Academic illiteracy, African style

There is such a thing as "Zimbabwean English". You can look it up in the Oxford Companion to the English Language, which I'm sure you keep on your night table for bedtime reading. Or you can take my word for it. During my time in the land of bambazonke, I was often amused by the locutions peculiar to its denizens.

The horrible white racists who settled and ran Zimbabwe in the colonial era -- it was known as Rhodesia in those days -- built lots of schools, with the result that the English literacy rate was one of the highest in sub-Saharan Africa.

Since independence in 1980, standards have slipped considerably. But Zimbabweans still have a great love of sesquipedelian words and grandiose phrases. If you know a lot of big words, they seem to think, you must be educated, and therefore not just fit but entitled to lead the country's institutions.

During the Mugabe era (April 1980 through December 2017) it was customary for businesses, government agencies, and individual public figures to insert huge advertisements in the local press, particularly the state-owned Herald of Truth, congratulating Comrade Bob on everything from his birthday to the opening of a new Blair toilet. To describe the messages which took up pages upon pages of newsprint as fawning would be an understatement. "Adulatory" would be a better word.

Following the (mostly) bloodless coup earlier this month, there is a new dictator in town, but the custom continues. But the quality of the English in the congratulatory ads, and in public speech generally, seems to have declined. Walt's old friend Dr CZ printed this egregious example in his column in today's Financial Gazette.

His Excellency Cde Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa, The Principal, Eng T Madondo, Advisory Council, Management, Staff and Students of Harare Polytechnic joins the nation in congratulating Cde Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa on your appointment as Head of State and Government and Commander of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces. You demonstrated resilience, tenacity and composure as you rose through the echelon and fastigium of presidency. The humility you portrayed revealed the axiologies and phronesis of a leader. Harare polytechnic shares the developmental trajectory you enunciated on your inauguration and is ready to hit the ground running.

I cannot add my "amen" because he can't figure out what the principal of Harare Polytechnic (or whoever wrote this for him) is trying to say. [I'm working on it. Always like to increase my vocabulary! Ed.] So all I can do is encourage Comrade ED (no relation to our Ed.) to take Eng Madondo's words for what they're worth -- about $1.98.

Dr CZ ends his column with some words of wisdom which I will copy here, since it seems to me their application is not restricted to the Dark Continent.
The African education system has many surprising outcomes. The smartest students pass with first class marks and get admission to medical and engineering schools. The second class students get MBAs and LLBs to manage the first class students. The third class students enter politics, and rule both first and second class students. The failures join the army and control politicians who, if they are not happy with, they kick or kill. Best of all, those who did not attend any school, become prophets and witch doctors, and everybody follows them!

Hundreds of Zimbos* fall for joke employment offer

Assiduous readers will know that Walt spent some years, before the turn of the century, knocking around Zimbabwe (the Rhodesia that was), watching a state becoming a failed state, before my very eyes. Almost everyone I knew there has since departed the country, or departed this life entirely So, to keep up with the news from the Dark Continent, I rely on my old chum, Dr CZ, who writes the second part of "Cabinet Files" in the Financial Gazette, every Thursday. It is Dr CZ who calls his compatriots "Zimbos", *meaning "Zimbabweans", nothing more or less.

In last week's column, Dr CZ invited Zimbos interested in assisting him in carrying out a strategic survey that he was planning to undertake to contact him as a matter of urgency. Here is the notice which appeared at the end of the column.

"This is very urgent. Dr CZ is looking for six Zimbos out there who are willing to help him with some strategic research that he will be conducting in the next few days. It is a three-day contract. Over and above being provided with transport, accommodation and meals, the assistants — who should be holders of at least any tertiary qualification — will each be paid an allowance of US$800 per day. The contract days are from the 29 to 31 of this month. Anyone interested should urgently e-mail their name and contact number to the e-mail below. The offer is strictly on a first-come-first-served basis."

The column appeared on February 23rd, and readers will note that the contract on offer was to run "from the 29 to 31 of this month". The joke should have been obvious to anyone who learned "30 days hath September...", but it seems post-colonial Zimbabwean education does not include any reference to that little saying. This week, Dr CZ reports on the aftermath, as follows...

"Although Dr CZ had just asked for those interested to submit their names and contact numbers for the piece of work that was to take place between February 29 and 31, as late as at the time of going to print this March, desperate emails were still trickling into his mail-box… most of them accompanied with bulky CVs and several phone numbers and dozens of the applicants are holders of several post graduate degrees. It was one of Dr CZ’s many asinine pranks that many of his fans took seriously. What was intended to start and end as just harmless mischief has turned out to be a real survey. The results of the survey show what happens when people become hopelessly desperate.

"If the applicants were mere village yokels who could hardly tell their left from right, one would have assumed that none of them knew that the dates on which the survey was supposed to take place do not exist on this side of the rainbow yet, but these are very educated men and women whose basic commonsensical reasoning has since been evaporated by the dire personal situations they find themselves in.

"Most of these people could be fathers and mothers, whom entire clans look upon. Yet they cannot do anything about their situation. This explains why seemingly normal people end up doing things that people in normal situations would not think possible. This perpetuates the abnormality that this country is increasingly getting known to be. This is the sad reality of the situation that this country has deteriorated to… never mind what officialdom says."

Quite right. 37 years after the perfidious British sold out Ian Smith's "white settler regime" to the darker-complected Africans, Zimbabwe has become a basket case... with the bottom now on the verge of falling out of the basket. With every passing day, Zimbabwe gets worse and worse. The Dark Continent gets ever darker.

Further reading: "Mugabe's corpse could win next Zimbabwe election, widow-to-be says", WWW 18/2/17.