“I want to spend my whole life here on this job, arresting poachers and protecting animals.” What’s more, joining Akashinga has given her confidence and autonomy – and the chance to win back custody of her daughter.

“When I manage to stop poachers, I feel accomplished,” she says.

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They settled on Akashinga, ‘the Brave Ones’ in Shona. Mander asked her and the 16 other women – many of whom also came from backgrounds of abuse – to come up with a name for their unit. After an excruciating three day-long military-style try-out, she was invited to become part of the new force. If selected, she would be responsible for patrolling and protecting the nearby Phundundu Wildlife Park: a 115 square mile former trophy hunting area that is part of a larger ecosystem home to some 11,000 elephants.Ĭhigumbura jumped at the opportunity. An Australian named Damien Mander was looking for female recruits to become wildlife rangers, and the village head thought Chigumbura was an excellent candidate. It went on like this for three years, until one day, when Chigumbura was 20, the village head pulled her aside. “Everything was misery,” Chigumbura says with a sigh. When she came by, the grandmother would spin stories to shoo her away, telling her that her baby was in Mozambique, for example. Chigumbura was not even permitted to visit her daughter. So against Chigumbura’s wishes, the rapist’s mother took the baby – a little girl Chigumbura named Yearn Cleopatra – to raise as her own. Cultural norms among the Shona dictate that, should a mother lack the resources to take care of her child, it’s given to the father’s parents.

“It was like I couldn’t do anything more with my life.”Ĭhigumbura was jobless, with no skills and no prospects. After realising she was pregnant with her rapist’s child, Chigumbura dropped out of school and put aside her dream of becoming a nurse. Kelly Lyee Chigumbura was 17 years old when, she says, she was raped near her family’s home in Zimbabwe’s Lower Zambezi Valley.

The brave ones