Professor Wiseman Magwa is the Executive Director of the Midlands State University's Language Institute in Gweru. He is a Full Professor and holder of a Doctoral degree in Language Education from the University of South Africa. Professor Magwa is the founding Vice Chancellor of the Reformed Church University in Masvingo where he served for eight (8) years as head of the institution.
Professor Magwa worked in schools as a high school teacher for many years before he joined the Gweru Teachers College as a Lecturer in 1987 and rose to become Senior Lecturer and then Principal Lecturer in 1994. In 2000 he left Gweru Teachers College and joined the then newly established Midlands State University as a Lecturer and was later promoted to become Senior Lecturer in 2003, Associaate Professor in 2005 and Full Professor in 2008. In 2009 Professor Magwa was appointed the substantive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Education at the Zimbabwe Open University (ZOU). There he pursued a career in Open and Distance Learning. After serving for only two years as Faculty Dean at ZOU, Professor Magwa was appointed Acting Vice Chancellor of the Reformed Church University in 2011. A year later, in November 2012, he was appointed Vice Chancellor of the same university to become its founding Vice Chancellor until 2018 when he retired. He then re-joined Midlands State University as a Senior Professor and was appointed founding Director of the MSU-Language Institute in September 2018.
Professor Magwa holds a PhD in Language Education from the University of South Africa.
Professor Magwa has written extensively in the area of language, literature, education and philosophy. He is the author of over 100 publications on various aspects of language, literature, grammar, education and philosophy, of which 29 of these are books being used as reference texts in schools, colleges and universities. The Professor was appointed Chief Language and Culture Consultant, and Advisor in the making of the new constitution in Zimbabwe (2011-2012). He was also the National Coordinator in the project to translate the constitution into official indigenous languages of Zimbabwe (2017-2018). The Constitution Dissemination, Awareness and Education Project funded by the European Union in 2019 appointed him Chief Consultant and he was also the Country Coordinator in the CASAS Language Harmonisation of Indigenous Languages in the Botswana, Mozambique and Zimbabwe project (2008-2012). Professor Magwa is a member of the SADC Technical Committee on Open and Distance Learning and country representative (2010-2014) and sits on the Board of the Centre for Advanced Studies of African Society (CASAS), an Africa-wide continental language organisation. He serves as an external examiner at ten (10) international universities in the SADC region and beyond. Magwa is a recipient of several internal and external academic awards. In June 2013 Professor Magwa was awarded the World Education Congress Global Trophy for outstanding contribution to education which he physically received in Mumbai, India. Then later in 2017, he received the Christian Business and Academic Leader of the Year Award at Crown Plaza Hotel, Harare.