Salons are huge market places

LARGELY known as establishments where hairdressers, barbers and cosmetologists conduct their trades, hair salons have a variety of other functions many people are unaware of.

If your idea of a salon is confined to viewing it as a place only associated with blending shears, blow driers, curling irons, razor blades, paddle brushes, sectioning clips and right combs, you definitely need to take another look.

Forget about their small sizes, hair salons are, in fact, much bigger than Timbuktu — an intellectual and spiritual capital, as well as a centre for the propagation of Islam throughout Africa in the 15th and 16th centuries.

In reality, salons are huge market places, where various goods and services are sold every day.

Business worth billions of dollars in both the local and foreign currency is conducted in these spaces, which some people mistakenly consider domiciles for the less-educated and most talkative people. These are, indeed, not places for individuals of the lowest intelligence order, if truth be told.

If sugar is in short supply in supermarket chains, a visit to the nearest salon will yield positive results.

Inhava yebenzi; kune zvese.

If you are looking for vegetables, household furniture, cars and all sorts of drugs, look no further than the salon. Moneychangers, second-hand clothes traders, self-styled butchers, n’angas and prophets, to name but just a few, get the majority of their clients from salons.

Individuals seeking tenants and tradesmen offering services like carpentry, building, plumbing and gardening are among the people who frequent hairdressers’ salons.

Despite the attendant health risks, some are sometimes seen selling sadza there. Political, social and economic debates are commonplace in salons — where everyone, including the rich and the poor — meet for an odd hair trim and waxing. Those in need of love and facing challenges finding a life partner also frequent these places, where ideas are awash like sand.

“Never take a hair salon for granted, my brother. There is just everything for everyone in those tiny spaces, which smell of methylated spirit, hair ointment and some home-made hair creams. People in hair salons discuss everything and offer various services. Some of the attendants there sell everything, including sex,” one guzzler told this writer at a bar in Domboshava recently.

“If you are having marital challenges, your problems can be solved if you share them with other players in a salon, where people of various opinions, the so-called POVO, meet,” he continued.As I commit pen to paper, gentle reader, people the world over express different views of barbershops and these salons.

“My son had a good life before he hooked up with a shrew of a woman who worked in a beauty salon. Those ladies meet a lot of clients with various characters and have discipline challenges, which soon resulted in them having problems upon problems until the marriage finally collapsed,” I heard an elderly man saying recently.

“I now hate hair salons to the point that, if I need a hairdo, I would rather invite the barber to come over to my house because the environment in those places is toxic,” he added.

But that view is not shared by everyone.

A workmate of mine says he converted to Christianity after being ministered to in a salon.

“I met God in a salon. I am now actually going to church after being ministered to by someone in a hair salon. The guy gave me words that changed my life for the better and I see nothing wrong with those spaces,” he said. Some landlords, however, said they will never accommodate a tenant who works in a hair salon.

“Those people use coarse and unpolished language. The way they sometimes dress is for adult viewing only, and I do not get along with it. The people also work late into the night and I am afraid such tenants may expose my house to burglars. I stand to be corrected,” said a landlady by the name of Chihera in Mufakose recently.

Gentle reader, never underestimate the value of a salon next time you pay a visit.

Inotambika mughetto.

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