Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood

Subtitled, "An African Childhood," this delightful autobiography by Alexandra Fuller transported me right into her world. Born in 1969, her early childhood was spent in sweltering hot Rhodesia, where her parents slept with guns next to their bed, and her father was often away, fighting with other white men against the guerillas who eventually won the war. Her parents were poor, life was brutal and harsh, and the climate was always sticky and uncomfortable. And yet, this is a tale laced with humor as she casts her child's eye view at the many disruptions and disappointments of her family's life as they moved from Rhodesia to Malawi and then to Zambia.

Ms. Fuller's world was full of hot sweaty days, hard work, mosquitoes and ticks and snakes. There's only occasional electricity, drinking water is foul, and any kind of plumbing is a luxury. But there's always beer and alcohol, and lots of cigarettes, all of which is taken for granted as a way of life by her and her sister, the two surviving siblings out of five. I couldn't help thinking about my own children and their easy life here in New York, as I looked at the photographs throughout the book as the two young girls grew up and the parents grew wrinkled and gray. I love the writer's descriptions and the way she uses words. The children sing songs about fighting through "thickandthin" and the family camps with other "expats-like-us". Young Alexandra, nicknamed "Bobo" learns to clean, load and shoot a gun. Her father chain smokes cigarettes as he drives their Land Rover over inhospitable roads. Her mother loves animals and keeps packs of dogs around in a losing battle to control their fleas. The children attend boarding schools that change in racial composition as the politics change. And yet there's never a single word of self pity in spite of failing crops and ramshackle living conditions.

I loved this book and read it fast, enjoying Ms. Fuller's voice. The Africa she describes became real to me as I let myself plunge into her world for a little while. There was an excellent map which helped me locate the places she describes as well as the family snapshots. Most of all though, there was a sense throughout of what it really felt like to be that little girl who grew up to share her memories with her readers. I thank her for doing that and give this book one of my highest recommendations. Read it. It's a real treat!

If there's one thing Alexandra Fuller can do, it's write. This unsentimental memoir of a white African childhood on various hardscrabble farms from 1972 to 1990, amidst periods of "unrest," including Rhodesia's long struggle against white rule, captivates as it horrifies. With humor and unflinching honesty, Fuller immerses the reader in the welter of smells, searing heat, torrential rains and myriad dangers from man, animal and plantlife.

Her opening:
"Mum says, 'Don't come creeping into our room at night.'
They sleep with loaded guns beside them on the bedside rugs. She says, 'Don't startle us when we're sleeping.'
'Why not?'
'We might shoot you.'
'Oh.'
'By mistake.'
'Okay.' As it is, there seems a good enough chance of getting shot on purpose. 'Okay, I won't.' "

With these few lines, Fuller captures her tone - fluctuations of fear, bewilderment and humor. Her story is told primarily in present tense from her childhood point of view, though she skips around in chronology in order to follow theme threads: school, war, poverty, her mother's alcoholism and unpredictability. Her mother, Nicola, is ferocious, larger than life; a woman who can drag her daughter off without breakfast to spend the day on horseback rounding up wild cows or laze away a rainy day sprawled with both daughters on her bed reading. A woman whose manic-depressive tendencies were exacerbated by the heartbreaking deaths of three of her five children and exaggerated by alcohol. She's brave, unpredictable, loving and scary.

Racism in Fuller's world is a given, unquestioned by the child who sasses her nanny by threatening to fire her. Her parents are so poor they sell Nicola's rings each planting season and redeem them at harvest. Yet they have a houseful of servants and field hands. One day, her mother out, Fuller is bitten by something on her "downthere." Despite her terrified wailing, her black nanny refuses to aid her. When Nicola finally arrives, she drags the child inside, exasperated, and warns her, " 'Never, ever pull down your shorts in front of an African again."

Fuller concludes the incident: "That's how I remember Karoi. And the dust-stinging wind blowing through the mealies on a hot, dry September night....And the beginning of the army guys: men in camouflage, breaking like a ribbon out of the back of an army lorry and uncurling onto the road, heads shaved, faces fresh and blank. Men cradling guns. And the beginning of men not in camouflage anymore, looking blank-faced, limbs lost."

There's a dark, manic hilarity to much of the book - the teenage Fuller crossing the border on her way to boarding school, her mother comatose from an all-night drunk. "Dad nods, smokes. I crush out my cigarette. We're both hoping Mum doesn't say anything to get us shot." There are also gut-wrenching tragedies and moments of abject terror. The death of a sibling, her parents' grief-addled drunken driving, war. And there is Africa, a place of extremes, a place full of noises, smells and weather to make the rest of the world tame and drab in comparison, a place Fuller captures lovingly in her vivid, muscular, poetic prose.

Dissatisfied reviewers of Alexandra Fuller's "Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight" tend to dwell on the degree to which the book fails to conform to their own agendas and expectations. These reviewers lament Fuller's perceived lack of attention to women's issues, the plight of black Zimbabweans, and the horrors of the Rhodesian War, to name a few. In other words, rather than praise Fuller for the story she tells, they criticize her for stories they believe she fails to tell. To bad for them; they are missing out on a great book.

In addition to being smart, funny, entertainnig, and well-written, Fuller's memoir provides invaluable insight into the end of white rule in southern Africa. The Fullers are hardly members of a wealthly, landed, colonial ruling class. They are poor, rootless, prone to drinking and fighting. Where is the privilege, however minimal, for which they and other white Rhodesians fought? Why on earth would they stay on in places like Zambia and Malawi after the end of white rule? Fuller offers no definite answers to these questions -- though possible answers lurk in the loving and intricate passages in which Fuller describes the sights, sounds, and smells of southern African life. As the story of ordinary white Africans living through a defining moment in southern African history, this book works particularly well.

Those who enjoy Fuller's book might also want to read "Mukiwa," Peter Godwin's equally excellent memoir of growing up in white Rhodesia. Godwin (who, like Fuller, spent much of his youth in the eastern part of Rhodesia, near the border with Mozambique) is about ten years older than Fuller. As such, he offers more about the origins of the war. Godwin also fought with the Rhodesian Army in the 1970s (these experiences make up a large portion of his narrative) and returned to his homeland as a journalist in the 1980s, to cover prime minister Robert Mugabe's reign of terror against his opposition. This more political and historical approach provides a nice companion to Fuller's work.

Evokes images of childhood and Africa that are at the same time luscious and abhorrent, but that draw you into the life of this young girl like few other early childhood biographies have achieved. Miss Fuller is completely unapologetic about her parents and accepts them for who they are are and doesn't try to excuse or blame them -- how refreshing!

This is hardly an objective review, as I like Ms. Fuller grew up in the white farming community of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe and I'm also a survivor of the pink prison (Arundel School) and now reside in the US. But unlike Bobo, I grew up a wealthy farm with relatively normal parents in a very abnormal world of the white colonialist in black Africa. I resonate strongly with her images which are dead on. I still wake each morning listening to hear the "work harder" doves and the "go away" birds. Thanks Bobo for giving me a couple hours to relapse into a world that no longer exists but was home for some of us. Looks like those "Use of English" classes taught by Mrs. Twiss at Arundel paid off....

What a pleasure it is to start off the new year with a wonderful new book. I probably never would have picked this book up, except for the glowing reviews it's been getting. And, are they ever deserved. This is the story of Bobo Fuller, daughter of gone-to-the-dogs parents in 1970's Rhodesia, on the losing (depending on your point of view) side of a civil war. Covering her growing-up years of moving from one place to another in Africa always searching for a way to exist in a place where white Africans no longer had power and privilege, Ms. Fuller writes unsparingly, unsentimentally, and honestly about her family and their remarkable experiences. Don't miss this terrific book.