grunge and painting over the pockmarked result. I suppose we were better tenants than most, but that’s not perfect. Oh, and I can see a photo of the broom on the verandah, after a week of disuse, and a colourful creeper is curling around it. [spacer height=”5px”]
All pretty dire, but worst was the roof space. In the bedroom, especially, the ceiling bowed down and seemed to bow down more deeply every day. We lay below and looked up. There was something there: we could hear it scraping around. And as summer wore on and the tropical solstice approached and dusk came a little bit later it so happened that as we partook of our evening snifter we sat on the verandah and were rewarded with a rare sight – hundreds and hundreds of bats pouring out from under the eaves and flapping away into the twilight. It must have been near the end of our sojourn there; otherwise we surely couldn’t have endured cowering beneath a pyramid of guano at imminent risk of interment. [spacer height=”5px”]
It’s erroneous to think that bats can orientate themselves by sound in an unfamiliar confined space. It’s quite true that they make a beeline for a woman’s hair. One day a muddled bat taught us these things when it strayed into the diningroom and bumped into all four walls and settled on my wife’s head. She did not like it. Funnily enough, I can’t remember how we persuaded our bat to push off, but I can recall chasing it round and round with a broom and the growing feeling of horror and powerlessness in the face of raw nature. Bats scratch, you know; I believe they have nasty teeth. [spacer height=”5px”]
At that time the staffroom was an unpleasant place. The teachers were not unwelcoming, merely very distracted, and not unhelpful, their helpfulness merely attenuated or immaterial. The atmosphere was oppressive, the tension palpable. We fell into two camps: disillusioned idealists of both races and disillusioned white cynics who had hoped African Education offered a quick route to promotion. Some teachers were very good, some bad, and, utterly untried, I guess I was in the latter camp, and I probably lacked the grit to graduate in due course to the former. I must have made casual friends and I must have asked a lot of questions to help me survive, but I’ve blotted out most of this rather humiliating chapter from my mind, just about preserving my self-esteem. [spacer height=”5px”]
This was the third term, in Rhodesia the September-to-December term, and tensions inevitably reached a zenith on Independence Day. One of the European teachers was a bit of an activist. Before dawn on 11 November 1966, exactly a year after the Front had declared its reckless independence, he slipped across to the flagpole and hoisted a black flag. There was a baby ruction about that but I can’t remember its being followed up – and of course the government didn’t want to publicise any sign of a crack in the wall of white solidarity. [spacer height=”5px”]
Well, I was there to teach. The third term, in the fourth form, is the term for sitting the Cambridge O-levels. A lot of revision. And the first thing I discovered is that the poor kids had completed only half their syllabus for that year. Either I had to teach the other half in a month or I’d have to cut their losses for them and tell them they’d have no choice of questions in their final examinations and would have to answer everything on the parts they had actually covered over two years. I can give you only the outline of the story: I’ve since told it too often to be completely confident of how it evolved, how it was received, cannot clearly picture the pained faces of the students, but I did discuss it with an old hand: he laughed it off as all too typical and agreed with my strategy. I think the boys and girls in some measure trusted me, even if their respect for any white teacher was equivocal. [spacer height=”5px”]
How well did I teach? God knows, but I had no discipline problems – unless, utterly traumatised, I’ve blocked out a whole chapter of my life…. Instead, for self-preservation during one of the most critical periods in their lives, Form IV automatically gave me their attention. Form III was lively but not too obstreperous. I can remember little detail but I do know that I had a modicum of that crucial quality, margin. I became a whizz at solving geometrical problems, immediately reaching for the appropriate proof, and this was significant because at age sixteen it was the one thing, apart from my endlessly amended English essays, that left me struggling with homework – and it took me to the brink of “Put down your pens!” in exams, no time for sitting around wondering what everyone else knew and I’d forgotten. Now, from nowhere except the slow maturing of the brain, with no stimulus in the meantime, I could beat schoolboys. And a natural development of my neural networks, while my reflexes and memory declined, seems to me to be the only explanation. Is such a phenomenon rare? The mathematical brain reaches its maturity, I read, at about 25 and so I was not left floundering as I’d half-expected. Anyway, I could do arithmetic fast enough. And I am kind and patient and I tried to remember everyone’s name and I could usually laugh at myself…. About Physics I remember much less. [spacer height=”5px”]
I knew about bell curves, and I knew I was dealing with, perhaps, the cream of over 100,000 children in that age group. Even accounting for the huge element of luck involved, and aware that it was the assessment at primary level and the shakeout then that had whittled them down to so few. It was obvious that the IQ of my charges was very high indeed. In the A Form these would be the sort of kids, I suppose, that would, nowadays, need no contacts or coaching to get into Oxbridge. The B Formers were slower but comfortably up to my old schoolmates’ level of attainment. And, usually members of the first literate generation, they were learning a subject from an unfamiliar culture in a foreign language. [spacer height=”5px”]
The girls were just like the schoolgirls of Mabelreign Girls High, teenagers who giggled a little and sometimes flapped their eyelashes experimentally at Teacher to see what they might get away with. I’m ashamed to say I was a bit surprised. I hadn’t been the least surprised to meet bright young black men. I had met graduates, and most black policemen and store foremen were bright and spoke excellent English. Excellent English on top of four African languages. And of course I was ideologically ready for such. But the only black women I had met had been servants, usually nannies, or the bashful town wives of servants. But I had believed them to be in some way other, and if I had considered the matter I’d probably have attributed their reticence and veiled expressions to some unbridgeable cultural gap. But in Goromonzi I soon forgot, something hard for a Rhodesian to do, their colour. [spacer height=”5px”]
Let’s get cricket over and done with. I’m sorry about the cricket. The departed Maths and Science man had supervised cricket. The most philosophically interesting and the most essentially boring game to play in the whole wide world. I had neither the poise nor concentration nor knowledge of the finer points nor the eye nor the experience to be an umpire and I made an abominably bad one. The keen players, like keen sportsmen everywhere, took the game awfully seriously, and I can’t take any recreation seriously, except road cycling. But I did empathise with them as I arbitrarily raised my finger – “Out!” – and had to stand by my outrageous decisions against all reason. How could I tell the difference between the truly hard done by champions and the merely ear-splittingly strident blaggers? Yes, chaps, I’m sorry to this day. [spacer height=”5px”]
Mealtime duty was another burden but here, though I was just as useless at supervision, I do have something to be happier about. Meals were held for all the boys together in a huge hall with a corrugated iron roof. Just one master. Looking back at it, I see it as a metaphor for the British Empire: governed in part by the uninformed exercise of colossal bluff. After grace the roar began and soared to an amazing intensity. The large metal plates were heaped with the traditional fare, great balls of sadza, copious splashings of relish atop, eaten in the traditional manner with the fingers. Well, you know schoolboys: it all disappeared at amazing velocity to the accompaniment of orchestral levels of percussive sound and operatic levels of chorus. Magnified by the acoustics. I stood there extraneous. But one day the Head Boy, a fine fellow with a natural dignity and mature judgement, was accosted by the Rebel of the Remove. You must understand that the age of the boys could be elastic: perhaps there was no birth certificate; perhaps a boy was there on account of some deception. The Rebel was a large guy in his twenties; the Head Boy was merely tall and athletic. Afterwards the best theory vouchsafed to me was that a village girl, encountered during a forbidden off-campus escapade, was behind it – always suspect a woman – though no doubt there were other areas of discord. A few blows were exchanged. Then they stood nose to nose, fists clenched. The proverbial hush fell – a comparative hush because tifosi were interjecting. A volatile tableau unfolding before me. I marched forth and pushed my way between them and told them to part. I was carelessly brushed aside. I persisted. The pair preened. Time stood still. And then the Rebel gave way. “Go back to your seats,” I said, and by Heaven, they did. Next morning the Head Boy came to see me, to apologise, unsure of himself. Had he been reported to the headmaster? “You behaved stupidly,” I said, “but it is quite forgotten now, and I’m sure it won’t happen again.” In truth, it was in no one’s interest to take things further. I hope he was grateful. [spacer height=”5px”]
One random memory from that time: a multiracial wedding there with Mass that went on for an hour and a half, at least, in Latin, and I remember nothing else about it, cannot even visualise the main participants. You can see that the whole term was so awful that I expunged what I could from my mental repositories and retained a few oft-removed files, all out of sequence and interleaved with new insights. And a lasting regret: by the time I could think clearly again, I was unable to put surnames reliably to faces, and all I have is a few film rushes of remembrance to go on. I most very sincerely hope that those kids benefitted a little from Goromonzi and had as fulfilled lives as can be expected. [spacer height=”5px”]
There is an absurdist postscript. I was very angry, then and now, about the inadequate deal we were allowing the cream of the cream. So unproductively second rate and restricted. With unbelievable naivety I wrote a letter to the Director of African Education, outlining several reforms and rather self-interestedly complaining that my ever-so-useful subjects of Social Anthropology and more germanely Economics were essential to the development of young minds and should count along with the standard subjects towards setting salaries. And I did want to teach some form of civic education, because a grasp of economics and western institutions would better fit them to play their part in the great project of partnership, still not entirely purged from the sometimes-deceitful rhetoric of the Rhodesian Front. And had I not studied in Manchester where my diploma was taught side-by-side with Community Organisation? (Rhodesia’s Conservation & Extension Service was in fact doing pioneer work in community development.) I suppose the most surprising result of my impertinence was that the Director asked me to come and see him. He explained that I was too young and too new to the department and too inexperienced to direct my opinion to the head of the department, that I should listen and learn and study some more and later on I might think about trying to make a difference. I don’t quite know what to make of it now. He probably had his own misgivings about Smithy and the Front – what intelligent person wouldn’t have? – and was probably an old-fashioned paternalist like my father. I will conclude that he was being kind, that he didn’t want to discourage anyone with some ideals, even oddball ones.

Digby is the author of a biography of Sir John Willoughby, one of the pioneers of Rhodesia.