There is a general consensus among Zimbabweans working abroad that if they can get work, they work harder and are more valued by their employers than the locals - just like migrants the world over. This blog, however, is not about the flame of political freedom that was carried in the historic, pre-independence era. It has a social and economic thrust.
Don't get me wrong, I have not strayed into conservative territory; I am still, as I always have been, pro-democracy and politically dead centre. That is why I am politically dead in this dreadful Mugabe era of Zimbabwe's development. I am blogging on about observed changed standards of behaviour that have evolved very slowly during a lifetime in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe and which have suddenly become very visibly new to me in a changed environment here in England.
I was ruminating on these changes today when I tumbled to another conclusion: not only do our migrants work harder etc, be they of British ancestry or not, they often carry back to this ancient island some of the best of their Zimbabwean (and former Rhodesian) social and economic norms. They find themselves more British than the British. These norms were long ago exported to the colonies and the best of them (forget about the worst, for purposes of this argument)are no longer to be found in contemporary Britain In some places that have been sheltered for three or four generations from the slow attrition of old-fashioned values, this may not apply.
The best examples I can think of are in business practises and in education.
I can't think of any time in the colonial era when a business would pull a trick like the following: send a product in the guise of a luxury gift to a customer, and then send another a year later, demanding a double payment and claiming that the recipient had `subscribed' by accepting the first gift. That is not a very subtle `hard sell'. And quoted this very day in a daily paper is the story of an organization using the name of its patron, a famous actor, in order to spend a large sum of the organization's cash on an unpopular project, without having consulted the patron. The actor was furious.
Education: in Rhodesia, and up to about 2000, in Zimbabwe (when the place was run like a country and not like Mugabe's personal fiefdom), nobody would have openly questioned the authority of a headmaster or dreamed of abusing a teacher, let alone drawing a knife on a fellow pupil. We acted almost like obedient Victorian subjects towards authority. Frozen in time, almost. Come to think of it, that might explain today's Zimbabweans' passive response to the nastiest headmaster we have ever experienced.
These examples are not particularly shocking, but I shall be on the lookout for better ones, bigger gripes, to illustrate my point.
Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell
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