As I drove out of town the road opened up wide and bright. The morning sun shone on everything it touched. On my left, a tall signpost caught my eye. It had bold white letters on a light Blue background: University of Gweru. The sign stood right by the roadside, a marker for anyone who cared to notice. For me it always pulled me in. Every time I saw that sign old memories started coming back.
Seeing that sign brought it all back. University days. Late nights, wild talk about the future and all the promises we made to ourselves and to each other. I remembered how we used to make plans. We scribbled them on hostel walls. We kept lists of things we said we would do after finishing school. I looked at that sign and wondered how many of us had really done what we said we would do. How many had actually found what we were looking for in the end?
University promised us peace. It promised a way up, a way out and a chance to finally settle in life. But I started to think about whether it was really peace that we found at the end of it all. I had my first degree in Media and Society Studies. Sometimes it felt like the main thing I learned was how to keep asking more questions.
I remembered the list of courses the university offered. There was even one called Peace Studies. I could almost hear people’s voices in my head. Some people used to laugh at it. They said it was the most useless degree you could get, just a waste of time and money. Others argued that it was the best thing anyone could study. They would say, “This is what Zimbabwe needs. This is what the world needs right now.” They claimed Peace Studies gave you the tools to solve real problems, to bring people together and to hold a society together when everything else wanted to pull it apart. Maybe that`s why i studied it next.
But there was a funny thing about Peace Studies. Nobody could really agree on what peace meant. In those classes, every single textbook gave you a new definition. Peace was the absence of violence or it was justice. Some said it was development and others said it was well-being. But to some, it was simply having a hot meal and a quiet room at the end of the day. The definitions piled up quickly. Either Big words with long explanations or more theories than I couldn’t keep track of.
What made me laugh, even though sometimes it was a tired laugh, was that even the professors who taught Peace Studies rarely seemed to have peace themselves. You could see it on their faces as they hurried down the corridors weighed down by books and stress. Some rushed in late, snapping at the class and then stood at the front, talking about conflict resolution for an hour. All the while their own lives ran at full speed in the opposite direction.
I started thinking that maybe peace is not something you can earn with a degree or memorize for an exam. Maybe peace is something you have to search for in your own messy life without all those big words from textbooks.
I thought about Dr. Makoni, my old Peace Studies lecturer. She was sharp and always quick with a joke. Her hair was always pulled back so tight you knew she meant business. She could quote Mandela and Martin Luther King without even looking at her notes. Her lectures on non-violence felt more like sermons because she spoke with so much passion and certainty that it was hard not to listen.
One morning during exams came to mind. The air in the halls felt heavy and everyone was tense. The smell of burnt toast drifted up from the hostel kitchen. That day, Dr. Makoni was late which almost never happened. When she walked in you could tell something was wrong. Her face looked pale and her voice was tight with every word seemed to cost her effort. She stood at the front of the class and stared at us for a long moment before she began her lecture.
In the middle of her talk her phone buzzed. She glanced at it and her whole face changed. For a moment, she closed her eyes and took in a long, shaky breath.
“I’m sorry, class,” she said, her voice softer than usual. “I need to step out, just continue reading.”
She stepped into the hallway then swung the door shut behind her. We could hear her voice outside, rising and falling in Shona. It was sharper and more raw than anything we had ever heard in her lectures. “No, that’s not what I said. I said do not do anything until I get home. Wait. Please. Just wait.” There was a pause, a pleading and a hope that sounded just out of reach.
When she came back inside, her eyes were still bright but they looked troubled. She tried to pick up where she left off but her mind seemed to be somewhere else. She finished early that day. As we packed up she stopped one student by the door.
“Sometimes peace is the hardest lesson of all,” she said quietly. “Even for me.”
I never forgot that moment. Here was the professor who taught us about peace, negotiation and mediation, but she was struggling to hold her own world together. That was the day I learned that even the experts do not always have the answers. Sometimes peace slips through their fingers no matter how hard they try to hold on.
Just then, a loud hoot jolted me out of my thoughts. I looked up and saw that the traffic light had turned green. The line of cars behind me was growing. I put the car in gear and pulled away.
I drove the last few blocks in silence. My mind was still circling the same old question—if peace is so hard to keep, even for the ones who study it, what hope is there for the rest of us?
