Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight – An African Childhood
By Alexandra Fuller
While politically correct critics sit around arguing whether or not White Africans are entitled to their say, gifted writers with singular voices pay tribute to their families and farms, recalling vanished childhoods in a vanished country called Southern Rhodesia.
Although Alexandra Fuller was born in wet, grey Derbyshire, England, she was conceived in 1969 within the roar of Victoria Falls during her tobacco-farming parents’ futile attempt to sever their physical and emotional ties to a Rhodesia. But unhealed heartbreak had already left its mark on this “rotten luck family” after their second-born child died suddenly from meningitis at the height of blonde-baby-boy cuddliness.
Nicola and Tim think they can purge their blood of Africa through the strength of their pioneer spirits and rough hands, and set up house in their English farm’s dreary, animal-shit-encrusted barn. Having added running water and flush toilets, they sell it to city folk as a rural cottage and flee back to Rhodesia with their two young daughters, just as the 13-year Bush War begins to grow “calmly violent, secret and earnest.”
If most white Rhodesians elected to settle on the fertile, central vein of the country’s Great Dyke, Fuller’s father was inevitably drawn to places marked on the map as ‘Not Fit for White Man’s Habitation’; to the most undesirable corners of the ‘Comfort-Discomfort belts’; to the “edges of the country that tend toward extreme heat, flat heartless scrub, droughts, malaria”; or the Burma Valley: “fertile-foul-smelling” holding “the green-leafy lie of prosperity in its jeweled fist”; to places “so hot that the flamboyant tree outside cracks to itself, as if already anticipating how it will feel to be on fire.”
At age five, Alexandra lives in “the very birthplace and epicenter of the civil war in Rhodesia,” and within view of the Mozambican hills, just as that country’s 10-year colonial war between Portugal and FRELIMO was ending and a new civil war between FRELIMO and RENAMO was about to begin.
Fuller’s progress from childhood to young womanhood, described in short, poignant and to-the-point chapters punctuated with melancholy black and white photos, is far from idyllic. By seven, she can load a FN; the family car is a mine-proof Land Rover; and she is raised on “thin milk from wild beef cows reluctantly domesticated and that reluctantly give milk.”
Both parents become police reservists, with Dad gone on patrol for 10-day stretches looking for ‘terrs,’ while gun-carrying Mum – “hard-living, glamorous, intemperate, intelligent, racist” – holds down the farm. Her drinking hardens as the repeated losses pile up, and she becomes increasingly irrational, uncontrollable and depressed.
Another baby-doll toddler dies, drowning in a duck pond; a desperately wanted last-chance son is stillborn. Their long string of family dogs, abandoned by farmers fleeing the Bush War, are killed by snakes, baboons or snares, by tick fever or from eating cow turds tainted with tick-killing pesticides. The “high-hipped Sanga cattle spread ticks to our pampered, pastured cows,” causing them to succumb to heartwater, redwater, sweating sickness, or to carry mixed-blood calves or go wild.
When the war is lost, landless squatters arrive before the indebted farm is to be auctioned off as part of Mugabe’s land distribution programme – but not to whites or even freedom fighters. Instead, “poor and rough and undesirable farms,” like theirs, “go to Mugabe’s enemies as an act of appeasement.”
In 1982, the family moves to the Malawi of “the lilliputian dictator” Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda. Another tobacco farm, this time on the mosquito-infested Lake Chilwa. Another land where paranoia and insanity reign, where Indian stores are confiscated, and whites can be thrown out at a moment’s notice. “We feel more dangerously teetering, close to disease and death … death by spies… by swamp rot… by lack of social contact… We are white and alone.”
At boarding school in the new Zimbabwe, the Afrikaans and English children are gone; only a few farmers’ kids are left. With the arrival of the first black children, Fuller realizes that, until then, she’s never known the family name of a single African – only the first names of the cook, gardener or Boss Boys.
A year later, Dad is deciding between moving his fragile family to Papua New Guinea, Mozambique, or Zambia. Opting for Zambia, their brink-of-life existence continues, but at least there’s a proper house, electricity and flush toilets on the farm owned by Germans.
Fuller has an extraordinary gift for language and brilliantly captures the intoxicating headiness of Africa, and all its smells: “…the wood smoke from the fires that heat our water, the boiled-meat smell of dog food… The spicy, woody scent of Africa on the changing wind.” Africans smell of “raw onions and salt… of people who are not afraid to eat meat and who smoke fish over open fires on the beach and who pound maize into meal and who work out-of-doors.” A witch doctor smells “as old as an ancient tree, like burnt dark.” A freshly killed impala smells like its life: “dust, rutting, shit, sun and rain.”
She swiftly summarizes Africa’s white survivors: “I don’t know many men who wear dark sunglasses. The men I know squint into the sun… they stare into the distance, into the hope-of-rain, or the threat-of terrorists, or the possibility-of-a-kudu.”
And its wildlife: “A kudu bull stares us down – the perfect white ‘V’ on his nose a hunter’s target. He is sniffling the air and then, with a magnificent leap, his horns laid across his back like medieval weapons, he is gone, plunging grayly into the crosshatched bush.”
Ultimately, although Fuller claims she was born with “the constitution of a missionary,” she and her sister Vanessa survive their African childhoods.
The 315-page Don’t Let's Go To The Dogs Tonight, with some interesting black and white photos, is published by Random House.