Explanations of ‘success’ or ‘failure’ in education are often limited by the choice of indicator and by the frame of explanation. In this chapter, I broaden the explanation of academic success to include the Shona conception of hunhuism (personhood). Analysing the performance of Zimbabwean learners from this perspective shows how learners understand themselves and energize their academic performance, while at the same time suggesting new theoretical approaches to questions of academic identity.

Weak academic performance among black African learners from low socio-economic backgrounds is generally put down to poverty. These learners’ parents lack appropriate cultural resources. They live within economically disadvantaged family cultures, and in disadvantaged neighbourhoods that doom them to failure (Bourdieu 1993). This focus on failure prevents us from reflecting on the experiences of learners who manage to overcome the endemic negative influences in their lives to achieve academically.

I focus in this chapter on a secondary school in the povertystricken, high-density township of Mbare in Zimbabwe’s capital city, Harare. Harare is located in Mashonaland Province, in the north of the country where most people speak chiShona. I am myself a chiShona speaker; I grew up in Mbare and taught for many years in various secondary schools in Harare. The subjects of this chapter are Ordinary Level (O Level) learners. At the time of the study, most of the learners were in their late teens. They are heirs to Zimbabwe’s long colonial history, which has left them both landless and ‘wealthless’ (Zvobgo 1994). In recent years, poverty in Zimbabwe has escalated. The combined effects of economic structural-adjustment programmes, governmental mismanagement, drought, HIV and AIDS and, in 2005, the dehumanizing Murambatsvina (clear the filth) campaign of mass evictions and demolitions, which left over 700,000 people homeless, all contribute to the worsening circumstances (Bond and Manyanya 2002: 34-35; Human Rights Watch 2005: 19). Illness, hunger, unemployment, as well as shortages of housing, water and electricity, prevail (Raftopoulos and Sachikonye 2001).

Guidance teachers tend to explain poor school performance by referring to erratic school attendance and poor home circumstances (UNICEF 2003). Such conditions are acute for children, and especially for girls and orphans, whose caregivers often fail to raise the necessary school fees, or keep them at home to attend to sick family members or to carry out household chores (Government of Zimbabwe and UNICEF 2001; UNDP 2003; UNICEF 2001).