Demover the mover...its a dogs life

Demover the mover

A Dog’s Life: With Robert Mukondiwa

There should only be so many things that can possibly happen in one year; especially if it is the first year of High School.

But in my case, it would seem we had a year of form one but the events were so many that if we were to be paid for serving overtime, we would be in for a lot of cheese.

And thus we got yet again to that very year.

While as form one students in our first term, we tended to be the humble lot. We were expected to at least try and act out the part of the cute little kids that people thought we were.

Of course to some modesty was totally out of the question. They needed to be seen, these little form one extroverts.

And didn’t the elder kids at this boarding school that we called home-Msengezi High School- just love the extrovert tots?

One of the major reason why we were expected to be humble was that many of the older boys, whose share price of the vain ‘looks stock market had gone into recession’ would beat up on any boy who wanted to shine when the girls were around.

“Unoda ku‘campaigner’ kana pane zvimoko mupfanha. Unofunga kuti ndiwe wega unogona kutaura chirungu? Manje nhasi toda kuku…I shall spare the dear reader the rather distasteful lingo for we shall make you crap your self courtesy of a beating!

(You always want to hog the limelight when the girls are around. Do you think you are the only one that can speak perfect English? Well now we want to thrash you so much so that you shit your pants.)

and because of those threats, some of which could be more sterner that this one, we would always act like form one Mother Theresa’s when the beautiful older girls were around just so we are not labelled attention seekers.

The girls had a tendency of coming so close to us and stroking us as they said nice things about how we were ‘cute little kids’ and very well behaved and very short. Unbeknown to them, we were tall enough to peep into their cleavage. Although they must have been rather modest sized, their little oranges I mean, to us and our tiny eyes, they were the stuff that Pamela Anderson had. They were gigantic to us!

But we never went as far as trying to talk back so much. Only attention seekers would talk back and we didn’t want to be seen as such.

However, every endangered specie, Form One’s included, has its own handful that swims against the current.

Demover Sakala was one such fellow who swam upstream. He would show off and hog the limelight if given half a chance.

The girls were always around him as he delivered ‘robot’ dance moves and spoke in some skewered accent. A forced European/American blended accent that made him look good.

I all honesty he had become a brand and he was quite a looker for someone from Hwange where the sun burns the skin mercilessly.

The senior boys loathed him, and secretly so did we.

Although he would get bitch-slapped occasionally when we got back to the hostel, he kept being a pimple on the most delicate body part until the older boys granted him some sort of reprieve. He was labelled a nutcase. Nhinhi isinganzi nyangwe tikarova seyi. (An unrepentant naughty knave who does not reform never mind the amount of beating administered.) So they stopped hitting him.

At lone time he changed his hairstyle by administering hair remover on parts of his scalp and leaving some large chunks of his wire brush like hair.

The teachers would have none of the B.A Baracus look and forced him to shave off the entire head using hair remover.

A few days later he was riddled with pimples, much like the peel of a lemon. Secretly we loved how horrible he looked as the older girls would be stroking our heads instead of his bumpy road of a scalp.

One day, we were at the hostel as always and when we woke up, the school tuck-shop had been broken into. It had been left bare.

Now to put you into perspective, ours was no ordinary canteen.

Being a school on a farm, the tuck-shop stored everything from cooking oil, petroleum jelly, sanitary pads, bread, soft drinks, Anchor brand of yeast, bute and snuff, salt and sugar; the works!

The whodunit came to the fore again!

The person who was the most obvious suspect was Mai Dzemunyasi; an unassuming lady who worked in the tuck-shop. She was ebony dark, had a lazy eye and was chunky…quite chunky!

When she bent over the experience was like looking at the unexplored ‘back of the moon’ and it was less than intriguing. Especially after one had had a meal. But she was no beauty queen so we did not mind her like that.

She vehemently denied having anything to do with it.

“Handidye zvinotapira,” she said famously alluding to the fact that she could not be the thief since she did not like sweet things, and the tuck-shop was packed to the rafters with sweets, biscuits and chocolate too!

She looked innocent too.

So the headmaster, then a man called Mr Madamombe, decided to call in the Old Bill, and they came in a jiffy.

The police details ordered us back to the hostels and we were made to stand by our trunks.

They came to each and every trunk and ordered us to open them up. The form fours were the major suspects. The tuck-shop was almost a little prison that it had to be a great mighty person to have prised open the sealed doors and lifted everything from a fully packed mini-market in effect. They had to have had a car, but no tyre tracks could be seen. And it was an inside job, because how could anyone know the time when the guard would stop patrolling for a few minutes everyday?

At the end of the inspection, they were clueless. The police had unearthed nothing.

They had, however, seen young Demover with quite a number of sweets, nothing out of the ordinary too much. And he also had a lot of coins on him at the bottom of his trunk.

It was his he had said.

Besides, he was a young form one student who loved girls too much and that was not a sin in effect.

However, it was also discovered that he had been playing the role of Father Cristmas’ son the whole morning. He had a crush on a girl called Dorcus (whose surname I shall not divulge now that she is married) who I also had a serious crush on. In fact, I think that is why I was not a fan of Demover’s!

She had been receiving sweets from him the whole morning, along with every girl Demover wanted to impress.

The cops took the chap for further questioning and he cracked. It was he that had stripped the tuck-shop bare!

People were gob-smacked! A form one chap? Stealing?

And he led the people to where he had taken the loot. Ironically, just across the tuck-shop lay his classroom and he had mounted some tables in the dead of the night and stashed the ceiling with all the missing goodies! The ‘missing’ goods where a few metres away all along!

He was taken for a couple of lashes and his father was summoned all the way from Hwange.

Before we knew it, he had been transferred from Msengezi.

It was a giant leap for us, his rival suitors. One down.

As long as they took his cute face away from our school and our girls, we could narrow the battle for Dorcus to a handful. Just a handful.

We never did win Dorcus though which is a tragedy. Come to think of it, we wonder what on earth she called gorgeous since I believe I was all that!

I did meet Demover years later in Hwange all grown up and still as naughty as hell. He was as multi-talented as a Swiss Army knife though. We became friends. Good friends. But nobody would ever forget the form one student who broke into an Alcatraz of a tuck-shop and almost got away with the crime. Demover was truly the mover.

Some have been perturbed about how I found myself in school with the likes of Demover and I have always had one answer…mine is a dog’s life, but somebody’s got to live it!