Where is Zimbabwe?

Dancer-musicians from Zimbabwe came to my son's elementary school last month.
It was the start of a 40-day, cross-cultural tour for them in Japan.
We were lucky that our local international non-profit supported their visit.
Parents were also invited to watch the school performance in the old gym of the school, so my wife and I went and took our youngest daughter.
Two men, both performers and coordinator-teachers for their group, and four boys, aged 7 to 15, danced and sang traditional songs and played traditional instruments particular of their country.
The walls of the gym were covered with pictures and explanations about the country, the lives of the youth who had come so far to Japan.
While their multi-rhythmic performance was delightful and exciting, I was more impressed that one of their main languages is English. It is due to the unfortunate imperialistic history of Great Britain in its attempt to enslave and rob the continent. Cecil John Rhodes made a fortune in diamond-mining and even renamed a great swath of land in southern Africa, "Rhodesia." Only within recent history have the Zimbabweans reclaimed their full independence and re-named their country.
But any recipient of the "Rhodes Scholarship" today would probably not be so eager to impress the very source of their grant came long ago from blood diamonds and slavery.
Certainly, the current leader in Zimbabwe, Mugabe, is no better a despot.
However, as an English teacher in Japan, I thought it was extraordinarily poignant that a people from an even more different and juxtaposed culture to Japan than the United States spoke English. That the language is still a major tool for understanding and traveling about the world.
That the homogenous culture of the Japanese, who have spent more than anyone in Asia to learn English, but who lag consistently behind other more aggressive Asia countries in mastering or scoring high on TESOL or TOEIC tests, could try a little harder in stepping out of the "Japanese mind" box and embrace a foreign language that just might broaden their global acceptance and advance their communication of ideas.
It's frustrating because my children speak English and Japanese. My relatives in America speak to them openly and encourage them to embrace challenges. When we visit the States, they are exposed to people, friends, from a multitude of races and cultural backgrounds.
In Japan, my son is often asked to "say something in English" like it is a card trick, some bit of magic that they themselves cannot do. English is taught in schools by teachers who often have no background in speaking it, who do not wish to teach it, and have never traveled abroad. Their classrooms are like painful seiges of grammar patterns and awkward sounding greetings where memorized phrases are life buoys, and screwball jokes such as "I am a pen" perpetuate.
I like many things about the Japanese, but this cultural flaw is frustrating.
So, I was happy to hear the Zimbabweans speak, glad my son could understand, me and wife, also. I wonder if it was too much to hope that my son realizes he has something special inside him that is not magic but essential to learning and understanding the greater world, something to embrace, not to hide from and make jokes about.
The way many students stood up to dance with the young Zimbabwe men in traditional dress, maybe they sort of get it too.