Zambia HEIS and Building Community Connectedness: Orature surrounding Mulungushi Rock of Authority and Broken Hill Mine

Abstract

In this paper, I use the orature surrounding Mulungushi Rock of Authority and Broken Hill Mine to argue that there is often a missing link between the public, formal and theoretical discourse taught in Zambian HEIS and the private or communal narratives as observed in communities where the subject matter originates from. This is despite the fact that when taught in the classroom, it is assumed that what is presented about a particular community in the classroom reflects that community including its peoples’ perspectives on the same.  I theorise that despite the existence of many public political, historical narratives of Mulungushi Rock of Authority and Broken Hill mine to feed the University classroom, the perspective of the community as espoused in its orature is scanty. Such a situation broadens the gap and alienates local and/or indigenous people in concerned communities from knowledge that relates to them. My thesis is that the missing link, the gap or connection between the local and indigenous communities where the Rock and Mine are located and the HEIS can be built by bridging classroom knowledge with indigenous orature about the two. This is because myths and other oral literary art forms have always been ways in which society understands, interprets and demystifies the world around it (Guerin, 2005). Finding the oral narratives and other oral artforms such as legends, myths surrounding the historical sites under discussion would provide valuable information regarding how communities interpret and connect to these artifacts. As such, as long as orature is considered a manque (Finnegan, 2012), unworthy of study and considered primitive by evolutionists, important communal narratives will be overshadowed. Hence there is need to reorient 21^st century HEIS to include perspectives such as the ones suggested concerning orature and the two historical sites above. Only then will we be able to bridge the gap between the subjects taught in the classrooms and the actual subjects in the community.