Cry The Lost Generation

Monday, the 19 th of March  2018, was my first encounter with the effects of drug abuse.I had spent a leisurely three hours of the morning with a nephew of mine who had just completed his MSc,after he dropped me off at the main bus stop in Harare,I boarded a bus that was Chitungwiza bound

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Cry The Lost Generation

The first part of the twenty kilometers of the journey was kind of eventless. Things turned at the first bus stop after the St Marys Police Station, the bus was supposed to let off passengers whilst others boarded. The conductor ,who was standing just inside the bus on the steps ,asked the Youngman (in his early twenties) to get further into the bus as he was afraid that he would fall off the bus .The young man flatly refused and started to berate the conductor at the top of his voice.Bus and mini-bus taxi conductors are well-known for being brash or outright rude to passengers once they are onboard but this one met his match in the irate young man who told him that he was not going to pay and there was nothing that the conductor could do about it.Try as he would ,the conductor was unable to force the young man off the bus.The young man ,who was wearing some really dark sun glasses proceeded to assault the conductor  whilst calling the conductor all sorts of names  and alluding to the fact that he was a person of loose morals. The conductor did not take kindly to the tirade and tried to punch the Youngman but he proved to be too powerful for him. Efforts by most of the elderly people on the bus to urge the conductor to ignore the irate young man fell on deaf ears.

At the first bus top in Zengeza, the argument nearly spilled over into the bus as the two antagonists continued to trade punches but the young man was winning the fight ,at this stage the conductor retrieved an iron bar used with the wheel spanner ,seeing this the young tyrant quickly jumped off the bus and sauntered away leaving the conductor fuming since the driver was restraining him.

I have heard stories of how the unemployed youths in the townships abuse substances like cough mixture and others in order to have a high and forget about their troubles for some hours but this was my closest  encounter with one who was intoxicated. One’s heart bleeds for this lost generation which cannot seem to shake off the despondence of unemployment and the need for personal fulfillment.