My hell memories of Chibuku days
Correspondent | Monday July 27, 2015 16:10
Born in the shebeen, me and my sibblings early graduated into running the business for our single mother. We leant to run after the chibuku trucks with wheel-burrows, to buy stock. We knew the chibuku truck bellows so well we could tell it was coming even when we were deep in our sleep. Even when the mother was away for months we kept the fire burning with the tradition of buying and selling as primary school kids.
There was nothing we could do, we were born into it. My sister actually started drinking the same chibuku we were supposed to be selling. I remember one day she was caught dead drunk, and yet she pretended to be sober. I liked the fresh ones, the not so fermented, because it tasted sweet. I would be tempted to steal from several cartoons and later claim to the chibuku truckman that these were damages.
The single mother was a drunkard too, and sometimes she would finish the whole stock with friends, and tomorrow we would struggle to count who is owing us, our mother owing herself, or her friends owing her, sometimes those moments would cripple the business for weeks, or for months until she found money somewhere to start all over again.
It was a story of bad memories in our one roomed shack that we used as the chibuku shebeen, bedroom, and a bar for drinkers especially when weather conditions were unfavourable; we would line the benches, have the drinkers sit on them, enjoy the chibuku, and their shebeen conversations.
My worst memory was when I realised that at the shebeen, chibuku was not the only item of trade; just about anything, including my mother, the women who came to drink, all had a price; imagine coming out of the house to pee, only to find one of the chibuku drinkers shagging your mom at the back of the one roomed shack; I had to pretend I was not looking.
But that was not to be the last bad memory of chibuku to hit me as a primary school kid; once while arriving home from a late kiddies football stumbling awkwardly into the shack, loo and behold, my neighbour was hitting it off with a stranger on the floor; my sister was watching. The stranger would later reward the neighbour with money for the service.
Sometimes things would turn worse at our shebeen, like when a suspecting neighbour’s man came banging our door open only to get a shock of his life; yes, his wife was giving it away , at our one roomed shack for some mullers. This is hard to state…..the chibuku drinkers would even hit on my sister too.
I never liked a shebeen since those days, my mother has never been able to pull away from the stranglehold of shebeen liquor, the drinking and the selling; no matter how hard we prayed and reasoned.
But when few years ago, I learned that President Ian Khama’s government was taking a hard stance against chibuku and shebeens, I rejoiced inside, it was a sigh of relief, my prayer of many years were being answered by God, maybe not at family scale, but on a national scale.
The pain that I have gone through as a child of shebeen, as microcosm of the pains of the larger society in Botswana, chibuku has brought misery to many children growing mo dispotong.
I do not care whether the media talks about 10 000 shebeens closing down since 2012, because , you know what that means? It means this, multiply that 10 000 selling points by the number of children who would have been raised there by the single mothers, and we are talking 50 000 innocent lives now for the first time, being able to be raised in a chibuku free society, not introduced to early sex activities, drinking,violent activities and smoking dagga.
But you evil, immoral people, you cry when chibuku depots close down. Yes, let them close down, for the sake of our dignity, thank you God, thank you President Ian Khama, for you may not be a father, husband, a drinker of hard stuff, but as for chibuku, you have handled it as if you had the nasty experience of being raised in a shebeen like me. Happy President’s Day.
Ngwana Wa Spoto*
*Not her real name