Our story
Emzini means the house. Not the school, not the academy, not the bootcamp. That choice was deliberate, and it still governs how the place runs.
Each reported figure carries the outlet that published it and the date it was true. Club participation is counted separately and never folded into the headline. How we count.
How it began
2019 to now.
The first classes ran in Bulawayo, at the Public Library and later through the American Space at NUST. There was no platform, no curriculum repository and no grading system. There was a room and the people in it.
What that room taught us is the thing the organisation is now built around: the syllabus is not the hard part. Anyone can find a good syllabus. What is hard is the culture, the expectation that you will struggle and continue anyway, and the presence of somebody slightly further along who has already struggled with exactly the thing defeating you.
Going online was arithmetic rather than strategy. One room in Bulawayo holds thirty people, and there were more than thirty who wanted to learn. Scaling a room is easy; scaling the culture of a room is not, and that is where most online courses quietly fail. So we kept the mentorship and industrialised everything around it, which is how we ended up writing our own grading platform instead of buying one.
Where it ran
A borrowed room, a projector, and whoever turned up.
The Public Library first, then the American Space at NUST, which has since closed. Everything the organisation does now is an attempt to give that room more capacity than one room can have.
The founder
Eric Khumalo
Founder and Chief Executive
The syllabus is not the hard part. Anyone can find a good syllabus. What is hard is the culture, and somebody slightly further along who has already struggled with the thing defeating you.
Grew up in Gwabalanda and sat his A-Levels at Mpopoma High, the same school the clubs now run in. Read Data Science at UC Berkeley as a Mastercard Foundation Scholar, interned at Twitter across three summers, and has worked as a data scientist and privacy engineer since. Teaches CS7 himself and leads the Professional Training Track.
Mission
To teach computer science to a university standard, mentor the people who finish into work worth doing, and charge what each household can actually afford.
We started in Bulawayo. We have never restricted it to Bulawayo.
Three commitments, all testable. If the teaching is not rigorous, if graduates are not getting work, or if somebody able is turned away over money, we have failed at something specific.
Vision
A generation of African engineers who did not have to leave to become good, and who choose what to do next.
Most of ours are Zimbabwean because that is where we started, not because that is who we are for.
Some will build here and some will build elsewhere. The point is that it becomes a decision rather than the only door that opened.
What we stand for
Four, and each one costs us something. That is how you tell a value from a slogan.
Who runs it
Small, and everyone still teaches.
Proud Mpala
Chief Strategy Officer
Maranatha Adventist High School, then an MS in Computer Science at Stanford. A pioneer CS7 alumnus who came back. Leads strategic direction, curriculum design and long term growth planning.
Nandipa Siluma
Operations Lead
Maranatha Adventist High School, then Computer Science at Northwestern University. A pioneer CS7 alumna. Runs organisational logistics, the partner school relationships and hub operations.
Andile Mbele
Technical Lead
A software engineer and systems builder working on scalable platforms and applied AI. Owns the platform architecture, the hub deployment systems and the infrastructure that lets distributed learning work. The bridge between the technology and the classroom.
Methembe Moyo
Product Advisor
Computer Science at LeMoyne-Owen College, then product management at Lyft and now Aircall. Advises on the Poseidon product roadmap and on the path from an internal tool to something other institutions can license.
Support and collaboration
Named, because an organisation with no named backers reads as unfunded.
Come in
Whether you want to learn, to teach, to host a club or to fund one, it starts the same way.
