A Minister’s courageous stance shows education is key

Sunday Argus

September 11 2016

TAXI drivers are usually shrewd judges of reality. Careering around the CBD and well beyond as a priest at St George’s Cathedral I learnt more in the context of minibus taxis about grassroots South African living than I did from most of the church meetings I attended!

On a recent visit to the Mother City it was Uber drivers who provided the latest updates not just of life in Planet Zuma but further afield.

All, bar one in fact, were Zimbabweans. Most from Harare, in their twenties with young families, restarting life in the Western Cape.

To a man they were articulate and impressively measured when discussing the latest from home.

Few could unravel the tripartite factions of both Zanu-PF or the already much-splintered MDC. But most, like citizens the world over, cherished the same human dreams.

Freedom, food, employment, equality, peace and prosperity – but above all, education.

Mugabe has got most things spectacularly wrong. But one thing that for long was the jewel in his crown was the laudable levels of literacy in Zimbabwe. The best in Africa, for years leaving the horrors of South Africa’s now ever-morefailing education-system in the shade.

“The violence disrupted my schooling,” said one. “I want my children to have better schooling than me.”

“On planet Zuma?” – its primary schools sometimes filled with B Coms who think that a degree entitles you to draw a big salary, however bad your teaching is – “I can’t see your children achieving that here,” I gently suggested to several.

“If David Coltart was education minister, it would happen,” said one. “We need a Coltart here,” said another. “He’d get them the textbooks they need, the desks and equipment. And get the teachers going.”

A few years ago I’d actually heard Coltart speak. He was impressive.

A human rights lawyer and parliamentarian for the MDC, Coltart, I knew, had been the driving force behind the exposure of the terrible violence initiated by Zanu- PF against Zapu in the 1980s.

When I heard him, Coltart was busy trying to kick-start an education system in the Unity Government of 2009-2013. Within months, he’d ensured the biggest production and delivery of textbooksany country has probably ever seen in so short a space of time: a staggering 13 million books for primary schools alone.

Over the past week, I’ve been reading Coltart’s The Struggle Continues: Fifty Years of Tyranny in Zimbabwe.

My South African friends tell me that this 600-pager is now on the bestseller list. I’m not surprised.

It is absolutely unputdownable. It’s relentlessly objective. Fact piled upon fact in the way that I suppose a lawyer needs to construct a case. It’s like the longest opening or closing speech at a trial you’ll ever read.

But in its relentlessly unemotional, yet deftly written style, Coltart has produced a masterpiece.

Describing a testament to tyranny as a masterpiece sounds tautological at first. Until you are so gripped by the narrative that you realise that the person being convicted in all this is not only a dictator like Mugabe, or even a political party or three, it’s actually oneself.

Coltart, like the true Christian and humanitarian that he is, through extraordinary honesty about himself and with integrity of a rare degree, confronts each of us with an old truth.

My co-religionists express it sometimes as the question: “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” For some it will be that famous aphorism “all it takes for evil to flourish is for the good to do nothing” that confronts their apathy.

For others again it will be Martin Niemoller’s dictum that comes to mind: “first they came for the communists and I did not speak out because I was not a communist.”

But whichever of these speaks to our particular circumstances, convicted is what all of us who read Coltart’s searing, disturbing, horrifying yet still hopeful narrative will surely be.

For me the twin questions that hovered over my beach chair was the straightforward “Why didn’t I do more? And what will I do now?”, together with the realisation that those Uber drivers know what the first step must be. For Coltart’s extraordinary and courageous public service reminds all of us of an ancient truth – even dictators in their hearts know this – which is that only educational opportunity can build and will change societies.

• Chris Chivers is principal of Westcott House, Cambridge, canon of the diocese of Saldhana Bay and chairman of USPG, the global Anglican charity.