Bulawayo, with its colourful history of live bands that were a mix of talents and genres from Ebony Sheik and Jazz Impacto to The Cool Crooners, deserves a second chance.
I recently watched a small band of merry young musicians setting up their rig at a Bulawayo township pub. The space was so small it could barely fit 30 to 50 gyrating, zonked revellers but you could feel the electricity in the air, the kind of air where you need a strong nose to take in the toxic mix of smelly armpits, unwashed genitals and opaque beer farts. But hey, that’s how folks here love their fun.
But at the turn of the millennium, Bulawayo’s once huffing and puffing industrial cauldrons fizzled like the fart of a dying man. That deindustrialisation inevitably sounded a death blow to the once thriving social scene that was defined by live bands and booze and cigarette smoke-filled liquor bazaars. Older folks will tell you about buying a 12-pack “box” of NatBrew Lager and bum-rushing Gregory Isaacs and Eddie Fitzroy back in 1988 and, later, Buju Banton at the White City Stadium.
back in 1965, the city’s deindustrialisation was felt in the city’s long celebrated cultural spaces such as the masked masquerade brought here by Malawian immigrants. The Nyau , once a permanent weekend feature at local beer gardens, disappeared too.The opaque brew , so much loved by weary men from industries as diverse as Dunlop Tyres, pork producer Colcom Foods, the mighty beef machine Cold Storage Commission and steel-makers Zeco, was suddenly unaffordable.
He cursed as he pointed at a giant municipality hall that lies derelict and has been turned into the headquarters of a local prophet where hundreds of women line up each day for spiritual healing. The gig I saw being set up at that township pub had poignant significance in the scheme of live entertainment in a time of economic diarrhoea, as student activists like to put it. This gig — the first of its kind at the joint, I was told — reflected how constricted the space is for young artists, especially the kind who believe in actually learning how to play instruments in the manner of those Binga prodigies, Mukoomba.was resurrected, I asked the barman whether they still had a resident band.
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