A Decade After Winning Independence, Zimbabwe Is at a Crossroads : Africa: A rising jobless rate is today’s most critical problem. But the nation shares with others on the continent the strains of transition away from a colonial past.

If the future of Zimbabwe has a human face, it could be that of Passmore Kaseke, a proud, eager, 18-year-old high school graduate, the first in his family able to read and write.

Every now and then Kaseke dreams of a career in law or accounting, but each day he must face more immediate concerns, such as finding a rare odd job scraping rust from radiators or toting scrap metal.

Recently Kaseke and his best friend, Albert Mlambo, got day work washing dishes in a roadside ice cream shop. They were very lucky. More than 100 others had contended for the jobs.

The two youths scrubbed bowls for 10 hours, the first paying work they were able to muster in the two months since they finished school. They made about $4 each, which enabled them to buy a little meat for their parents and siblings to eat.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of Zimbabwe’s independence and the dawn of majority rule, which arrived after many years of racial hatred and civil violence in the white-ruled country then called Rhodesia.

In more ways than one, it is a country at a crossroads, continuing a painstaking transition from a colonial and racially separatist past to a singularly African future.

Zimbabwe’s problems are familiar across Africa: a high annual population-growth rate of 3.5%, paltry foreign investment totaling less than $50 million over the last decade, an inflation rate of 20%.

But these difficulties pale by comparison to the nation’s rising jobless rate, currently 25% for the entire population, but far higher among Zimbabwe’s young.

In a country where 48% of the population of 9.4 million is younger than 15, nearly 280,000 high-school graduates like Kaseke and Mlambo--”school-leavers,” as they are called here--enter the marketplace each year to compete for an estimated 12,000 jobs.

Ironically, the crisis of unemployment is an offshoot of one of Zimbabwe’s sterling achievements in its first decade. When the government of Robert Mugabe came to power in 1980, it vowed to guarantee full educational opportunities for its population, 95% of whom are black and had been lawfully barred from most secondary and higher-level schools under the white-ruled government.

Since then, the number of primary and secondary schools has grown tenfold. The national literacy rate has climbed from 45% to nearly 80%, according to government figures.

In 1978 less than 2% of the blacks eligible by age to enter high school were allowed to do so. Today, more than 70% are enrolled. And Zimbabwe is the only country in all of Africa that boasts full primary school enrollment.

Between 1957 and 1977, only 39,000 blacks were permitted three or more years of secondary education. Since independence, more than 1 million have completed secondary schools--but only a tenth of them have jobs.

“We placed a high premium on education because for 90 years the black population was deprived. The reason the whites were crushing the rest of us was because they were ensuring that we remained ignorant,” said Fay Chung, Zimbabwe’s minister of primary and secondary education.

“Now we have created a situation that is potentially dangerous--so many bright young people and so few jobs. But it is also potentially creative. I think we are in a far better position to develop than other countries where there are masses of illiterates.”

Many foreign analysts hail Zimbabwe’s educational successes but also consider the corollary problems quite urgent. “In fact, it’s something of a time bomb,” said one U.S. official based here. “Education is fostering so many hopes, and I think a lot of young people are angry.”

Mugabe’s government faces many critical tests as the 1990s begin: how to attract investment to a country starving for foreign exchange; how to peacefully resettle thousands of peasants from overcrowded communal farms onto prime white-held lands without destroying the confidence--and provoking an exodus--of those white farmers whose produce and expertise it so badly needs to keep; how to shape a fair political future respecting the rights of opponents without endangering stability.

In December the ruling party, the Zimbabwe African National Union, in a long-awaited show of reconciliation, merged with the rival Zimbabwe African People’s Union headed by Vice President Joshua Nkomo.

The expression of unity between the veteran adversaries, Mugabe and Nkomo, came several years after bloody ethnic strife between Nkomo’s Ndebele people and the Shona majority threatened to sunder the nation.

But the merger seemed almost secondary to more immediate political concerns--whether to allow more political parties, whether to craft Mugabe’s beloved Marxist-Leninism into the national constitution, how to grapple with political disaffection among the young.

Last year, at the University of Zimbabwe--a campus that has experienced growing unrest in the face of high unemployment and several widely publicized corruption trials of public officials--education minister Chung was so outraged to see Nkomo booed and shouted down by student demonstrators during a speech that she grabbed the microphone and accused them of fascism.

“I think there is something of a generation gap growing here,” said Walter Kamba, 58, the university’s vice chancellor, a close adviser to Mugabe and a frequent target of student scorn. “Those who dreamed that independence would be the end of all problems were quite mistaken. . . . Many of today’s students were only 10 or 11 when independence came. Their concerns are changing.”

Zimbabwe’s transition between its past and present is reflected at many turns here in the capital, a sleek and stylish city of tree-lined streets, manicured parks, shiny high-rises and one- and two-story colonial-style storefronts with painted shutters and balconies.

Just over a decade ago, blacks were not allowed to enter the downtown district of what was then called Salisbury without passes from the government of Ian Smith, the white leader who once vowed that majority rule would never come in his lifetime.

These days Smith, who lives a quiet life of retirement, is fighting a battle in Zimbabwe’s courts and legislature to prevent the majority-rule government from cutting his pension.

The city’s boulevards also reflect the nation’s transition. Since 1980, many street signs that once bore the names of such British colonial favorites as Queen Victoria and Sir Edgar Whitehead have been replaced by those of famous African nationalist leaders such as Zambia’s Kenneth Kaunda, Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere and the late Samora Machel of Mozambique.

One notable exception is Rhodes Avenue, a major east-west corridor named after Cecil Rhodes, the imperialist founder of Rhodesia. A visitor can tell he is on Rhodes Avenue, because it is the only street in town that does not have any signs identifying it.

Zimbabweans give various reasons for this, some saying “the people” snatched the Rhodes Avenue signs in celebration of independence in 1980; others say whites, fearing the avenue was going to be renamed anyway, “pinched” them for souvenirs.

Still others say the government took them down in hope of one day renaming the street after Mugabe--but it is still waiting for someone to publicly suggest it.

In a larger sense, the mysterious void on Rhodes Avenue points up the uncertainty of Zimbabwe’s future.

Nowadays, young people do not need passes to enter the city, but they do not find many opportunities once they get here. Storefront employment agencies overflow with applicants. Public transport has become so poor and unreliable that most people seem to prefer to hitchhike.

The central registry building on Moffat Street, where citizens apply for public documents such as birth certificates and passports, is overwhelmed each day with hundreds of young school-leavers hoping to acquire national registration cards, requisite identification for 18-year-old job seekers.

Standing in lines has become one of the dominant facts of life in Zimbabwe. In the national art gallery here, an oil painting in an exhibit of local artists seemed to capture the youthful frustrations of an entire city in its colorful depiction of huge throngs of people, with a bright red caption reading, “Is this the queue for the bus, registration, bread or South African visas?”

Indeed, those frustrations are so sharp that Kempton Makamure, a law professor at the University of Zimbabwe and a vocal opponent of the government, says “a growing sense of alienation” and the prospect of joblessness are pushing many students to the brink of suicide.

The government has yet to come up with a clear program to grapple with the nation’s joblessness. Although the Mugabe administration sings the praises of farm work, it is doubtful that peasant labor will prove attractive over the long run to the masses of educated graduates expecting more from life.

Many foreign analysts say that unless the government creates a better atmosphere to attract foreign investment--such as lowering tax rates and allowing more profits to be sent home--the problem may only get worse.

Meanwhile, young Zimbabweans like Kaseke and Mlambo will continue to hunt for a job--any job. “I know I will get something regular for sure,” said Mlambo, the more optimistic of the pair. “I think it will just take greater patience.”