Attack on St Alberts School

Saint Alberts High School is a coeducational Roman Catholic Church mission high school that also provides boarding for students. It is situated in the Mashonaland Central province of Rhodesia, on the escarpment overlooking the Zambezi Valley in northern Zimbabwe near the Mozambique border. It is above this escarpment which is also popularly known as the Mavhuradonha Mountain range. The Valley below is also known as Dande. St. Alberts is located in a pristine area between Mount Darwin and Centenary, in a region of temperate weather.

In July 1973, Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) cadres captured 292 pupils and staff from the school and force-marched them north towards Mozambique, where the ZANLA bases were. The march was intercepted by the Rhodesian Security Forces before the cadres crossed the border, and all but eight of the children and staff were recovered.[1]

Similar abductions were repeated over the following years and the security forces found themselves increasingly unable to prevent them.[2] The captured schoolchildren would be marched to ZANLA bases in Mozambique where they would undergo "political 're-education'" (Abbott's and Botham's words[3]) and guerrilla training. The school was closed in the late 1970s at the height of the Rhodesian Bush War. It had become a haven for the recruitment of communist backed terrorists.