Usic also crashed
could offer hope for both musicians and lovers of live pub music. I figured it showed the ambition of the young musicians; that they could earn a living out of this enterprise despite the industrial apocalypse that has visited Bulawayo with the vengeance of the devil.
It's still a vicious cycle, though.
With company closures has naturally come zero disposable income. Folks can only dream of the kind of entertainment allowances enjoyed by parastatal bosses. What other pubs here prefer is the easy way: just have your barman also wear another hat, that of a DJ. If Bulawayo is to experience the rebirth of cool — the return of live music in drinking joints — these musicians, both young and old, could just be what the city needs in its efforts to reclaim its space as the cultural tourism metropolis it always was.
A city is defined by what occupies its denizens as far as night fun or lazy weekend afternoons are concerned. It is no wonder that many folks when they travel to a new city, the first thing they ask is: “Show me the most happening joints in town.” Now the city of Bulawayo needs its own Marshall Plan to resuscitate dead industries. After all, local industrialists were teased with DIMAF (Distressed and Marginalised Areas Fund), which came to naught after peanuts where handed out to re-build everything from textiles to pharmaceuticals.
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. But how nobody knows. Some believe it's always an exercise in selfflagellation to reminisce about the good old days. But for Zimbabweans, it seems to be the only thing that offers relief from the vertigo-inducing economic nonsense.
After all, some — even the bornfrees who are now themselves grown men and women with their own families — have taken to online bulletin boards and social media fight clubs to declare their yearning for Ian Smith's Rhodesia and Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. Go figure. And cyberpunks are having the time of their lives baiting apologists of what has become a rogue regime with threats of harnessing social media to topple a democratically elected government.
For now, it remains nothing but nostalgia etched in the collective memory of men and women who feel they have been deprived of a basic human right: the right to dance.