The day the dollar died, the m
Bulawayo’s cool jazz scene has been destroyed by the disastrous economy
Irecently 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.
As the band set up, I spoke to one of the young men, who told me he plays the drums. I asked him how busy this kind of roadshow kept them and he said that only the previous night they had played in Shangani, a former mining town a little over 100km from Bulawayo. It got me thinking about how Bulawayo musicians, historically, turned to playing in insalubrious joints to make a buck. Fast or slow, a buck is a buck, they will tell you.
It is a trend seen across the country where small-time musicians take permanent residence in all manner of nightspots where pickpockets and sex workers are headquartered. The tales are of the sorry type in which concerned mothers warn their daughters never to have any business with a musician. In the past few years, I have seen big-name museve and sungura musicians billed to play at some of Bulawayo's notorious haunts and laughed.
How did this come to be? Is the economy so bad that reputations are being flushed down the lavatory? It is at these daredevil havens where we have seen posters pasted on walls advertising one live show or another — the riotous type — but still no resident band to play to a mature crowd. Yet there is a bigger story to be told about the city's pub jam sessions where live bands once thrived.
As far as folks here can remember, the immediate post-independence pub scene is the stuff of legend. It was basically a continuation of the perpetual “jazz age" spurred by economic circumstances that afforded the working man a near-epicurean existence. This was a time long before anyone cared about safe sex and dudes could hold fuck fests without a care in the world. Why? Because they could pay their bills and entertain sex workers on a minimum wage.
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 (National Breweries, aka Delta Beverages) Lager and bumrushing Gregory Isaacs and Eddie Fitzroy back in 1988 and, later, Buju Banton at the White City Stadium.
That was when booze and music were jolly good bedfellows. And because these were roots rock reggae gigs, lads thought it acceptable to roll up a spliff and puff in public and could well have chanted the Peter Tosh anthem Legalise It.
You talk of Bulawayo municipality beer gardens where sweaty men from the Belmont industrial area, in the southwest of the city, made unfailing stopovers, and the entertainment that came with the joints there was priceless, as unpacked in fast-paced oral histories. These kinds of thrills were city-wide. My brother recently told me he first saw the likes of Ndux Malax, Solomon Skuza and Ebony Sheik at a Bulawayo municipality-run cocktail bar in the early 1990s.
This was at the height of local musicians' creative powers and when regular Joes, who received their weekly wages in small khaki envelopes, could afford to drink and dance and still live on full bellies till the next payday. Local dandies did not have to be thieves or corrupt shysters to live the life but were the salaried postmen, garbage men or backyard tailors. And teachers were kings, taking nothing but Castle Lager.
Then things took a very bad turn and teachers became paupers. Textile factories closed and have been turned into churches with Biblethumpers that former strongman Robert Mugabe once accused of taking money from the poor and keeping it for themselves. Amid the Tower of Babel-like dissonance, the municipality was not insulated from the economic apocalypse. Beer gardens, once an indelible part of the city of Bulawayo's social history, were shut down. Today, you find the granitewalled colonial vestiges with overgrown grass and trees, turning them into mini jungles where you might as well go game hunting. The juke boxes that blared all kinds of sounds were carted away to some vault in dark municipality basements.
Kosher music stopped but was soon repurposed by youthful USB DJS with no clue about what they were playing.
Perhaps even more painfully for old hands that settled long before Smith’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence 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 (izitandare, we called them), once a permanent weekend feature at local beer gardens, disappeared too.
From happy feet to long faces
The opaque brew (izangata, they called it), 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 steelmakers Zeco, was suddenly unaffordable. For example, imbibers say they bought the four-litre skali of amasese for 76 cents before the ridiculous Democratic Republic of Congo military sorties and the year 2000 apocalypse. In about 2002, when annual inflation hit almost 200%, it cost 4.40 Zimbabwe dollars. It is impossible today to adjust these figures for inflation.
The excitement was also to be found away from municipality beerhalls in the high-density townships. It was no surprise that some folks commented or complained that the city joints were a bad place to be once the owls started hooting. After all, a popular Highlanders Football Club player, Titus Majola, had been stabbed to death at a nightclub. That was back in 1998. The legendary Lovemore