Silveira House
organization
Silveira House is a Jesuit centre for religious training and education located in Chishawasha, on the outskirts of Harare, Zimbabwe. Founded in 1964, it is named after Gonçalo da Silveira, the first Jesuit priest to come to Zimbabwe in the 16th century.
History
Silveira was founded in 1964 by John Dove, who remained at Silveira House until 1984.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, Silveira House became a centre for trade union education and political organizing. With the establishment of Zimbabwe as an independent nation in 1980 and new opportunities for the black majority, Silveira continued its programs in civic education for political participation, and in skills training, agriculture, and community building. With the economic woes of the 1990s, Silveira launched programs in peacebuilding, lobbying, and advocacy, and increased its technical training capacity.
In 2018 Silveira House organized an indaba for the 23 Zimbabwean presidential candidates.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Silveira House” as organization. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as organization. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q24235947. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1964, 1984, 1980 and 2018.
Official terminology may obscure informal participation, dissent or communities documented only indirectly. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
- Event chronology
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Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Silveira House”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Silveira House primary sources, Silveira House archive and Silveira research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Silveira House” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.