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guy can easily see better than he can think.
This villager has a friend called Machivenyika (the lustful one) and the idyll in the village is that names tell a story and whether by coincidence or not, this friend of mine always brewed a story that seemed to justify his name. He is quite a beer guzzler too.
On first sight, he was tall, handsome, charming and ever smiling. Ladies loved him. He always wore designer suits when in Harare and designer jackets when following up his field officers.
On this particular occasion, this villager met him in yonder Mutare and knowing that this villager is no beer drinker, it took him time to convince the villager to spend some time in a nightclub.
His brief was that he was a finance officer for one of these non-governmental organisations following up his field officers with their petty cash. Hey, he had quite a bundle of the greenback in his right jacket pocket. His style would have made the late lyrical musician Paul Matavire envious, whose mantra with jacket pockets and piping paper notes was that it made him look gentle­manly and rich.    
At sunset, we sat on high stools in the club and there were still a few of us. This villager could count his fingers against each patron, without having to go onto the second palm.
Machi, as he is affectionately called by friends, took Lion Lager, while this villager took his traditional coke, for is it not common knowledge that the villager was weaned off from suckling his mother’s milk with a coke and not hot chilly like many of you?
This villager took the coke can by his left hand and opened it. The typical snapping sound “psss!”, signalled the contents were absolutely fresh. This villager chugged down the coke.
The lustful one looked with amusement. The look forced the villager to explain that the hermetic seal on the can eliminated the need for a special tamper-guard, when one takes the can from the shelf and it ensures that the customer ascertains that the product is untouched. Machi thought the villager was crazy for paying too much attention to detail on silly things.
The evening wore on, giving way to night and one by one ladies of the night started trickling in. It was dark out­side while the disco lights sashayed in rhythm with the symphony. Rotating, flashing and rotating. Rotating! Rotating like searchlights. The first group of ladies of the night sidled in. They ranged from the ordinary, the tall and pencil slim to the short and plumb up to the onion-shaped. There were the beautiful and the ugly ones, too. Their faces were mainly ashen dead from some dressing or call if face powder. Some had lips so red one would think they had been suckling blood. They looked ghostly for some sober like this villager.
From their looks, they despised everything the decent womenfolk valued. Their dressing scorned decency and mocked the goodness of womanhood.
Soon another group of elderly prostitutes and young apprentices swaggered into the bar. They systematically leaned against the walls, casting their inviting eyes around. Call it pulling crocodile smiles! Beer and coke continued to flow like the Dande River.
Men also trickled in and each time a man entered the club the ladies of the night cocked their heads, like wary sparrows and glanced up at him from shoes up to the head. Once in a while they danced to the music but the dances made this villager realise that dancing is a perpen­dicular expression of a horizontal desire.   
There was no doubt that Machi was an excellent beer buyer and his buying power drew their attention. He was getting visibly sloshed, his eyes turning brownish and bleary, his nostrils getting clogged and his voice getting louder and changing in both pitch and crescendo. Dirty jokes poured out from his mouth like a flooded stream offloading into a yawning huge river. Machi called the onion-shaped prostitute and spoke to her in with stupid composure. Sooner rather than later, she went to look for a chair to sit with us.
While she fetched the chair, Machi winked one eye, put his thumbs on his throat and slumped, twisting his face into a grisly parody of strangulation. “Finish! Deal sealed,” he whispered into the villager’s ear.    
Beer and coke rained and then poured. The call of nature also increased and one by we visited the loo. The night also became chilly and silly cold. The scullery ladies shivered and the onion-shaped asked to be excused to go home and fetch a jacket to warm herself, but Machi could not hear of it. He feared losing her. The influence of alco­hol and some excitement, the sort of the excitement of a boy who has just received a new toy, took over reasoning.
“Let me be a gentleman for once, wear my jacket. I will absorb the cold.’’
But you see, in the village, the elders say the day a mon­key is destined to die it finds all trees slippery, with dogs in hot pursuit.
Moments later she left her half-filled glass of beer for the ladies room. This must have been her third or fourth time she visited the ladies room but the first ever time with Machi’s jacket. A minute passed, two, three, four, five minutes, she never returned. The clock never stopped.
Machi suddenly frowned, knocked his own forehead with his right fist. He jumped up and shouted in a stam­mer, “m-m-my money. There is money in that jacket. Where is she? I mean where is she?’’
He immediately went for the ladies room, never mind­ing who was there. Ladies came out scampering, one of them half dressed, showing she had been disturbed while answering the call of nature.
There was drama and pandemonium. Commotion. Swearing. Commotion. Pushing. Shoving. Commotion, commotion and spilling of beer but she was nowhere to be seen.
The search started. Machi became sober. Other                     guzzlers joined in the search, through urine-tainted alleys, wide streets and jacaranda tree shadows. We combed the areas but she was nowhere to be seen. Car lights were not useful either. US$3 000 was gone. Swear­ing and shouting obscenities never brought back the money.
The night wore on, the money was needed and one by one, those who had voluntarily joined the search party dropped out. Machi and this villager never tired. The search led to Chikanga, Sakubva, Yeoville back to Chikanga and then Sakubva again and again.
The last time the two-man search party drove into Sakubva it was at sunrise. Women had woken up early and were sweeping the hearths of their homes. One by one, we asked if there was a tenant who was a sex worker, but there was no joy.
During those escapades we also learnt that most                               of the commercial sex workers posed as nurses to their landlords, so they went on night duty everyday. We also learnt they used fake names. We also learnt they were migratory from one town to another and from one growth point to another. Machi sweated! The game was over. 
As to what happened to Machi’s job, your guess is as good as that of this villager.
The village soothsayer, the ageless autochthon of knowledge and wisdom concluded “Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.”

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