I was six years old when Karoi in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) was opened up to ex-servicemen in 1947. The Western world was at peace once more, but many of the colonies had begun to agitate for their own independence, and, having left one war behind, they continued with another. I have attempted to put together for posterity a sequence of events, told by some of those early stalwarts who played an important role in the making of a close knit community - those men, women and children who helped to shape its course and, in the fullness of time, made it one of the most desirable farming areas in the country. Ultimately, what also developed along the way, sixty or more years after the curtain had been raised, was a situation that not even the most enlightened visionary could have predicted or foreseen, nor would hardly have believed.