Police Round Up 14 Schoolchildren At A Vuzu Party
Police in Bulawayo have initiated investigations into a Vuzu party that was held at a house in Pumula South suburb on Friday.
The infamous Vuzu parties are social events where youth, mostly teenagers engage in excessive beer drinking, drug abuse and sex orgies.
In a statement posted on X (formerly Twitter) this Saturday, police said the party had 14 learners who wearing uniforms from different schools.
Condoms and empty beer containers were found at the party. Police said:Police in Bulawayo are investigating an incident in which 14 students, who were wearing different school uniforms, were found at a Vuzu party at a certain house in Pumula South on 15/07/23. Condoms and empty containers of alcohol were recovered at the scene.
In 2019, one of the attendees of the early Vuzu parties or Vuzooms, Leroy Mufudzi described their genesis in 2011.
He told a weekly publication that the Vuzu parties started at Bulawayo’s Hillside dams where a kombi owner called Max would bring students and girls from private colleges.
The kombi had a booming sound system, which suggests the origins of the name “Vuzooms”. Said Mufudzi:
The first Vuzu parties started at Hillside Dams.
They were held there and most people would just come to party close to the gate at Dams.
The masterminds of the whole Vuzu thing or I can call them the founders, were this guy called Max and others.
He was a dreadlocked guy and he had a kombi with a booming sound system. He used to take girls from Girls College using that kombi.
We would go there and the guy’s car would be the life of the party. It would be the only sound system and people would gather around it.
There you would find students from CBC, Girls College, Convent, Eveline, Townsend, Milton and Plumtree. The boys who had the most shine were from CBC and Plumtree.
It was a thing for private school kids so you didn’t have a lot of people from the western areas.
But as time went on, one person that goes to CBC that was from the western areas would bring another from the western areas and that one would bring another and on and on it went.
In August 2022, Zimbabwe Republic Police (ZRP) spokesperson in Bulawayo Province Inspector Abednico Ncube declared that Vuzu parties had been dealt with and were a thing of the past.
