“I worked for the BSAP and sent my children to school so they could have a better tomorrow.” This is what Aniko Midzi of Bindura, a member of the BSAP during the 1970s independence war whose father had also been a policeman, told an interviewer some twenty years after independence. Midzi was obviously proud that five of his six children had completed “O levels” (secondary school) and the youngest was still in school. As will be seen, acquiring Western-style education became an important theme in African security force service in colonial Southern Rhodesia.

The introduction of Western education, mostly through the medium of Christian missionary schools, eventually represented one of the most profound contradictions of the colonial system in Africa. Graduates of mission schools became literate Christians, loyal colonial subjects, and the pioneers of an upwardly mobile, African Westernized middle class with relatively well-paying and prestigious jobs in the colonial order. The same people, however, quickly saw the racist hypocrisy of colonialism and used the tools they had acquired through Western education—literacy, proficiency in the English language, and Western organizational methods—to demand redress of various grievances and the granting of political rights. Historian Michael West has shown that Africans in colonial Southern Rhodesia, as they did elsewhere, tended to see Western education as the key to social mobility. As such, the settler state saw black academic education as a threat to white supremacy and sought to undercut it with racially discriminatory school funding and by encouraging industrial education as more appropriate to the African economic role.