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From the frying pan into freedom
After fleeing war-torn Zimbabwe, teacher Judith Mawoko finds peace in small-town Alberta.
More than 40 years have passed, but Judith Mawoko still vividly remembers her favourite teacher and how he brought the outside world into her Grade 4 classroom.
In a rural village in Zimbabwe, then known as Rhodesia, Mr. Mupeti used magazines to show Mawoko and the other students photos of things they had never seen before, such as airplanes and trains.
Science field trips, meanwhile, took place in the thick bush behind the school, which sat at the foot of a mountain. There, Mawoko and her classmates learned about animals in their natural habitats, from monkeys swinging in high branches to slithering snakes.
Mawoko remembers her teacher as enthusiastic and able to make any subject come alive.
“I always try to teach like that in my classroom; there’s never a dull moment,” says Mawoko, a Grade 3/4 teacher at Ecole Providence School in the northern Alberta town of McLennan, population 692.
For Mawoko, it’s been an arduous journey to her current classroom, where principal Krista Veitch says Mawoko’s students are always engaged and excited for school.
“She’s a phenomenal teacher,” Veitch says.
Mawoko’s story begins with a carefree childhood in the Kwambana village, upended by a guerrilla war that killed loved ones and villagers, including her beloved teacher, Mr. Mupeti. It was he, as well as her upbringing, that inspired her to become a teacher.
She had nine siblings and was always helping out with the younger kids, a role she enjoyed and approached with great patience.
“My parents always said, ‘You are a teacher, this is where you belong,’” Mawoko remembers.
SHARING HER STORY
Mawoko’s experiences, starting from when she was around the age of her current students to when she left Zimbabwe as a refugee, are recounted in her self-published memoir, From The Frying Pan Into the Fire.
In the book, Mawoko describes her childhood with three brothers and six sisters, raised in an extended family of subsistence farmers.
“Every day had its own adventures,” she writes. “There was never a dull moment. There was no boredom, no loneliness and no stress. The word poverty was unknown to us. What was poverty? Our grain storage rooms were full of corn. We had livestock. We went to school. We had friends. We had loving parents and countless aunts, uncles and cousins. We had roofs above our heads to protect us from the rain. We had no worries, no problems.”
That changed in 1975, when Mawoko was 10 years old and the Zimbabwe War of Liberation, also called the Rhodesian Bush War, interrupted village life.
Mawoko remembers visiting in bush camps with Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army soldiers, who were fighting to liberate the country from colonial rule. She listened with keen interest to a history she hadn’t heard before: how the British had used guns to fight against Blacks armed with spears, bows and arrows. After the massacre, the settlers had driven people off arable lands to establish their own farms.
“I began to see things a little differently. Life was not as good as I had thought,” Mawoko writes.
As violence spread, Mawoko and the other children stopped playing in the river and roaming the forests to collect wild fruit and herbs.
“We started living in fear,” Mawoko says.
One day, at the school’s morning assembly, a popular teacher was missing.
“The headmaster later visited each classroom individually to break the sad news. A bus had been blown up by a land mine. Mr. Mupeti had perished in it,” Mawoko writes.
Loss persisted. An unknown number of villagers died when bombs were dropped on the village in April 1977. During the continuous assault, accompanied by deafening explosions, Mawoko and her family rushed into their hut for cover. But when Mawoko’s mother looked out a small window and saw several nearby huts burning, she led everyone back outside.
“That split second decision she made that day saved our lives. Our hut immediately burst into flames,” Mawoko writes.
The village school eventually closed and Mawoko was out of the classroom for two years, until her dad’s job was transferred and her family left their war-torn village for a city.
The war ended with independence for Zimbabwe in 1980, causing what Mawoko describes as a “brief romance” with autonomy, until the supposed democracy turned into a brutal dictatorship and peace was lost again.
ABANDONING EVERYTHING
After the war, Mawoko studied at the University of Zimbabwe to become a teacher, started her career and married. But further tragedy struck when Mawoko was seven months pregnant and her husband died suddenly, at age 27. She gave birth to their daughter two months later.
Mawoko spent a decade teaching high school English in Zimbabwe. Near the end of her memoir she describes a country marred by rampant corruption and greed that permeated every aspect of life. Citizens were more afraid of the police than they were of criminals. She couldn’t find a spot for her daughter in a decent secondary school unless she paid a bribe to the headmaster and was unable to drive without being stopped by police demanding a bribe.
Eventually, political violence and intimidation made it dangerous to be a teacher in Zimbabwe, so in 2001, Mawoko abandoned everything and fled to Canada, where one of her brothers lived.
“I just found no future in the country and that’s when I came here,” Mawoko says. “It was the most painful experience to leave home.”
The experience was especially painful because her daughter, then age 12, stayed at a boarding school in Zimbabwe for the first year.
While she’s faced many challenges throughout her life, Mawoko says her memoir is ultimately not a tragic story.
“There are some sad parts, but when I describe my early childhood, it’s a lot of fun reading about it,” she says.
Principal Veitch, who worked with Mawoko at Ecole Providence for five years, says excitement abounded at the school when Mawoko published her book in 2018. Veitch even caught older students sneakily reading it in class.
“To suddenly realize your teacher has had all of these things happen in her life, and has witnessed all this tragedy and has overcome it, you just see the person in a different light. Kids can look at that … and think, ‘oh, if she’s overcome that, I can overcome this,’” Veitch says.
Veitch describes Mawoko as an excellent teacher who excels at whatever she puts her mind to, even when there’s obstacles along the way.
Those qualities have helped Mawoko succeed in Canada, starting with her first job teaching junior high in Attawapiskat in northwestern Ontario. Wanting to live in a city, Mawoko later moved to Calgary, working as an education assistant and spending her summers at the University of Calgary to earn the credits she needed for an Alberta teaching certificate. After substitute teaching in Calgary, Mawoko moved to McLennan in 2015 and began teaching elementary school students for the first time in her career.
While it hasn’t been an easy journey to Mawoko’s current classroom, where her favourite subjects to teach are English, math and religion, she feels content.
“I’m just so happy,” Mawoko says. “This is where I belong.”
A fireside chat with Judith Mawoko
What motivated you to write your memoir?
As an educator, I was motivated by a desire to teach. I wanted to tell the story of life in Zimbabwe from the vantage point of personal experience. I also wanted to inspire, comfort and encourage others to persevere through their own challenges.
What are some of the misconceptions you’ve heard about Africa from your students?
Students think that Africa is one country, in which all people are Black and speak the same language. They all live in mud huts, surrounded by wild animals. Students believe that the whole African experience is about poverty, disease and war.
I tell them that Africa has over 50 different countries and over 2,000 languages and a diversity of ethnicities and cultures. And yes there is poverty, but that’s not the full story. There are millionaires, cities and technology. (When I told my students that I had talked to all my siblings in Africa on the phone on the weekend, one student gasped, “There are phones in Africa?”)
What do you miss about Africa?
First and foremost I miss my family, siblings, cousins, nieces and nephews. I also miss the sunshine. It’s summer throughout the year. I miss the organic food, music, dance and celebrations.
How does teaching in Canada compare to teaching in Zimbabwe?
First, teacher education is equivalent. When I arrived in Canada, the Ontario College of Teachers evaluated my credentials and certified me to teach in Ontario without any need for further education.
Secondly, students are the same everywhere. They are curious and they want to learn. They all need a motivated, compassionate and creative teacher who cares about them.
What do you like about living in a small town in Alberta?
After living four years in Toronto and eight years in Calgary, I find myself most at peace in small town McLennan where everyone knows everyone else. People here are very warm and welcoming, which gives me a sense of community and a feeling of belonging. In my school, class sizes are smaller and I get to know my students and their families at a personal level.
Got an idea? In Profile features an interesting teacher in each issue of the ATA Magazine. If you know of a teacher who would be a good profile subject, please contact managing editor Cory Hare at cory.hare@ata.ab.ca.
