Howard* was about 15 when he stabbed Thembani* to death in 2000.
Howard had always carried himself as a respectful but streetwise teenager. It was known that his mother had emigrated to South Africa years earlier, leaving him to stay with his uncle.
This small detail about his mother being an economic migrant in Johannesburg was enough to explain, for some, why Howard seemed to stand out as far as his dress sense was concerned. It would also later clarify what would become a neighbourhood tragedy.
Looking back now, it is still difficult to understand why Howard stabbed his friend to death. Everyone in the old neighbourhood knew or imagined them as a bunch of harmless juveniles.
But as the narrative unfolded, we were told they had been drinking at a birthday party and a minor tiff had led to the fatal stabbing. When news reached us that Thembani was lying dead at a street corner, we asked ourselves what had led to the altercation and how could this have happened in the first place.
Teenage friends of the boys would later say that Howard always carried a knife, a small foldable Okapi. Still, we asked ourselves why. Why would a teenager feel the need to pack a knife in his denims and swear to never leave home unless armed?
Because Bulawayo has long been associated with South Africa, where police statistics highlight violent crime as a primordial daily fare (recall Fikile Mbalula’s Operation Wanya Tsotsi campaign), and because Howard’s mother was domiciled in the neighbouring country, street analysts and self-taught sociologists connected the dots to make sense of the senseless murder.
Last year, I visited the magistrate’s courts at the Tredgold building in Bulawayo to check the public court records on what became of Howard.
Police disperse streets vendors as they patrol near Tredgold Magistrates courts in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. (ZINYANGE AUNTONY/AFP via Getty Images)
I met a prison officer, also from my old neighbourhood, who recalled the murder case because he had worked at the infamous Khami Prison on the outskirts of Bulawayo.
He said: “I remember him, the boy who killed his friend at a party. He fled to South Africa and never appeared in court.”
In recent years, Bulawayo, a city of all sorts of adventures and misadventures, has found itself plagued with a spike in the number of teenagers knifing other teenagers to death. And there have been older victims of teen violence.
The headlines: “Schoolgirl, 15, knifed to death by another teen girl in fight over boyfriend (2019),” “Teen kills friend, tries to hang self (2021),” “Bulawayo teen killed in turf war (2015),” “Teenager kills self after work mate murder (2021),” “19-yr-old stabs and axes neighbour to death (2022).”
Over the past few years, a craze emerged in the city where teenagers hold bacchanalian get-togethers, with sex orgies apparently being at the core of what they call vuzu parties.
Named after the youth-oriented South African digital satellite TV channel, the teen parties have shaken the city’s moral compass, and local leaders, parents and police seem clueless about how to deal with what is seen by many as a social aberration.
In February 2019, a city teenager was found dead in the wee hours in one of its teeming townships.
Initial police investigations said the teenager had drunk himself to death after attending a vuzu party. But after the teen’s family complained of shoddy police work, and with the assistance of the local legislator, a second autopsy showed the young man had been murdered.
This incident came despite numerous warnings from Bulawayo police about the vuzu parties, noting that these activities had led to an increase in stabbings, as some teenagers, much like Howard many years before them, apparently do not leave their homes without packing an Okapi knife.
The influences have been around for years, and have not necessarily always come from television shows.
It’s a long and multi-layered timeline, from elders jamming on vinyl South African mbaqanga in shebeens, long seen as violent hotbeds; to playing on full blast cassette tapes of Freddie Gwala’s melodies that seemed to be narrations, if not a celebration, of his jailhouse experiences; to tsotsitaal, itself disparaged here by elders as the lingo of lawbreakers; to everything that was consumed on video cassette, including such TV dramas that ranged from Gazi Lami to Yizo Yizo.
It appeared inescapable that Bulawayo’s youth subcultures would yank scripted dramas from the screen and take them up as their own daily experiences. Street cred became an example of life imitating art.
Generations earlier, people who had made the great trek to seek their El Dorado in the Witwatersrand mines during the Wenela (Witwatersrand Native Labour Association) years came loaded with their own tales of adventure.
Young men sought to make real those adventures in the streets of Bulawayo where brothers and uncles known to have been to Wenela were treated as real life toughs and gangsters whose paths you crossed at your own peril.
It came as no surprise then for older people that young men, who walked the streets of Hillbrow broke and hungry, soon returned to the same if not worse poverty in Bulawayo and claimed street punk credentials, ostensibly with designs to strike fear in the hearts of everyone, including their own parents.
That dalliance with Jozi would morph into something ominous, and not just as seen in fictionalised cinematic renditions, be it the streetwise Thomas Mogotlane in 1988’s Mapantsula, or Presley Chweneyagae in 2005’s Oscar-winning crime thriller Tsotsi, but from older brothers and neighbours who made a bloody living as real life tsotsis in the mean streets of Johannesburg.
The lucky ones came back to excite young impressionable lads with invented adventures and daredevil heists, while those who supped with the Devil using short spoons came face up, lifeless in cheap coffins.
It bred the perpetuation of a tough guy persona, a type of masculinity whose consequences were invariably dire.
Nevertheless, that knife crime has experienced a surge in Bulawayo in recent times — with teenage perpetrators this time — baffles many in a city that has also experienced a spate of violent armed robberies.
Criminal enterprise has become a sort of perverted plebeian aspiration, yet the history of local crime is a retelling of young pretenders looking up to goons as role models and father figures.
According to official statistics, Zimbabwe churns out more than 300 000 school leavers each year, and they generally finish their secondary education aged about 16 and 17.
That statistic itself is enough to raise alarm.
Back in the 1980s and 1990s, Zimbabwe had a thriving apprenticeship programme for school leavers that gave them skills training as artisans in diverse fields and quickly absorbed them into industry. Those who did not have requisite entry level apprentice training qualifications still found jobs as general hands and lived happy lives.
There was a time in post-independence Zimbabwe when it was said that an unemployed youth was one who did not want to find a job.
Today, organisations representing youths claim that up to 90% are unemployed.
It is this same demographic that joins the ever expanding ranks of the jobless in a country where labour unions say 90% of Zimbabweans are not formally employed.
During the 2013 national elections, then president Robert Mugabe promised the country two million jobs, while the current president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, has built his presidency on the promise of making Zimbabwe a middle class economy by 2030, which means rebuilding long dead factories and industries.
A protester shouts anti-Mugabe slogans in front of burning tyres during a demonstration on July 6 2016, in Makokoba, Bulawayo Zimbabwe. (STRINGER/AFP via Getty Images)
For hundreds of thousands of teenagers roaming the streets and carrying knives in their pockets, and for whom the Fordism conveyor belt of unemployment is a reality that keeps churning them out, the countdown to 2030 could prove to be a long wait.
It is in that context of too much time and too little to do that the Devil has found permanent workshops, evangelicals have been quick to explain, and with the shutdown of municipality youth centres previously scattered across the city to keep young minds off the streets, social workers and pastors have their work cut out.
Mugabe would later say, to the disbelief of many, that youths should create opportunities for themselves and aspire to be employers, not employees. How, he did not elaborate, but educationists agree that the effects of government-sponsored redundancy are being felt among youths — and at a deadly cost.
*Names have been changed.
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