When the music grows up…Inside Bulawayo’s no under-23 party

EVERY time Davison Feliate stepped out into a pub or a nightclub in Bulawayo, he noticed that the people who surrounded him were increasingly getting younger.

At every nightspot, he seemed to run into the new generation of revellers, known as ama2k by virtue of the fact that they were born at or after the turn of the century.

At his favourite nightspots and events, he noticed that the type of music and the kind of environment it generated were geared towards the satisfaction of the nocturnal habits of the young and the restless.

This meant long nights punctuated by long, sweaty periods on the dance floor. It meant a night of amapiano or three-step, sub-genres of house music that have found favour with younger music lovers across the globe.

In Bulawayo, if you asked any of this generation about Brass Monkey, you would draw blank stares. They also never witnessed the heydays of Visions or Paparazzi, nightspots that defined different eras for generations born in the 80s and 90s.

It was after this realisation that Feliate created Private School, an event that caters to the tastes of an older generation of revellers. Besides being a strictly no under-23 event, Private School is a sonic experience, taking mature fun-lovers through the genres that helped shape memories in the 90s and early 2000s.

On 15 February, the day after Valentine’s Day, Private School returns after a year’s hiatus with an event that is sure to turn the heads of the people that Feliate is adamant inspired the concept: women.

“I think the gap has definitely been bridged,” he told Sunday Life in an interview.
“This applies more to women because I feel that for men 40 and above, we are comfortable going to clubs, but for a 40-year-old woman, it’s different. They have kids, they have work and it’s not easy to go out late into the night. We are not saying that this concept is meant to cater for women, but they are the main reason we came up with it. You go out and you see your 2K generation.”

For Feliate, Private School is no longer just an event, but a diagnosis of the showbiz scene that acted as though only the very young deserve entertainment.

“You’d go out and see your nieces or your friends’ daughters, and I have no disrespect towards them because I go to spaces they dominate. I look young, I dress young, and I force myself into these places, but this is not the same with women. We go to these places, clubs and pubs and we don’t see people our age or people we resonate with.

“You don’t meet people you can have a decent conversation with, just by virtue of age. So we thought, let’s create a space where we can meet our peers. Let’s create a place where we can meet our sisters or friends from previous nightlife settings when we were young,” he said.

Feliate said the Private School event was thus a trip down memory lane, an opportunity to reconnect with fading memories that could only be invoked by music that defined life during a certain period. This, he said, was why they insisted on the no under-23 age restriction.

“We are now reminiscing about Brass Monkey days, Ivy League or Visions, which was an era for people like me.
“Overall, the gap is being bridged and successfully so. We are happy because it is not only about the music but also the conversations that are being had.

“We don’t mean to disrespect the younger generations, but there’s a reason why our tickets state that we don’t want under-23s. This is because they don’t understand what we are trying to get at, they don’t understand the things that we experienced. For once, we want to put a restriction and say we don’t want you guys here, go and vibe with your peers,” he said.

While Feliate acknowledged the popularity of the concept, he insisted that organisers did not want to flood the calendar with Private School events throughout the year, as for them it was more than just another commercial endeavour.

“I think over the last two years we’ve managed to create a hunger for that and this is why we also don’t want to abuse it. We don’t want to commercialise Private School and have it every two months. Let the people miss it.

“We haven’t had it in over a year and I bet a lot of people will be looking forward to it. It’s a chance for people to meet in a different setting because while they might come across each other during the year, things are not the same at a Private School event. After all, the conversations are different.

“It’s about reminiscing about high school; it’s about dedication songs and autograph books. Sometimes the events and arts calendar is a bit overloaded and when we checked our calendar, our prospective events were clashing with other events that also cater to most of our crowd. So we decided to pass it on to the New Year, which is now,” he said.

While 2025 saw only one highly successful event, Feliate said this year revellers would not have to wait an entire year for an event, as they already had a springtime edition on the cards.

“We promised our private scholars that this year they will have two semesters, with the first being the Valentine’s edition. Our second semester will be in September, on a date that we will announce soon. We always try to make things better and we’ve learnt a lot from the three events that we have had. We are trying not to repeat songs and we are trying to go further and further back as far as the music is concerned.

“We are trying to introduce new genres and although we cannot disclose our DJ line-ups yet, I can guarantee that the musical excellence people have experienced in the past will remain the case again this year. We only cater to a limited number of people and we won’t sell beyond that. As the name of the gig suggests, this is a Private School event and you wouldn’t go to any private school in Zimbabwe and find a child without a chair or a desk. The same holds for our patrons: we will have limited seating for a limited number of people,” he said.