I saunter into an overcrowded Senga beer hall, in my Home Town of Gweru, crammed with the not so pleasing stench of overworked bodies galvanising the whole room, the smell of sweat is overpowering that it makes one throw up.
“Damn the city council I have not taken a bath in six days,” an insult is directed to a city council official who has just come into the bar. Sorry for him for he too has not taken a bath.
In one corner a man in a torn and over worn overall is ‘comfortably’ asleep in the midst of empty scud containers. By his side one-guy just steps over a stream of vomit as if it is not even there. Just behind me is a score of grubby teenagers sharing a cigarette.
As I meander my way to the counter a lady in her late fifties fires me with a barrage of insults, the raison d’être best known to her. I ask the bar tender to give me a pint of beer. The second I say “pint” activities in the beer hall are on a stand still and all the eyes are on me. For a moment I am perplexed, I just feel out of place.
I take my pint and wander down the stuffed place to find just somewhere to put my bottom on. Finally I find somewhere to sit. This corner, harboured by a group of man is but … The atmospheres here is eccentric, the group is cracking jokes in a bid to kill off misery.
“You know what?” states one chap in his early thirties but due to an overdose of beer and poverty he looks like he is in his late fifties, “In this one family there is a father, a mother, a house girl, a youth of 16 and a toddler,” he continues, “ one day,” he takes a breath, “the young boy finds his younger sister; the toddler in a mess, as he is looking for the maid to clean up the baby. He finds the maid and the father in an uncompromising position. He rashes to alert his mother who he finds is no better as she is lying on her back heavily drunk.” The man then pauses and takes one long sip of the holy waters. We impatiently wait for him to quench his thirst, so that the he can finish off the...