I remember the white government telling the teachers to identify the top 5% of black students to educate them up to university level, trying to bring them on, get them into medicine, dentistry, engineering, social sciences etc etc. This was to bring about a middle class as quickly as possible, so as to integrate them into society. But the Marxists flew in from outside the country and poisoned the likes of Mugabe with their lies about the whites keeping them down, etc. which led to the war. Impatience to snatch power was the reason skills were not imparted at the political level. When the whites left they left behind a well developed infrastructure withtop doctors, teachers, nurses, apprenticeships that trained builders, joiners, etc. We were proud of what we had achieved in a short time, I remember my parents working hard, there were clinics and schools honeycombed throughout the country every five miles. Then Zanu and Zapu came in with their thugs and killers, terrorising villagers, stealing their children and taking them across the border to train them as soldiers, if the villagers resisted, they were tortured (I remember one particularly dreadful story where they cut off the man's lips and forced his wife to cook and eat them. Many such things they did. When they stole power, not from Smith but from Bishop Muzorera, the genuinely elected leader whose Presidency Mugabe refused to accept, the first thing Mugabe did was to clean out the Defence budget, which was only the beginning of building up his fortune in Swiss banks. My fellow students at the university a few years down the line lamented that they had been so deceived, and when Ian Smith went shopping at the Bon Marche one day a whole bunch of black people gathered outside the shop calling his name. The manager told Smith to go out the back way, but Smith said he had never run away in his life, and would not run now. When he stepped outside, all the crowd shouted "Come back as our President, Mr. Smith".
Anonymous