ARTISTES are up in arms with the Primary and Secondary
Education ministry over a commissioned textbook which it implies that musician
Lovemore Majaivana is dead.
Titled Best Approach to Visual and Performing Arts, the
book is for Grade 3 learners and it is currently being used in schools. It was
published by Priority Projects Publishing (PPP) and commissioned by the
government.
Majaivana is alive and lives in the United States, having
left Zimbabwe at the turn of the millennium. He has since quit music and does
other jobs there.
A top musician during his time in Zimbabwe and based in
Bulawayo, he released national hit songs such as Umoya Wami, Wakewashayina,
Isono Sami and Mkwenyana among several hits.
Dub poet Albert Nyathi, who has known and worked with
Majaivana said: “I am so infuriated by a publisher teaching children lies in a
book, claiming one of our topmost musicians in Zimbabwe is late. Am wondering
if that book is on the syllabus! This must be stopped forthwith.”
Outspoken playwright Cont Mhlanga blasted the Education
ministry for awarding contracts to people who “are too lazy to research”.
“We should not do this with the education of our children
just because we want quick money from donors and to loot public funds from
government by giving contracts to people who are too lazy to research and have
no clue about the cultural creative industries of Zimbabwe. And how does such
content find its way into our national schools?”
Pressed for comment by Mhlanga, Priority Projects
Publishing operations executive Samuel Chuma responded to the outcry. “As a
leading publisher, Priority Projects Publishing acknowledges the feedback on
the Visual and Performing Arts Grade 3 Learner’s Book where Lovemore Majaivana
was captioned as ‘The late’.
“We shall offer an official statement soon after we have
done our investigations. PPP sincerely apologises for the emotional pain and
trauma caused to Majaivana’s immediate family, Majaivana himself and the
country at large.”
Mhlanga was furious: “Can the minister, Cain Mathema, and
his government please pay Majaivana +/- US$1 million compensation and send an
official apology to his family and the people of Bulawayo and the rest of the
country for this misinformation before holding the Zimbabwe @40 Celebrations in
Majaivana’s city community and neighbourhood. We cannot allow the nation to
celebrate such errors and nonsense 40 years on!
“The Bulawayo Resident Minister should pass on this massage
to the Office of the Cabinet and President. What are government officials doing
to our national memory and to the minds of our young people? And for the
publisher of this book, he must face the music!”
Mhlanga said as a leader in the performing arts sector who
represents the interests of many, he simply wants to know who gave the writers
that information that Majaivana had died.
“We are more than interested in the source of that
information than what the publishing house intends to do. There are also
serious historical implications in that page; when you place Oliver Mtukudzi
and Majaivana on the same page you are appealing to tribal context and
expression. When you then add a caption that Mtukudzi entertained people during
the war, and Majaivana entertained people after independence, you imply two
things; that Majaivana was not performing before 1980 and second that Ndebele
artistes did not participate or add any value to the liberation war.”
The playwright said to avoid such things, Amakhosi has been
in negotiations for an MoU with the Primary and Secondary Education ministry
since 2017 “to be part of the process to produce history, arts and heritage
content for the new competence based curriculum for Zimbabwe schools and to
this date that MoU has not been considered nor signed as if no one in
government knows what Amakhosi is good at or specialises in”.
“We have been marginalised by our own government in this
field for the past years simply because we are in Bulawayo and not in Harare.
What drive me crazy are people in government offices who are convinced that
Zimbabwe is Harare and the fact that they are in Harare and in government
departments, they do it for every Zimbabwean.” Daily News
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