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Any of those names except just one are quite appropriate. The inappropriate one is “growth points.” Why? Because nothing grows at those places except debauchery, crime and activities associated with vice and financial recklessness that lead to the breaking up of families and the inevitable concomitant misery especially for the children of those people who spend a greater part of their time there, boozing and/or gambling plus indulging in obviously resultant sexual promiscuity.
Some culturally and socially prominent personalities frequent those centres. Among such people are some chiefs, schools teachers and religious leaders.
The writer of this article has come across stories about one or two chiefs and headmen, to say nothing about village heads, who have become involved in actual physical fights over prostitutes or whatever else at such places. Acting under the influence of alcoholic beverages, those personages sometimes throw self-respect to the wind and behave just like mere hoodlums.
They disregard that they are community leaders whose behaviour should be exemplary wherever they are and whenever. Chiefs, headmen and school teachers are some of the community leaders whose thoughts, words and deeds should generate enlightenment.
That means in effect that they should be role models, people whose behaviour is worth emulating. They should be known for expressing good thoughts and doing good deeds of which they and everyone else are proud of.
Is it possible for one to achieve and maintain such a good character if one’s mind is always befuddled by alcoholic drinks? No.
As custodians of the cultures of their respective communities, chiefs, headmen and, indeed, village heads should be known for sobriety rather than for drunkenness.
Communities that were known for drunkenness eventually disintegrated and are virtually either no more or are now a mere shadow of their former selves.
Examples of such people are: first, the Romans who lived in Latium in today’s central Italy before, during and a couple of centuries after the days of Julius Caesar; second, the Picts of the Scottish Highlands, who were virtually wiped out by drunkenness among other things; and, third, the Khoi Khoi (formerly referred to by the Dutch as the Hottentots) some of whose prominent leaders in South Africa were Stuurmann and Adam Kok.
At the time of the occupation of the Cape of Good Hope by the Dutch led by Dr Jan van Riebeeck in 1652, the Khoi Khoi lived south of an imaginary line extending more or less from the mouth of the Breede River in the South-East of Cape Town to the mouth of the Oliphants River in the North-West.
They were almost exterminated by wine and brandy produced in that region’s (the Mediterranean area known in geography as the South-West Cape) vineyards.
Today, the Khoi Khoi in that region are not as virile an ethnic community as the Xhosas, the Zulus, the Sothos, the Vendas and others in their respective areas, all because of their excessive consumption of alcoholic beverages. They feature prominently in the social, political, cultural and economic life of Namibia, but relatively less in that of South African these days.
It is important for the chiefs of Zimbabwe to shun centres of drunkenness but instead spend most of their time planning together with their people how best to develop their respective territories’ social, industrial, commercial and cultural infrastructures and other related projects.
Time spent on getting drunk is, without any doubt, time spent most fruitlessly, if not in self-defeat.
A great deal of petty and sometimes serious crime is associated with centres where people get drunk. It would be most embarrassing for a chief, or a headman or a village head to be called as a witness in any
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