The Party Train
- Colette Kirk
- Apr 10, 2020
- 3 min read
We don’t have festivals like they have in the developed world in Zimbabwe. We just don’t have the organisation and facilities, or the money, that would be required to put on something like Glastonbury in the UK or Falls Festival in Australia. However, we do have a Falls Fest of our own: held in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe’s greatest tourist destination, Falls Fest, now known as the Victoria Falls Carnival, has been known to be fairly wild.
I last attended The Victoria Falls Carnival in 2016 with my sister, 2 of our cousins and 4 of our friends. We stayed in an Airbnb – the first Airbnb I ever stayed in actually – and bought tickets for 2 full days. Besides almost drowning during white water rafting (I legitimately thought I was going to die that day) and being eaten half to death in the Airbnb by mosquitos, we also went on the party train on our first night of the festival.
The carnival had commandeered one of the ancient passenger trains that hardly function anymore in our decimated economy and turned it into a moving club – various carriages were emptied of chairs and filled with ‘DJ booths’, cooler boxes full of ice and cheap multicoloured flashing lights. The train was ferrying us to a party in the middle of the bush.
Set to leave at 7pm, by 6.30 the old colonial station was filled with hundreds of youths, of many nationalities and races, drinking, shouting, and in every type of dress code you can think of. Victoria falls is the most multicultural place in Zimbabwe – many tourists come here not even realising that they’ve left South Africa or the other ‘safer’ country they were holidaying in.
The train was late, of course, but not too bad. When it arrived, there was a mad scramble for groups of friends to get seats together. It wasn’t necessary – there was no order in that train. You could sit on the floor if you wanted to.
The journey started pretty calmly. Plenty of shouting and bursts of music from the club carriages, some people already drunk enough to start feeling sick and trying to pass out in their chairs. We obviously saw many people that we knew – everyone in Zimbabwe somehow knows everyone else, and so there was lots of genuine and fake greeting and reminiscing on school days. Most of us leave Zimbabwe for university and only come home in December for the Christmas holiday, so often this is the only time of year we see each other. On this train we were discovering old school friends, old boyfriends, old enemies.
I lost a few of our crew fairly quickly. My sister and I ventured into one of the club cabins.
It wasn’t a bad atmosphere: what looked like a dining room table from our old school dining hall had been placed along one of the carriage walls, with big, distorting speakers on either side and 2 smiling, unknown DJs wearing flat caps pretending to know what they were doing on the ‘decks’. The carriage was packed, and the floor was already covered in spilled drinks and who knew what else.
After joining in the ‘dancing’ (more like fist pumping and bumping into the other inhabitants due to the rocking of the train) we moved swiftly on and were making our way through more carriages when the conductor or some other official came scrambling madly through, shouting furiously through the window. He pushed past us – we looked at each other and then turned around to follow him. He stopped in the space between the carriages, furiously tapping away on WhatsApp whilst trying to get his small radio handset to work.
“Sekuru,” I said. ‘What’s going on?”
“These boys,” he muttered, still trying to send WhatsApp messages, despite the fact we were now far out of range of any signal. He then lunged forward and leaned out of an open window, screaming furiously. We moved forward too and peered out of the window next to him. The problem became immediately clear. Various idiot boys were leaning far out of the doors of the train, with others trying to climb out the windows and get onto the roof of the train. There was actually one fool sitting atop the train’s roof.
We watched for a few minutes, half laughing, half terrified one of these imbeciles was going to fall off. With no party in sight, the train then started slowing down and came to a grinding halt. There were mixtures of applause and booing from carriages up and down. After releasing another torrent of abuse at the boys performing their drunken heroics, the official withdrew from the window, looked at us, clicked his tongue, shook his head and said, in a tone both condescending and full of disbelief:
“White people.”
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