Kintsugi Heroes
Michael Stewart · 67 min
A boy who fished with his grandfather in the Rhodesian highlands became an 18-year-old officer leading men through a brutal guerrilla war — and somehow held onto his humanity.
You don't have to be in crisis to call.
Michael Stewart grew up fishing and riding horses in the Rhodesian highlands, the son of a fanatical trout fisherman and a mother stretched thin between four daughters and one restless boy. His childhood was freedom itself, running wild across mountains and farmland. But his father's temper sent him climbing into the avocado tree at night, waiting for safety to return. At twelve, Michael was shipped to boarding school, a strict military institution 300 kilometres away. The abandonment cut deep, but it taught him something that would save his life: how to stand alone.
By eighteen, Michael was an officer in the Rhodesian war, leading forty-five men through counterinsurgency operations in the bush. He learned to control fear the way he controlled his body on a motorbike or in a microlight, not by conquering it, but by accepting it as part of the terrain. He saw atrocities that broke something in him. He killed. He buried friends. When he came home to university, he couldn't sit in a classroom. He went back to the war until 1980.
What followed was a pattern that would define decades: Michael chasing the adrenaline he'd known in combat through kayaking, flying, extreme motorcycling. Nothing matched it. He watched Mugabe dismantle the country he loved, watched South Africa turn violent, realised he couldn't raise his three sons in that world. In 2000, he left Africa not for himself but for them. It was the hardest and most necessary decision he ever made.
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Kintsugi Heroes · Registered Australian not-for-profit · kintsugiheroes.com.au ↗