The Unseen Connection
Pretoria, the first morning
“It does not exist, or I did not have enough time to look lower and find it sitting a couple of rows below mine, head down, expression closed.”
— Vanessa, “My Love at First Sight”
There is a particular satisfaction in receiving your flight ticket for a trip you have planned. It means every box has been checked, every approval secured, and that short of some genuine catastrophe, the thing is actually going to happen. For South Africa I did not even need a visa — the ticket alone was enough — which made it feel even more certain. The fellowship was hybrid, so over the online weeks I had already met some of the other Zimbabwean fellows and a scattering from other countries. I knew I would not be travelling entirely among strangers; the odds were good that those of us leaving from the same city would be booked onto the same flight. The only loose end was work. I would be away from the office for a long stretch, so I spent my last days making sure everything was in order — reports filed, correspondence answered, nothing left smouldering behind me.
The day came. I packed and headed to Robert Gabriel Mugabe International Airport for an evening flight. I had arranged to meet one of the guys I had crossed paths with in the same advocacy spaces online — it is always a good thing to have one familiar face in a programme like this, someone to talk to about work and the road ahead. We checked in, waited, and slowly recognised the others who were travelling with us. You can usually tell: something about how old they look, a fragment of overheard conversation, and then you introduce yourself and confirm you are headed to the same place. At that point my entire intention for the trip was simple and complete — go to South Africa, learn, build a few new networks, widen my professional circle, and come home to my job. Nothing more. The idea of meeting a woman was not anywhere in my mind. I was locked in. I had projects that were eating most of my attention, and in my spare hours I sat staring at a screen trading forex. Pursuing anyone was the furthest thing from my plans.
We landed in South Africa late at night, and the first thing I saw was a row of people holding up YALI placards with our names and the programme logo. There is something genuinely reassuring about that — no airport hustle, no negotiating for a taxi, no working out which bus. Everything had been arranged. The hotel was expecting us. We were a large group, and they had kept dinner waiting. We piled into the minibuses, got to the hotel, checked in, ate, and — exhausted from the travel — wanted nothing more than bed.
Vanessa was somewhere in that arrival, or somewhere just before it. She was coming from Mozambique; she may have landed a few hours ahead of me, or she may still have been in the air. I have no idea, because at that point I did not know she existed. We had never met during the online sessions. There was no name to attach to a face, no face to attach to a name. There was, simply, nothing — no premonition, no quiet certainty that something was about to begin. Just a young man tired from a flight, mildly curious about what the next three weeks might hold and what he might get out of them.
⁂
It is worth pausing here, on this side of the story, to say something about the man who got on that flight. Because everything that comes next — the strategies, the misreadings, the inability to pull her into a hug when she offered — only makes sense if you understand who I was before any of it began.
I have always been a quiet kind of nerd. Introverted is more accurate than nerd, but the two run together in my case. I did not date much in high school; I dated a little in university, a little more after starting work. Nothing that ever quite took — not for any dramatic reason. The timing would be wrong, or the fit would be wrong, or life would simply pull us in different directions. By the time I was a few years into my career, I had drifted away from actively pursuing anything — less out of a decision than out of momentum. And I had, over the years, developed an idea of an ideal partner that was, to put it mildly, exclusive. I wanted someone who would stimulate me mentally — not as a phrase but as a real prerequisite. My female friends tended to be metallurgical engineers, chemical engineers, statisticians. My male friends and I lived in the same world: finance, investments, technology, the things you read about late at night and then build a life around. I was looking, if I was looking at all, for a mind I could keep up with and which would keep up with me. The narrowness of that filter was a feature, not a bug.
An ordinary day looked like this. Work, nine to five, mostly at my desk unless I was in the field for a monitoring trip, or in another city or country for a workshop. After work, my room. Music, gym, a screen. There was not much else. I had gotten so used to my own company that I could go an entire weekend without speaking to anyone — not friends, not even my parents, who had long since accepted that this was simply how their son operates. The goal, since university, had been the UN. Some sort of advisory role at international level, eventually. So spare time meant self-development: an extra online course, another fellowship application, the next CV-line that might move me closer. A woman to think about was not on the list. I will say it plainly: I sometimes forgot my own birthday until my sister sent me money for it. That is the kind of locked-in I was.
I rented in the city, and one of the small triumphs of any given month was managing not to run into my landlord at all. Whole weeks would pass in which the only people I exchanged real words with were work colleagues. I had grown used to that life. Because I had landed in a relatively senior role quite young, my colleagues tended to be the age of my parents; even most of my subordinates were older than me. The room was not full of available peers. Outside the office, my civic space was populated mostly by social-science people — warm, mission-driven, but rarely the kind who shared my background in numbers and code and markets. There were not many places where someone like me would naturally bump into someone like the partner I had quietly described to myself.
My default posture toward people was observation. I did not talk much. I watched, I noticed, I took things in, and I kept most of what I saw to myself. I liked to help — that part is genuine — but my circle was small, deliberately, and my life was very private. You needed to be inside the inner inner circle before you got to meet the version of me who is outgoing and actually quite fun. To anyone outside that ring, I came across as quiet, reserved, possibly aloof. I have made peace with that. It is the cost of how I am built.
By that point in my life, love was not high on the list. I had, somewhere along the way, settled into the role of the rich uncle: the man with his projects, his fellowships, his portfolio, his quiet ambitions, who would arrive at family gatherings warmly and alone. I was not actively looking for it. I was busy, and I had convinced myself that was enough of a reason. My friend Prince, who has the irritating gift of seeing through people he is fond of, used to tell me that “too busy” was a cover story. He thought I was afraid of being in love — that saying I had no time was easier than letting myself be loved, or, harder still, allowing myself to love someone back. I argued with him about this for years. I think now that he was at least partly right. I had not been hurt — not in any way I can point to. But I knew myself well enough to suspect that whatever I felt, when I let myself feel it, would be a lot. And the worst version of that suspicion was the possibility that it would not be returned. Nerds have a particular problem with love. We overthink. We calculate. We protect. But the thing we do not get credit for — the thing that, in fact, makes us dangerous to ourselves — is that we are extraordinarily dedicated to what we love. When we commit, we commit completely. We give everything. We nurture the thing relentlessly. And when what we give is not reciprocated, we feel it more than most people would guess. So, you learn to be patient with yourself. You stop chasing. You wait, quietly, for something that would fit, and you get on with the rest of your life in the meantime.
So when I arrived at the fellowship, I knew what I would see. It is a kind of law of large gatherings of young people: when you put a group of them in the same hotel for three weeks, some will pursue something. Some will try to date. Some genuinely cannot live without a brief romance, even one with an expiry date built in. I had seen this many times before — coming straight, in fact, from my role as deputy national facilitator of a large youth network, where I had spent years watching workshops and trainings produce exactly these small, intense, time-limited entanglements. I expected it at YALI too. I just did not picture myself in it.
When I watched it happen — the pairs forming at dinner, the giggles by the pool, the bus seats that became reserved without anyone having to say so — I felt several things at once, and they did not entirely agree with each other. One part of me categorised it neatly: programme romance, three-week phenomenon, ends at the airport. Another part of me quietly filed it under not-for-me-right-now, with the practised efficiency of a man who had filed many things there before. And underneath both of those, quieter and harder to admit, was a third thing: a small, dignified envy that I would never have called envy if you had asked me directly. I would have called it observation. But I noticed who they were sitting with at breakfast. I noticed who walked back from class together. I had no intention of doing anything about any of it. I just noticed. The way you notice a country you have decided is not for you, while still flicking through the brochure.
I told myself it was naive, what they were doing. I told myself it would end in awkward messages and silence by the second month. Some of it probably did. But I also have to be honest that I did not always believe my own dismissal. There were moments when one of them laughed at something the other had said, and I caught a flash of what it would feel like to be on the inside of that — not the architect of it, not the engineer of it, just inside — and the feeling moved through me before I could file it. Then I filed it.
The idea that someone like Vanessa might exist in this cohort — that there was a woman somewhere in that room who would meet the narrow filter I had built and then, more improbably, hold my attention — had not seriously crossed my mind. I had not come for that. I would not have known what to do with it if I had. And so when she finally sat two rows behind me with her composed posture and her quietly moving fingers and her charger that would soon become my problem, I did not register what was beginning. I registered a stillness. I registered an adapter mismatch. I did not register that the season I had been in — the settled one, the patient one, the one Prince had been quietly right about — was about to end.
⁂
We were up early the next morning, headed to the UNISA Business School in Midrand. Perhaps it was the early start that almost made me forget my charger — except I had not forgotten it at all. What I had failed to bring was the right adapter for those round South African sockets. A small thing. The kind of small thing that turns out to change everything.
The room was full of smiles, full of difference — different languages, different countries, young change-makers buzzing with the energy of people who have been chosen. And we had been chosen. When you are told that thirteen hundred people applied and only seventy-seven were taken, it does something to how you hold yourself. It meant everyone in that room was, in some measurable sense, exceptional. Which meant Vanessa was too — wherever she was sitting, whoever she was, in those first hours when I still did not know her name.
In the heart of South Africa, then, where the sockets mirrored the roundness of its landscapes, my journey at the YALI programme began. My concern that first morning was not for the lessons ahead but for the life of my laptop — my gateway to everything I was working on. I took a seat near the front, ready to absorb whatever the next three weeks had to teach me, with no idea that the most lasting thing I would carry home was not on the syllabus and was sitting two rows behind me.
Behind me, amidst seventy-seven young minds from thirteen African nations, was Vanessa. The room held a remarkable density of talent — people drawn from the Civic Leadership, Business, and Public Sector tracks, each carrying a different perspective and a different language. We had spent weeks together online, and the anticipation of finally meeting in person, of digging into topics like human-centred design and ethical leadership under the UNISA lecturers, was real. But I noticed her for a quieter reason than all of that. She sat composed in the middle of the buzz, focused, her fingers moving over her laptop keys, untouched by the noise around her. She brought a stillness to the room. I registered it without yet understanding it.
The twist came after lunch. I found the very charger I needed, its round prongs a perfect fit for the socket, and I used it in the absence of its owner — a small, ordinary trespass among young people who are forever rescuing one another in workshops. When the owner returned, it was Vanessa. She owned the charger. And from that moment she quietly became the thief of my thoughts. I had not yet spoken a word to her, and perhaps I never would have, were it not for a borrowed cable and a missing adapter. Our paths had been placed in the same classroom. Now, without either of us deciding it, they began to cross.
For those first days, our interactions went no further than the exchange of smiles and the sharing of a charger. In those small gestures something began — quiet enough to dismiss, persistent enough that I was still thinking about it long after I had landed back in Harare.
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