The Ruzevha/Ekhaya Coloniality Neologisms and Access to Higher Education in Zimbabwean Universities

Abstract

Though I did both my primary and secondary school in an urban area, I was required to spend the school holidays in the rural areas. During such school holidays, I used to carry out chores such as assisting in tilling the field, harvesting crops and herding the cattle. Besides the often-strenuous chores, school holidays were always convenient times to socially interact with family members and peers who reside and attend schools in the rural areas. For some implied reason, as an urban school-going learner, I was always treated socially with utmost and ‘undeserved’ regard by my rural peers who assumed that I was cleverer, more ‘civilised’ and more knowledgeable than them. In Zimbabwe, the urban–rural migration and vice versa facilitates the continuous social interaction between the urban and rural populace. Stereotypically, rural residents are culturally unsophisticated, backward and hold anachronistic scientific and social ideas (Matshinhe 2011). It is within the broad scope of rurality stereotypes in Zimbabwe that this chapter analytically exposes how rural students negotiate social spaces in geographically-located urban higher education institutions.