Shona lessons

"What you have to know is: Shona isn't about Robert Mugabe," the teacher says. "It's about Zimbabwe, where we all live."

We're sitting in a parents' meeting by candlelight (thanks to yet another power cut). My son's Shona teacher is angry: white parents aren't pushing their kids to do their Shona homework.

Zimbabwe's indigenous languages are a compulsory part of the school curriculum here. All well and good, you'd think: I'm keen for my child to improve his grasp of a second language as soon as possible. The problem is that Zimbabwe's chequered history of white-black relations weighs heavily. Not every white parent wants their child to learn Shona, it turns out.

"I tell them: speak with your maid, play with Shona kids. You need to practise," says the teacher. "But I get all sorts of answers: 'I'm not allowed' or 'the maid's not allowed to speak Shona to me' or "I'm not allowed to play with the children on my street. Black kids are well-behaved, you know. Most of them, at least."

"I love my language," she says passionately. "I want your kids to like it too." I look at her in the dim light: bright, young, articulate, well-educated (probably better so than many of the parents present). Zimbabwe didn't go through apartheid but some of the provisions of the former minority regime came pretty close to it: we have black friends who weren't allowed to live in the "good" suburbs 'til 1980. I know of three Shona families who bought classy homes in one low-density area in Mutare immediately after independence was declared on April 18th. They'd saved the cash, been itching to move for years.

Memories of the-whites-who-wouldn't-mix die hard. It must seem sometimes that many of them still won't.