Chapter 1
War Arrives

Hidden in this quiet mountainous area my father, Cleophas Kira Makonese, built a little store for the community. In the store he sold everything from bread, sugar and clothes to manual farm implements such as hoes and plows. He also sold corn seeds for the locals to farm their staple food. The store was situated next to the school, which was also a gathering point for the community. My father had two wives, Jesslin and Esnati Makonese, and several rural farming fields to sustain our huge family. He had gone to school up to the equivalent of a second year in high school today. During his time he could have been a teacher, but he chose to be a small businessman. My mom, Esnati, his first wife, was a very hard-working woman who helped him to set up his business in a place that is now named after him – KwaMakonese.

On the day the war arrived, I was playing keep-ups with my brother Paul using our homemade soccer ball in the yard. Soccer was the most popular game that young boys played in Zimbabwe when I was a child. The ball was normally made of a collection of plastic bags rolled together into the shape of a ball. Plastic grocery bags formed the inside of the ball and the outer plastic bag was normally from a mealie-meal bag, which was slightly thicker and could withstand the kicking much better than the grocery bags. Mealie-meal is ground corn, used to make the staple food called sadza. In the olden days people used to grind the corn on a piece of stone, crushing the corn between two rocks, causing the dry corn shells to break apart and form a kind of coarse flour. The flour was poured slowly into a pot of boiling water and gently stirred into a thin porridge. Nowadays people go to a grinding mill where pulverizing the corn takes a matter of minutes. But you can also just buy the already made cornmeal from a shop in plastic bags ranging from ten to fifty kilograms. We used to make our soccer balls from a twenty-kilogram empty mealie-meal bag. It was just the right size to fit enough plastic bags inside it to make a ball.

This homemade ball did not bounce very well and it took some getting used to to control it. It was heavy and did not go extremely far when you kicked it, but I tell you it brought a lot of joy for most kids in the rural areas. You only got to kick a genuine leather ball when you started school. Normally the school had one or two leather balls that were used by the school team and the best way to get to kick a real ball was when the school team was practising. The younger kids would hang around the goalpost area waiting for the ball to be kicked off the football pitch out of play. Since there were no nets, the ball normally flew through and as young kids we would run to pick it up for the older students playing on the team. Once the ball was in hand, we kicked it as hard as possible back to the players in the field. That was our only way to feel a real soccer ball. Soccer is my favourite game, I could go on and on talking about my love for soccer, but on this day it was different. This day the course of my life was changed forever.

My mother was preparing dinner. Normally we ate sadza as the main course with sour milk and some boiled fresh corn and vegetables. This was not sour cream, this was fresh milk from the cow, which had been left out for about a week, that