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Robert Mukondiwa
In the 80s and early 90s life was pretty interesting. The large Supersonic radio unit provided world class entertainment to the few lucky families that could afford them.

Complete with a multi-combo set with a turntable, auxiliary unit, “tape deck” and a cabinet for storing the “records”; large shiny black vinyl discs with colourful cardboard covers, the things were works of art that the neighbourhoods envied. And it was for their amazing sound that they sent bursting through for which they were the Mona Lisa equivalent of a magical mirage.

But besides the bombastic sound they provided, there was one other thing that occupied the youthful mind. How the cockroaches managed to survive in the speakers in spite of the loud music as they occasionally crept out through the box mesh of the speaker’s front to stretch their legs before going back amidst their ‘children’ in crackling cocoons with thin hair-like lines running across them from whence the baby roaches used to hatch.

And now, Mutare, far away and seemingly off the beaten path, has started giving mankind the answer to how it feels like to live in a speaker box thanks to the magical music journey provided for by the newly opened Club 263 in the mountain kingdom.

You see even when you enter, something is beautifully wrong with this club at the opening hem of the city. It has a beautiful aura and presence and yet is hauntingly empty for a music playing club.

“Not to worry,” says the main woman at the helm; a slim sculpture of woman called Yeukai, with a curious thin sheath of caramel covering for skin, which runs across every inch of her body,” Our patrons start trickling in at around 1 am and 2 am and then there is a flood.”

She flashes an alluring smile revealing a tooth adjusted by the gods to the left of her upper molars. A tooth that in my quick count is probably fourth from the left large molar. One that completes her beauty. One she flashed often. Maybe knowing that it is like the boar constrictor that squeezes the life out of any man . . . or being, that beholds it.

Then the music starts to beat. It shakes the heart inside your soul as the trickle starts to get in. You feel the heart shake, and shake, and shiver and sometimes feels as if it has broken. It is the proverbial rush of blood. And then the DJ’s on rotation start to obscenely spill good music to the ear. The hits and more start to flood the lace.

Then the music goes a decibel, or two or three up. Who says disco music was dead? The club, in true football stadium style, is suddenly full to the rafters with young revellers looking like roaches, with glassy eyes as soon as they start drinking and dancing, as they start having a good time.

My eyes turn glassy as well as the Johnnie Walker stops walking in my veins and starts a marathon instead. To my head. And mouth. As I start to sing I listen carefully to the people singing. Vana Wasu. The people of the eastern highlands. Famed for their accents that stick to them like death to a corpse. But as they sing to Rihanna, Tekno, Beyonce, Jidenna, Jay Z and other Naija and Western artistes they, funnily enough, are not singing with their famed accents. They sound like the real deal. So a combination of alcohol and music can make one lose that famed accent? Purge the tongue of habits known since birth? Who on earth would have known!

And like the cockroaches in my mother’s radio, the music ceases to sound loud at all. It is magical. Adrenaline pumping. It is the thing that kings yearn for. It no longer makes my ears bleed. Instead Yours Truly starts to dance. Bones creaking from the long absence from the dance floor. In the end all the world’s a dance floor.

“We have given the competition a run for their money,” Yeukai accepts.

True. A club or two has closed. The others look like Mausoleums embracing bodies of the lifeless. Nobody is in them. Everybody is here. At Club 263 Mutare. Everybody with a pulse that is.

“My friends have since moved there,” says local socialite and goddess Gamuchirai Drapper. I know the reason why. It rocks!

You thought Mutare was a boring place with diamonds under guns and people who have an accent? Think again! This very well may be the entertainment capital of the country.

Perhaps upon my next trip very soon, I will take you there.