I want to tell you about the night I thought I was going to die. Not dramatically. Not metaphorically. I mean the kind of physical pain that makes you lie completely still in the dark and wonder if this is what people feel after car accidents — that specific, overwhelming, total-body kind of wrong.
It was 2019. I was living in Glenview 7, Harare. I had recently ended things with my girlfriend — the woman who would eventually become my wife, though I did not know that yet. I was running a small gaming shop with my brother Pardon that we called Goshen. When we went to register it formally, the authorities suggested something different. We were operating in digital and financial literacy. They proposed Litfy Africa. The name stuck. That little gaming shop became the root of everything Litfy Africa would become.
12:02am
I woke up just after midnight and the pain was worse than it had been before I slept. Not a little worse. Categorically, alarmingly worse.
I reached for my phone and called Pardon. His room was next door — literally the room beside mine. I could hear his phone ringing through the wall. No answer. I called my sister Ashley. Unreachable. I called my stepmother. Unreachable. I called my mother. Unreachable.
Four calls. Four walls. Nobody coming through.
In a moment of clarity I thought of the girl who lived next door. Her name was Nomatter. I called her. She answered. She jumped the fence between our yards and went to tell my mother that I was in bad shape. More than thirty minutes had passed since I first tried to get help.
The Crawl
I made a decision. I was going to get to Pardon myself. I fell from the bed to the floor. I moved to my door. I had not locked it. The door opened. I crawled to Pardon's door and knocked.
Before I had left my room I had picked up two things — my national ID and my medical aid card. Even in that state, some part of my brain was still operational, still knowing what would be needed when the next person took over. I handed them to Pardon when he opened the door. I told him to call an ambulance.
The ambulance arrived around 2am. They took me to West End Hospital. The headache did not leave with the injection. It stayed for twenty-one days. Then one doctor gave me Diclofenac. The next morning I woke up and the headache was gone.
The Call
I was alive. I was well. And a few weeks later, Masimba called. He was in Victoria Falls. He was ready to build Tsoka 3.0 — which we called Santa — and he wanted me to come. He sent me money for the trip.
I arrived in Victoria Falls at 4am. I had no way to reach Masimba. I called Maxwell — a friend from secondary school now based in Victoria Falls. He answered immediately. He came in less than fifteen minutes.
Hawaii
The money came through. And when it did, Victoria Falls became something I had not expected. We arranged ourselves like a watch: I would work until midnight, then Masimba would take over until 10am. Twenty-four hours a day, the project was moving.
But we also lived. Fully and without apology. There was a restaurant perched above the jungle on the edge of the falls. The day the money came through, the three of us went — Masimba, David and me. When the woman at the entrance asked where we were from, David said: we are from the bottom. That day, at that restaurant, watching animals move through the jungle below us while we ordered food worth seventy-eight dollars between three people, it felt true.
Victoria Falls, in those weeks, felt like Hawaii. I did not know yet how quickly that would change.