No Safer Kinder Hatred

Frank Sayi grew up in the 1970s in Mawabeni, a native reserve in colonial Rhodesia, a country under white minority rule, governed by Ian Smith's illegal regime. Reserves were places of repression and containment. There seemed to Frank to be no difference between government soldiers, police officers, and guerillas fighting for freedom. They were all violent men who terrorised the civilian population. Schools were closed, food supply chains and clothing were contaminated with poison, refugees fled the armies.

There were five others in Frank's immediate family: his grandmother, a stern, wise, mercurial matriarch, capable of intimidating severity, her son Uncle Sami, and two sisters, Thoko and Gift. He didn't see much of their mother and in his mind she was another sister. Their lives were hard.

By June 1979 the country had a new name: Zimbabwe, and there was a brief hiatus in fighting. It was Independent at last. A new anthem was chosen, Nkosi Sikelela iAfrica - God Bless Africa - but by 1982 a civil war had erupted. The leader, Robert Mugabe declared total war on Matabeleland and the Ndebele people who hadn't supported him and unleashed his chosen militia, the Gukurahundi, who brought famine, disease, murder, rape and terror.

Frank Sayi was shaped by these events. His memoir tells of a childhood conditioned in the shadow of the mayhem brought about by the structure and dehumanising effects of colonialism and its dreadful legacy, and the impact of civil war. Yet it is also full of moving, hilarious and beautiful stories of innocence and the increasingly hard-won experience of a war-torn childhood, and the development of a man who was determined to leave this violence behind.