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Once a Rhodesian, always...
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood
Alexandra Fuller
2003
Picador, London
Reviewed by Richard Bartlett
Childhood, when it is being lived, seldom seems remarkable to those living it. It is only with hindsight, only with the benefit of adult prejudices and restrictions of 'normality' that some adults are able to realise how unusual their childhood was. The other peculiarity of childhood is the affinities it engenders in us. Its memories are treasured, however sullied, painful, joyful or traumatic they might have been. It's a means of pacing ourselves, allowing us to define what perfection never is.
Alexander Fuller's book is remarkable for her ability to take us back to a particularly unusual childhood. Yet it is also an example of how the prejudicesof childhood might be tempered, but, seldom, discarded only with great difficulty. She takes us on a superbly sad and tearfully joyous journey through her Rhodesian childhood as the daughter of a farmer, upon whom fortune seldom smiled.
After turning the last page, and despite prose that is at time hilarious and elsewhere brings one to the edge of tears, I was left with a sense of anger. Not at the injustice meted out to the Fuller family by fate, politics and acts of god, but by the injustice meted out to Africa by Fuller.
There is no doubt that she is an African, that her heart lurches each time she steps back on to the continent that is her home, that she has experienced some of the worst (and b
est) the continent can throw at one person, and has survived. But her Africa is white. She feels it necessary to refer to herself as a white African. The blacks in her book are mostly smiling servants, bungling bureaucrats or sneering soldiers/terrorists/guerrillas.
"Her ability to recreate her youth in the harsh beauty of Africa is fascinating and achingly familiar to those of us who experienced a childhood in colonial Zimbabwe"
I know that is her experience of Africa. I know those are her childhood memories and we cannot deny our history. But it is not a child writing this book, and while her ability to recreate her youth in the harsh beauty of Africa is fascinating, and achingly familiar to those of us who also experienced a childhood in colonial Zimbabwe, Fuller's Africa is one of places rather than people. This is part of the reason her book has been so well received. (It is - June 2003 - in the top 10 bestsellers at some stores of WH Smith, a major UK book retailer.)
The story she tells and her ability to turn her childhood into a page-turner is the other reason. The family arrived in Rhodesia as the war of liberation was beginning in the early 1970s. The family moved from a farm in the central town of Karoi to another farm close to the town of Umtali (now Mutare), right on the border with Mozambique. That was 1975, just as Mozambique became independent, opening up a large eastern front in white Rhodesia's war against the terrorists. The Fuller family was essentially on the frontline of the war. They slept with guns, machine guns, under their pillows. They only travelled to town in convey for fear of ambush. And the children lived in fear of terrorists cutting off their ears and lips.
It is not just living in the midst of a low-intensity war in the African bush that makes this a compelling story. It is the family's personal tragedy. Alexandra, or Bobo, as she is known by her family, and her sister were the only two of five siblings to survive to adulthood. The son Adrian, born before Alexandra, died in Rhodesia before he was old enough to talk. The trauma of his death took the family back to England, where Alexandra was born in 1969.
But cold, wet, green England was more than the young family could bear, so after two years they went back to Karoi, north west of Salisbury (now Harare). After Alexandra came Olivia who survived to two years before drowning in a duck pond while busy baby sitters turned their back and Alexandra felt it was her fault. The family tries to escape the emptiness of loss of their daughter/sister by going on holiday, but it is hollow, forced. The mother returns to seeking solace in alcohol and depression follows.
A few years later she falls pregnant again, normality returns, the war is over, their farm is nationalised so they start again in the flat savannah further south, but it is a difficult pregnancy, and the depression returns when the fifth baby is stillborn. So they move again, to Malawi for two years, and from there to Zambia, where a modicum of normality seems to develop as Bobo approaches adulthood.
The Africa she recreates is of the wild, often untamed, scrubland, manicured tobacco farms, filled with with sounds, smells, creatures that make the continent the stuff of myth and legend. Therein lies the racism, not an overt kind, but a more patronising kind that justifies our charity, our percepetion of Africa as being unable to look after itself. Fuller has created a gentle story, however traumatic, that is saturated with a subtle racism that its perpetrators would vehemently deny.
It might not be seen to be obviously racist, but it does nothing to counter racism. Through its people , its places and selective use of history. One of the most ironic, and violent, tales in the book is the description of the father tracking down one of the houseboys who stole all their possessions and attacked one of the other workers, stabbing her many times and bringing her to the edge of death. Ironic because the houseboy's name is July. Some years after the Fuller family had been violated by placing their trust in July, Nadine Gordimer wrote a novel about a houseboy, in South Africa, who has to look after the white family who employed him after the revolution turns their life upside down. Gordimer's houseboy is also named July. Unlike in July's People, Fuller's story has a more singularly violent climax. July is found, dragged back to the house, kicked and beaten by the other workers and dragged along a dirt road behind a pick-up truck after trying to run away.
This instance of violence is one of the few obvious examples in the book. Elsewhere the war is restricting their lives rather than harming it. Young Alexandra lives in fear of the terrorists coming in the night and cutting off her lips and ears. This did happen in Rhodesia, and the state media were only too happy to get as much mileage as possible out of this incident, which is probably why Fuller lived with this image of the war. What we don't hear is that this atrocity was only carried out against black people, and that it was probably carried out by Rhodesia's infamous Selous Scouts, SAS type soldiers under command of the white government.
Another example of history conveniently forgotten is when Vanessa, Alexandra's older sister, lashes out, and quite justifyably, at the censorship imposed on them by their live-in spy during their time in Malawi. It is as if this is an African creation, one that would never be permitted under the benign leadership of someone like Ian Smith. And while on the issue of representation of history, there is an interesting photo with the chapter entitled Independence. The chapter is about the independence of Zimbabwe in 1980 and the photo, whose caption reads 'Independence Arch', looks very much like the independence arch in Zambia. The profile of the fish eagle with its wings outstretched atop the arch is a bit of a giveaway, because it also appears on Zambia's flag. the Zimbabwe bird is the profile of a perched eagle rather than a soaring one. There are no words saying, "This is Zimbabwe's independence arch", but its use reminds me of that attitude among some whites who profess to not being able to tell one black person from another because they all look the same.
In too many places black people are described in ways that compare them to animals. One example, describing a guard at the Zambian border: "He circles the car, still-legged like a dog wondering which tyre to pee on." The workers, houseboys, nannies, are not described in such denigrating terms but they are nevertheless one of "'gondies', 'boogs', 'toeys', 'zots', 'nig-nogs', 'affies'". This is a child describing the world she grew up in, that's the way it was. Zimbabwe, and most of Africa, is still overcoming the effects of this attitude in the way it encouraged subservience.
At the age of 14, while living in Malawi, Alexandra went into the home of a black family for the first time, and suddenly they became real people, at least momentarily. And it is also momentarily that she describes her realisation that black people have two names: the one used so the white people can pronounce it, and the name their mother gave them, which the white people never bother learning. These fleeting steps, and others she narrates, over the boundaries that racism has delineated are never developed by Fuller, as if they are peripheral to the greater story of her white family.
Also while in Malawi, Alexandra goes out on her motorcycle and describes some abandoned shops she finds as "hung about with ghosts and old dreams and a lost time". While this phrase is being used to describe what remains after the Indian shopowners have left, it is a theme for much of her autobiography, as it must be with most: that search for old dreams and striving to recreate the lost times. But it is not just a theme of autobiographies, it is also a theme of what are known commonly in southern Africa as the "when-wes", the ex-Rhodesians whose oft-heard refrain is: "When we were in Rhodesia...". Unfortunately, this is not just a leftover from Zimbabwe, as it has become a constant refrain among much of the expat and white community in Africa that in the "old days" things were run so much better. This is the sense that one gets from Fuller's narrative - that Africa's perfection is marred only by the too many people who do not know how manage their treasures.
Thus she creates an Africa of place rather than of people. She evokes an image of an almost empty landscape that she and her pioneering family have conquered. This pioneering spirit, like that of the British who went before her and established the colonies of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (now Malawi). Almost tacit acknowledgement of this vision of Africa as empty is reflected in her frequent reference to her family's relative isolation, always expressed as its distance from the nearest white family. During the war in Rhodesia it was a necessity of survival as much as it was an expression of preference, but in describing her parent's present farm: "Once their new house if finished, they will live full time at Chirundu. Their nearest European neighbours are some Italian nuns who run a hospital for local villagers and a family who run a fishing lodge." It is the plight of the expat who sees the beauty of Africa, but not of the Africans.
As an African living in the ever-green countryside of England I read Fuller's descriptions of the African bush and was reminded why I miss the continent. I could smell the rain, hear the cicadas and almost feel the heat of impenetrable blue. She writes with unassuming directness and such compassion for her 'home' that I just wish it made me feel sad for all the right reasons as well.
Richard Bartlett is the co-editor of the African Review of Books.
