THERE are people who build institutions, and there are people who build family. My mother, Amai Nelia Musikavanhu, did both, and she never once treated them as separate things.
We lost her in the early hours of Thursday morning at a local hospital, in Mutare, the home she never left even as her name travelled far beyond it. It still does not feel real to write that sentence. For 30 years, Faith Drive Academy was not just an academy to us, it was the extra child at our table, the one Amai fed and clothed and worried over just as much as she did the six of us.
She used to tell us that her love for sport started long before any of us were born, back when she was a schoolgirl on the netball court. She carried that fire quietly for years, and then one day she looked around Mutare and saw girls with talent and nowhere to take it. So she built from somewhere. In the early 1990s, with almost nothing but conviction, she started Faith Drive Soccer Academy, and she poured herself into it the way only a mother can pour herself into something she believes will outlive her.
She was right to believe that. Today there is not a single club in the Zimbabwe Women's Premier Soccer League that has not been touched, in some way, by a player who passed through her hands. That is not a small thing. That is a woman who changed what was possible for the girl child in Manicaland, and in this country.
To us, though, she was not a founder or a visionary or a chairperson emeritus. She was Gogo. She was the woman who healed people as a herbalist during the day and still found time to stand on the touchline in the afternoon, watching girls who were not her own daughters as if they were. She never separated the two callings, healing bodies and building futures, because to her they came from the same place.
Mother, you did not just open a door for the girl child in football. You built the hallway, the field, the whole house, and you handed us the keys before you left. We promise you this: Faith Drive Academy does not end here. It cannot. You made sure of that in every season you gave to it.
Rest well, Amai. Netball girl. Herbalist. Founder. Gogo. We will carry it from here.
Your burial burial in Mutare is only but the beginning of safeguarding your legacy.
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