Skip to main contentSkip to navigationSkip to navigation
Alexandra Fuller's mum in 1964
Alexandra Fuller’s mother in 1964.
Alexandra Fuller’s mother in 1964.

Alexandra Fuller’s African childhood

This article is more than 9 years old
Anne Enright marvels at Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller’s intense memoir of growing up in Rhodesia

What happens when it’s all your fault, and not your fault at all? At the centre of Alexandra Fuller’s first memoir is a terrible, avoidable death for which she, as a child, feels responsible. Nothing about it makes sense, except in a magical way, and her eyes are opened by that incomprehension to see the world with the stalled, wise gaze of an eight-year-old girl.

It is not a troubled gaze, though she lives through troubled times; it is just endlessly accurate. Fuller sees the adults around her with the fierce penetration of someone who has moved beyond blame. She grows up during the bush war that helped turn Rhodesia into Zimbabwe, and she survives that too, in the gung-ho colonial style. Don’t Let’s Go To the Dogs Tonight (2002) is full of the sheer bloody enjoyment of being alive. It is also a triumph of proper judgment, a political comedy, an act of clarity.

Fuller is completely clear about her parents’ racism: the way these white farmers call the black people around them “gondies” or “wogs”; the ones who fight them are “bolshy muntus”, “restless natives”; the ones who work for them are “nannies” or “boys”. The family lives in a world of taboo and projected shame. Growing up, Fuller does not like drinking from the same cup as a black person. When she is obliged to wash in water a black child has used she is surprised to discover that “Nothing happens … I do not break out in spots or a rash. I do not turn black.” The black body is contaminating and shamefully exposed, the white body forbidden. As a very young child, when she is bitten by a tick, the nanny and cook put down their tea and frown at her, but they will not look downthere. “Not there,” says the cook. “I can’t look there.” And yet, if she falls or hurts herself, her nanny “lets me put my hand down her shirt on to her breast and I can suck my thumb and feel how soft she is”. Her nanny’s breasts smell of the way rain smells when it hits hot earth. “I know, without knowing why, that Mum would smack me if she saw me doing this.”

These are difficult things to say – get the tone wrong and you will offend almost everyone – but Fuller’s gaze is equally astonishing when she directs it at the bodies of the white people around her. Her mother dances after a bath and the towel slips to expose “blood smeared” thighs; her own belly is distended by worms. A visiting missionary starts to squirm with embarrassment on the sofa, “like a dog rubbing worms out of their bum on a rug, or on the furniture, which we call sailing”.

These “protected” white bodies are filled with parasites, impala meat and booze. They live in houses that are eaten by termites, with taps that spurt out dead frogs. Their swimming pools are choked with algae, alive with scorpions, dotted with the small faces of monitor lizards that obscure hanging bodies, four- to six-feet long. Fuller’s mother pretends to be Scottish, but her heart is African – whether Africa wants that heart, or not. Being white is a kind of construct, the continent is experienced by Fuller in a way that is overwhelmingly physical, you might even say – given the worms – visceral. First of all is the smell, which in Zambia “is strong enough to taste; bitter, burning, back-throat-coating, like the reminder of vomit”. In Devuli, Zimbabwe, they drink “thin, animal-smelling milk” and go to sleep in “the kind of shattering silence that comes after a generator has been shut off”. The family moves from farm to farm, so it would be easy to describe the land, in its exoticism, as endlessly various and endlessly the same, but Fuller has a talent for difference. Each servant has their own personality, each place its own character.  She describes the different songs of the birds, the many kinds of African smoke (cigarette smoke, wood smoke, the smoke of mosquito coils), even the various kinds of heat. You might think it a matter of temperature, but heat, for Fuller, has its own sound, of grasshoppers and crickets that sing and whine, its own pace “a dragging, shallow, pale crawl”, it even has a shape. In the Burma Valley, the cool night air sinks and the rising air contains, in a layer, the tapped scents of midday. Here it is so hot that “the flamboyant tree outside cracks to itself, as if already anticipating how it will feel to be on fire”.

Everything, the beautiful and the terrible, is described with the intensity felt for something that could be lost at any moment. And indeed, the world she lives in, that of white Rhodesia, is about to be superseded and the war “lost”: “Like something that falls between the crack in the sofa. Like something that drops out of your pocket.” Meanwhile, her parents sleep with loaded guns by their beds, and her mother sews a camouflage band to cover her father’s watch, to keep him safe.

Alexandra Fuller’s parents with her sister Van in Kenya, 1966.
Alexandra Fuller’s parents with her sister Van in Kenya, 1966

Perhaps children are the only people who can see war properly, stripped of ideological excuse. The Fullers move to a farm in the Burma Valley, “the very epicentre and birthplace of the civil war in Rhodesia”, where Alexandra and her sister Vanessa, learn – or fail to learn – how to strip and reassemble a gun then shoot it. This to defend themselves from the “terrs” or terrorists, who will come “they said, to chop off the ears and lips and eyelids of little white children”. These children cheer when they hear the “stomach-echoing thump” of a mine exploding in the hills, because it tells them “either an African or a baboon has been wounded or killed”. The Fullers have a bomb-proofed Land Rover, called “Lucy”, complete with siren – that her parents only use to announce their arrival at parties. When they drive into town they go past Africans “whose hatred reflects like sun in a mirror into our faces, impossible to ignore”.

Everyone, not just the Land Rover, has a nickname or a pet name, often bestowed by Fuller’s father. Her mother is “Tub”, she is “Chookies”, her sister is “Van”. To the rest of the world she is “Bobo”. “Don’t be touchy about being called a baboon,” she wants to tell some black soldiers on the road. “I am their kid and they call me Bobo. Same thing.” This playful refusal to name things properly is of a piece with their bantering racist abuse: the parents both infantilise the threat and refuse to grow up themselves. They continue, through war, drought, bad harvests, the birth of their children and the loss of their children, to have fun, to drink and party and play cards, to dance and have another drink, and then drink a whole lot more.

After the central tragedy of the book, Fuller’s mother goes from being a “fun drunk to a crazy sad drunk”, and Fuller feels responsible for that too. Her parents’ wildness is now terrifying to their children and the war seems, at times, just an extension of that fear: “then the outside world starts to join in and has a nervous breakdown all its own, so that it starts to get hard for me to know where Mum’s madness ends and the world’s madness begins”.

The constant attention Fuller pays to her mother, to her agonies and her pleasures, results in an unforgettable portrait of a dashing, horse-riding, reckless woman, a constant reader and an expert in having a terrible, good time. “I am like one of the dogs,” Fuller says, “trying to read her mood, her happiness, her next move.” They are separated, not just by tragedy, but also by booze; the way her drunken mother can spend, “an agreeable hour, looking in the rear-view mirror and trying out various expressions to see which most suits her lips”. Fuller is also estranged, perhaps, by her mother’s “icy” look, the way her eyes, in her madness, shine “like marbles, cold and hard and glittering”. But when she is drunk, this fearsome, fun woman is a slow-motion thing; stymied, open to pity. She is “softly, deeply drunk”, and her sobs are also “soft”. It is Fuller’s favourite word. She uses it again to describe the farm in Zambia where her battered family goes to mend. Here the land is “softly voluptuously fertile and sweet smelling of khaki weed, and old cow manure and thin dust and msasa leaves”.

The land is female, Fuller is quite clear about this. “In Rhodesia we are born and then the umbilical cord of each child is sewn straight from the mother into the ground, where it takes root and grows. Pulling away from the ground causes death by suffocation, starvation. That’s what the people of this land believe.” The war is fought for this – whatever it is: “mother” might be a good enough word for it. “Farmers,” by which she means the Mashona people, “fight a more deadly, secret kind of war. They are fighting for land into which they have put their seed, their sweat, their hopes.”

Fuller is proud of her own talent as a farmer, her ability to read the land for potential yield. Her father drives her to her wedding in full rig, dress, veil, bouquet, and they talk about the fields along the road. “Wonder what he’s feeding?” says her father, of another man’s cattle, and Fuller says: “Cottonseed cake, I bet.”

It is a gallant way to live, perhaps, but Fuller is also thwarted by her parents’ cheery refusal to give the events around her a proper name. “Don’t exaggerate,” her mother says when she sees dead men on the road, “you saw body bags, not bodies.” The children are sexually assaulted by a neighbour, and the response is the same: “Don’t exaggerate.” In the back seat of the car, Fuller looks over to her sister and finds “she has stopped listening. Like an African.”

Fuller is not a participant. When Rhodesia becomes Zimbabwe, her boarding school empties of white children and fills with black. She is introduced to a boy called Oliver Chiweshe, whose nanny and driver are dressed in better clothes than her own parents, and she wonders at his second name: “I have not known the full name of a single African until now.”

The white colonists, she says, named places after themselves, their heroes, their women. They used hopeful names and unlikely, stolen names, such as Venice or Bannockburn. They gave their servants English names that were liable to change from one day to the next. But Bobo Fuller knows the original and the restored African names for places, and she knows how little they matter too. “The land itself of course was careless of its name. It still is. You can call it what you like, fight all the wars you want in its name. Change its name altogether if you like. The land is still unblinking under the African sky.”

Comments (…)

Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion

Most viewed

Most viewed