By Princess Eugene Majuru, Princess of Harare
Zimbabwe has made undeniable progress in expanding access to education since Independence. Classrooms have multiplied, enrolment has widened, and curricula have been reformed more than once. Yet a quiet and increasingly visible problem persists within the education system: many learners pass through secondary school with little sustained knowledge of Zimbabwe’s own history, geography, and cultural foundations.
This is not an abstract concern. It has real consequences for how young people understand belonging, citizenship, and responsibility.
Recent conversations following my writing on education and heritage have highlighted a troubling pattern, particularly among learners educated almost exclusively through external syllabi. Many complete O Level without studying Zimbabwean history beyond primary school, without learning the country’s geography in any depth, and without continued engagement with a local language. The result is a cohort of young people who are academically competent, often globally oriented, yet strikingly disconnected from the national story.
Ask some of these learners basic questions — how many provinces Zimbabwe has, how they are structured, how Harare evolved, or how liberation history connects to place — and the gaps are evident. This is not a failure of intelligence. It is a failure of curriculum design.
Curriculum Is Not Neutral
Curriculum is not merely about examinable content. It is about orientation. It teaches young people what matters, what is central, and what can be treated as optional.
When Zimbabwean content is confined largely to Grade 7, and then disappears for many learners, the implicit lesson is that local history and geography are preliminary knowledge — useful for childhood, but irrelevant to adulthood. Meanwhile, European history figures prominently in some external syllabi, reinforcing the idea that global significance lies elsewhere.
This imbalance matters. A generation educated without sustained engagement with its own country’s story is more likely to experience Zimbabwe as a temporary space rather than a shared project. It is therefore unsurprising that many highly educated young people aspire primarily to leave, often without feeling any contradiction in doing so.
The ZIMSEC Question
The existence of ZIMSEC was meant, in part, to address this very problem: to anchor education in national context while remaining globally competitive. Yet today, ZIMSEC history, geography, and local languages are often treated as optional, particularly in private and former Group A schools.
There is a strong case to be made that Zimbabwean History, Geography, and at least one local language should be compulsory at O Level, regardless of whether learners also sit Cambridge examinations. This would not prevent global exposure; it would ensure national grounding.
Such a policy would:
Strengthen civic literacy
Foster informed national participation
Reduce the growing divide between private and public school cohorts
Support heritage-based education objectives
Create employment and sustainability for Zimbabwean educators and examiners
This is not cultural nationalism. It is educational coherence.
Why This Matters Now
Debates about school names, heritage, and symbols often provoke the response that there are “more important priorities.” But this framing misunderstands how education works. Material investment and symbolic clarity are not competing choices. They reinforce each other.
A school system that teaches liberation history while sidelining local content at secondary level sends mixed messages. A curriculum that privileges foreign histories while marginalising national ones undermines the very patriotism it claims to promote. Curriculum reform does not require confrontation. It requires clarity.
As schools prepare to reopen, this is the moment to ask not only how many children are in classrooms, but what those classrooms are teaching them to value, remember, and belong to. Education does not only produce skills. It produces citizens.
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