The Role of Land Reform Beneficiaries and the Reasons for Them Developing and Supporting a Satellite School in Masvingo, Zimbabwe: A Social Capital Marriage of Nhimbe and Allied Reasons

Résumé 0

The land reform process in Zimbabwe gave birth to a new type of school known as a satellite school, which emerged due to community requests (in areas populated by land reform beneficiaries) and an inability by government to adequately fund new schools that communities required. Various studies on the emergence of satellite schools have mainly focused on the challenges faced by satellite schools. This article explores nhimbe ("work party") and allied reasons specifically amongst the land reform beneficiaries who provide a supporting role to a satellite school in their community. This paper offers a different perspective on satellite schools from the vantage point of the land reform beneficiaries who are choosing to fill an educational gap and simultaneously nurture the development of an educational asset which they built-the satellite school. Theoretically, social capital frameworks by James Coleman (1988) and Robert Putnam (2000) are utilised to understand the relationships forged and maintained between groups of people for a greater good, in this case the land reform beneficiaries' construction and ongoing support of one selected satellite school. Although the study's research design adopted a multiple case study approach, we use the case of a group of land reform beneficiaries in one district for this paper. The data were elicited through semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions held at one satellite school in the Masvingo district of Zimbabwe. The purposively selected participants comprised six land reform beneficiaries, two village heads and one satellite school head, making a total sample of nine participants. The study revealed that the land reform beneficiaries played a central role in the development and support of the satellite school in their community because of a marriage of interrelated reasons. These included the close proximity of their homesteads to each other which generated nhimbe, which further developed their relationships, their social networks, a sense of homage coupled with an indebtedness to the Mugabe government, shared community goals and social norms and the existing resource base (that they could access in their community). The study revealed that all these reasons for the land reform beneficiaries developing and supporting the satellite school feed off each other-they are not independent of each other. We conclude that the land reform beneficiaries have a sense of ownership of the satellite school in their community in Masvingo and they resultantly strive to use the available resources they are able to muster to develop the school so that it can be a valued asset to their community.