Still Becoming

Pardon the spellings. Life also had typos.

Lovely Tuesday in October, '98, I arrived.

Popular month maybe. Common note, I suppose. That baby cry thing people's eardrums are used to hearing. Woman screams. Child cries. Someone says congratulations. Life continues.

But me, I don't know, maybe I expected ululation. A bit of ceremony. Women throwing voices into the air. Men standing up like, "Varume, pause everything. A legend has availed himself unto this world."

Well, you don't have to believe I'm a legend. That's fine. Google exists for such disputes.

Anyway.

A few sunsets on this blessed planet and you start suspecting maybe there was a mix-up. Maybe the delivery address was wrong. Maybe I was supposed to land on another planet, one where people look at a child with a strange mind and say, "Ah, this one thinks in systems."

But here? Here survival had a different syllabus.

Here they valued the spear, the hoe, the back that bends, the hand that knows soil, the boy who can wake up early and not ask too many useless questions.

And there I was, born with a programming mindset before I even knew programming existed. A small boy running loops in his head. Asking why. Asking how. Asking what if. Trying to debug life while everyone else was saying, "Just do what you're told."

The normal course took place.

Well. Maybe not normal-normal.

In '05, I found myself in the prestigious Mutambara Primary School. Prestigious according to me, yes, but childhood is allowed to accredit its own monuments.

Mission school. United Methodist Church. Morning prayers. Uniforms. Chalk dust. Teachers with that look that could discipline you from across the room.

For six years, I performed.

Stellar, I think. Maybe even dangerously stellar. Because praise does something to a child, sha. You start believing the prophecy. You start walking like maybe heaven leaked your file early.

After all, I was the legend. The promised one. The saviour.

Well, the real Saviour had already arrived a couple thousand years earlier, so let us not get carried away. But still. I was somewhere on the waiting list.

Then Grade Six and Seven came in foreign land - Chipinge Junior School.

Foreign land is dramatic, yes, but when you are a child and you have been moved from what you know, even the next town can feel like exile.

My first night at Chipinge Junior, after my father had left, I cried.

Do not put that in the legend brochure.

It was not cinematic crying. No rain against the window. No soundtrack. No camera pulling away slowly.

Just a boy in a strange place learning that bravery is easier when your father is still nearby.

I stayed in 6 Diamond.

Considered the worst, apparently.

Maybe it was. Maybe it was not.

A funny thing, calling a class full of children the worst.

But schools enjoy labels. Adults enjoy sorting. And children, poor things, start believing the shelves they are placed on.

We were kids. Humans. Soft things pretending to be ranked things.

Then I moved to 6 Silver.

Skipped Gold.

Apparently even minerals had a hierarchy, and somehow, I still found a side entrance.

Still, legends adapt.

I sat for Grade Seven national exams with that quiet confidence of a boy who had been praised enough to confuse pressure with destiny.

And the grades came.

Obviously.

The promised land after that was great, but nothing to marvel at like that.

St Faith's Secondary.

Form One to Form Six. All boys.

Man, I loved ladies. So, naturally, life sent me to an all-boys school. You see the humour? God is funny sometimes. Not always ha-ha funny. Sometimes just "ah, okay, noted" funny.

Funny enough, by the time St Faith's had finished with me, my famous care for ladies had almost logged out.

It was there, yes. A background process, occasionally active, mostly idle.

But mostly?

Meh.

But weirdly, I loved St Faith's more.

I loved it like you love a place that nearly finished you but also built you.

It gave me resilience. It gave me friends. It gave me business partners. It gave me brothers. The kind of family you choose before you even know that choosing family is a thing.

And in between all this, I made friends.

Lifetime friends, even.

High school has a strange way of handing you people before you have the language to understand what they will mean.

Willard.

Baba Amani now.

Man, I am proud of that friend.

Proud in a way that almost becomes prayer.

I wish him nothing but the very best.

And if life ever came for him, I think some part of me would stand up first before fear had finished speaking.

Then there is KD.

No full names.

Some people are not for public indexing.

He is special.

My business partner, yes.

But before anyone starts hearing Jeff Bezos music in the background, understand this:

he was my friend first.

Lifetime friend before business.

Brother before brand.

It disturbed me also.

Because somewhere in those corridors, between prep, punishments, hunger, and boys pretending not to be homesick, I became a nerd.

A proper one.

And let us be honest.

As much as I passed, I was far from the brightest at that prestigious high school.

Prestigious according to me again, yes. Let childhood keep its decorations.

The type who could solve for x but not for eye contact.

The type who understood equations, circuits, forces, angles, but could not understand the simple physics of walking up to a girl and saying, "I like you."

Then came the letters.

A in Mathematics.

Of course. Numbers knew me. Numbers never betrayed me. Give me x, I will find it. Give me simultaneous equations, I will fight. Give me calculus, I will at least pretend with confidence.

B in Physics.

Fair. The universe whispered enough for me to pass.

C in Technical Drawing.

Respectable.

Weird choice, actually.

For someone who had nothing to do with it at O Level, it made no obvious sense.

But I loved it.

My hand was trying to keep up with what my mind could already see.

Then E in Geography.

Imagine.

A boy who would spend his whole life trying to locate himself could not even properly explain the earth beneath his feet.

That one still feels personal.

But we move.

I went to Harare Institute of Technology to study Software Engineering.

Finally, a place where the chaos inside my head had a department.

A place where logic had syntax. Where problems had structure. Where broken things could be traced. Where an error message at least had the decency to tell you the line number.

I entered with hunger. Not the poetic kind only. The real one also.

The hunger of a boy from somewhere trying to become someone. The hunger of a Zimbabwean child who knows talent is nice, but talent without opportunity is just a sad story with good grammar.

I did not arrive at HIT alone.

I went with a brother. Family, not just friend.

Jabu. CJ.

In our first year, we lost our mother.

That was my first heartbreak.

Not romantic heartbreak. That smaller kind still had time to embarrass me later.

This was heavier.

This was grief walking into the room and making boys older without asking permission.

RIP, Mom. Sibongile Magombo.

CJ finished before me. One year before me, even though we started together. With a distinction.

Shoutout, CJ.

Actually brothers.

Then there was Panashe, a brother from Chipinge High, also doing Software with me.

Distinction again.

Shoutout, bro.

In all this, between these two brothers, Jabu and Panashe, I think I am the only one who drank.

Alcohol, man.

I think it both made me and destroyed me.

It opened rooms. It blurred others. It handed me courage like a loan shark, then came back with interest.

So I coded.

I learned systems. I learned failure. I learned that computers are annoying, but at least they are honest. If something breaks, it breaks for a reason.

People are not like that.

And then, of course, there was a girl.

There is always a girl.

I liked her the way cowards like people - silently, religiously, with discipline, with imagination, with full emotional architecture and zero deployment.

I built whole conversations in my head. I rehearsed lines. I saw futures. I probably even suffered from things she never did.

But did I make a move?

No.

Like a fool. Like a shy auntie. Like a man whose mouth had not yet received the memo from his heart.

Then final year came.

Well, fifth year, actually. Because my degree also had side quests.

And I liked another one.

This time, I tried.

And yeah.

Neh.

Some stories do not need a paragraph. Some defeats come pre-summarised.

Ladies, man.

Ladies might be crazy. Ladies might be clueless. Or maybe I am the crazy and clueless one. Or maybe everyone is just moving around with childhood wounds, poor timing, and confidence they downloaded illegally.

I do not know.

That is the annoying part.

I do not know what the lesson is.

I keep thinking life will explain itself properly. Like one day it will sit me down and say, "Ngoni, here is why that happened. Here is why you had to lose that. Here is why you were delayed there. Here is why you were born with this mind in a place that did not always know what to do with it."

But life does not explain.

Life just gives you another day and expects you to attend.

So I attend.

I went on.

That is probably the most consistent thing about me. I go on.

Not because I understand. Not because I am healed. Not because the lesson has landed. Not because I have become some wise man who smiles at pain and calls it growth.

No.

Sometimes I am just there, confused, slightly tired, overthinking, romanticising my own suffering, then opening the laptop anyway.

Because what else must I do?

In 2023, a week after my final exams, I jumped ship to South Africa for an opportunity.

Maybe that sentence sounds brave. Maybe it was just hunger with a passport.

We built Zivai by Danai.

Google it.

The rest is history.

Well. Not entirely history.

History has a habit of hiding people in the footnotes.

I made more friends. Found more rooms. Learned new versions of myself.

And somewhere there, I met a queen.

One I value above all.

I will not over-explain her.

Some people deserve privacy even inside confession.

All I will say is this: she has been an angel.

All love to C.

I became a developer.

A real one.

Not a motivational quote with VS Code open. Not "future billionaire" in someone's WhatsApp bio. A builder. A shipper. A systems guy.

I touched things bigger than the boy from Mutambara could have imagined.

Government systems. Passports. Visas. Payments. Access control. Applications that do not care about your feelings because somewhere, someone needs the thing to work.

I have written code in rooms where the stakes were not theoretical.

I have trained people. Fixed things. Broken things. Explained things. Travelled for things. Sat with pressure until pressure became furniture.

And my name?

I have done a lot for my name.

Maybe not enough for the hunger inside me, because the hunger keeps updating its requirements, but enough that if you are bored, you can Google me.

Not because fame is the point. Fame is too loud and too unserious.

But receipts matter.

Especially when you come from a place where people are very quick to humble you before they even understand what you are carrying.

Maybe I have done some goodwill for Zim devs. Maybe a small footprint. Maybe a small proof that we are not just surviving on this side of the planet. We can build. We can think. We can ship. We can sit at the table without apologising for the accent, the passport, or the route we took to arrive.

Still, I do not know.

Maybe that is ego. Maybe that is purpose. Maybe every legend is just a scared child who learned to keep evidence because the world kept asking, "Who do you think you are?"

And honestly?

I think I am still that child.

Still trying to explain himself. Still trying to prove something. Still trying to become something without fully knowing what that thing is.

I do not understand the life lessons.

I do not understand why talent comes early but clarity comes late.

I do not understand why I can design systems but fail to understand women.

I do not understand why I can debug code but not always debug myself.

I do not understand why God gives a man ambition, then places him in an economy that behaves like a denial-of-service attack.

I do not understand why some people land where they are immediately understood, while others spend years translating themselves for rooms that keep asking for a hoe when all they brought was a mind full of code.

Maybe I landed on the blessed planet.

Maybe I landed on the cursed one.

Most days, I suspect both.

But I am here.

Still laughing. Still losing. Still building. Still wanting love and pretending badly that I am above it. Still side-eyeing geography. Still grateful for St Faith's. Still carrying Mutambara. Still trying to make Chipinge mean something. Still searching for God in the stack trace. Still turning pain into jokes before it turns on me.

Still debugging the boy. Still refactoring the man.

Still becoming.

And maybe that is enough for now.

The legend has not arrived-arrived.

He is compiling.