Dominican Convent, Bulawayo

From 1895

Also known as Convent High School, Dominican Convent High School, Convent.

Catholic girls' school run by the Dominican Sisters since 1895, two years after the colonial town was founded; its magazine is Veritas.

The convent school is older than almost everything else in colonial Bulawayo. The primary school dates its founding to 28 October 1895, two years after the town was laid out. In 1968, when Bulawayo marked its 75th anniversary, the headmistress, Sister Mary Gilberta, wrote that the school had been “closely linked” with the city “for seventy-three of its seventy-five years of existence.”

The Dominican Sisters were given land as well as pupils. The site’s own list of suburb names notes that part of Parklands began as “Park Lands Estate A (Portion of original grant to Dominican Sisters).”

Veritas

The school magazine is called Veritas, Latin for truth and the Dominican motto. The issues in this collection run from 1958 to 1986. Each was printed with a bishop’s imprimatur: in 1958 and 1959 that of Adolph G. Schmitt, Bishop of Bulawayo.

The magazines read like a calendar of a Catholic school year in the Federation:

• 1958 opens in mourning, for Sister Mary Georgina, headmistress from 1938 to 1948, and for Pope Pius XII. The diary welcomes a new prioress, Mother Mary Melania, and a new headmistress, Sister Mary Laetitia, both of whom had taught at the school for years. On 11 February the whole school carried flowers in procession to the grotto for the centenary of Lourdes, and that evening the Sisters and boarders held a candlelit procession “slightly marred by a fine drizzle.”
• 1959 records a new uniform, pancakes and a fancy-dress parade on Shrove Tuesday, and fibreglass diving boards “from Holland” for the new swimming pool, which the Old Girls and the Catholic Women’s League had helped pay for. The head girl that year was Josephine Trollip. It also notes that Mount Pleasant, “the scene of our nursery days,” was being pulled down to make way for a new senior block.
• 1968 is a special issue. The whole magazine was dedicated to Bulawayo for its 75th anniversary, and every girl in the High School helped write it. For the Open Day on 27 July each class turned its room into an exhibition on the city’s history: model huts of Lobengula’s royal town, church models, a reconstruction of the first hospital tents, a mock-up of the first Standard Bank and a sewing room hung with Bulawayo textiles under the slogan “What Bulawayo makes, makes Bulawayo.” The exhibition even had two “live” missionaries, one of them a pioneer Dominican Sister in the pleated guimp. The issue won the Chronicle’s 75th Anniversary School Magazine Competition.
• 1986 carries a joint message from Sister M. Denys, headmistress of the High School, and Sister M. Venantia, headmistress of the Primary School: “The way to live life is not to stand outside it as a spectator but to enter into as a participant.” By then the PTA was building tennis courts on land leased from the City Council beside Basch Street.

What the photographs show

The photographs date from around 2009 and are unusually full. As well as the present school (classrooms, the three-storey block, the courtyard with its statue of Mary, the library in Fra Angelico House, the swimming pool, a girl playing marimba and girls playing soccer), they include drawings of the school’s buildings through time: the first school building, the school in 1910, 1930 and 1960, and Mount Pleasant Cottage in 1958. A placard marks Mother Patrick House.

What we don’t know yet

• Who the first Sisters in Bulawayo were and how they arrived. A thesis by Sister Admirablis Piendl on the Dominican Sisters in Bulawayo is cited in a 1981 history of Rhodesian schools. We have not seen it.
• Who Mother Patrick House is named for. Mother Patrick Cosgrave led the Dominican Sisters who nursed in Mashonaland from 1890. Whether she had a part in the Bulawayo foundation needs checking before we say so.
• Head girls and headmistresses. We have only scattered names. If you have old copies of Veritas, especially before 1958 or after 1986, we would like to see them.

If you were a Convent girl, or a Sister who taught there, we would like to hear what you remember.

50 photographs of Dominican Convent, Bulawayo →