The Mashonaland Irish Association

With a raucous St Patrick’s Day dinner at Fort
Salisbury (Harare) in 1891, a mere seven months after the Pioneer Column
raised their flag on Cecil Square, the Mashonaland Irish Association
was founded. Not only is it the oldest expatriate association in
Zimbabwe, the MIA is the oldest Irish association on the African
continent. The association developed into a vehicle for celebrating
Irishness through a busy social calendar and welfare programmes. For
over a century, the MIA has weathered the various challenges and
upheavals of a shared colonial experience and Zimbabwe’s struggle for
independence. Today, it continues to celebrate all things Irish while
embracing its diaspora as it approaches its thirteenth decade of
existence.

This Miscellany charts the association from its
inception to the present day with contributions from historians,
scholars, writers and poets, priests, nuns, missionaries, ex-MIA
Presidents and members; the diverse contributions range from the
colonial Anglo-Irish to the Jewish-Irish experience and throughout,
personalities have been resurrected, colourful ones recorded and even
the Minute books examined; all attest to the richness of the
association, its events but above all its members. Cumulatively, and
beyond the stories of individuals, the narrative provides new insights
into the layered complexity of the colonial experience, and the
adaptation (or not) of people of a different culture and belief into a
foreign setting.