Northlea School

From 1952

Also known as Northlea High School, Bulawayo North Secondary School.

Co-educational government high school on the Victoria Falls Road near State House, opened on 29 January 1952 as Bulawayo North Secondary School; motto Ipsa Scientia Potestas Est.

At eight o’clock on the morning of 29 January 1952, the headmaster of the new Bulawayo North Secondary School, Mr H. J. Broughton, and four teachers welcomed their first pupils: thirty-seven boys and fifty-two girls. The school was a single-storey block of five classrooms on the Victoria Falls Road, on high ground near State House. Its own history says the first thing Mr Broughton did was give the children a road-safety lecture about the traffic on the road outside.

The school became Northlea, and boys and girls were taught together there from the first day. Writing in the early 1980s, its own history called it “the only coeducational high school in Bulawayo.” That was true only among the city’s former whites-only government schools. Founders, for one, had taught boys and girls together since 1952.

Its colours are green, black and grey, and its motto is Ipsa Scientia Potestas Est, “knowledge is power.”

The first decade

Sport began at once. By the third week of term the under-13 cricket side had beaten Bulawayo Technical School, later Gifford, and the B side soon beat Milton. In 1954 Northlea and Milton combined to stage The Mikado. A decade after opening, under a new headmaster, Mr E. C. C. Owen, the school had 854 pupils and 48 teachers, with new laboratories, workshops, a gymnasium and a library.

A school of bands and finds

Northlea’s history is full of things that other schools didn’t have:

• A pipe band, formed in 1961 under Mr James Annandale. By the next year it was competing at the Royal Scottish Gathering in Johannesburg. In 1964 it was judged the top junior band in Southern Africa and won the Cairns Cup.
• A marimba band, started in 1975 by Mr J. Bardo. It toured South Africa, appeared on the Ge Korsten Show and played before President Samora Machel in Salisbury, after which it was invited to tour Mozambique.
• An archaeology club, founded in 1962 by Mr Mike Raath and Mr Stewart. The school’s history says it was this club that discovered “the now famous fossilized skeleton of a small dinosaur at Nyamandhlovu.”
• Drama. Mr Bardo’s You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown won the Rhodesian High School Drama Festival award in 1975. The actor and cabaret artist Bruce Millar began his career at Northlea.

On the sports field, “Bucky” Buchanan, Stuart Dunbar and LeRoy Duberly played rugby for Rhodesia, and Tommy Dunk was chosen for the Rhodesian cricket XI. Northlea won the inter-school Debating Contest in 1967. In 1975 the school opened Alouette House, a co-educational hostel for 102 boarders.

Change

Mr N. A. C. Bijl became headmaster in 1965. According to the history, he was the guiding light behind the first sponsored walk in Bulawayo to raise school funds. Mr J. A. Edington, deputy since 1964, took over in September 1979, and the history says he “was required to implement a radical change in the policy of the admission of pupils. The intake was henceforth to be of Zimbabwean children of all races.” It adds that the school, then 800 pupils and 37 staff, had been growing by about 75 pupils a year and expected to reach 900 again by 1983.

What we don’t know yet

• Northlea after 1983: its leaders, its intake, and whether the pipe and marimba bands survived.
• The dinosaur. Which fossil did the Archaeological Club find at Nyamandhlovu, and where is it now?
• The name. Northlea is also one of the Bulawayo suburb names whose origin we have never been able to explain. Did the school take its name from the suburb, or the other way round?
• Your Northlea. If you were a pupil or teacher, or played in the pipe band or the marimba band, we would love to hear from you.