Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight (2001)

An almost perfect companion piece to Peter Godwin's 'Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa' - another childhood account of life in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe. Perhaps it's something about the angle from which they view the world, but a childhood remembered somehow seems to convey more about the 'white tribe of Africa' than many scholarly accounts. Their uneasy relationship with the land and the people of Africa is conveyed perfectly, but - as becomes clear - their relationship to Africa is stronger than their connection with the rest of the world. As others have noted, this is a classic on just about every level. Very highly recommended, but noting that this is strong stuff. ( )

This had been on my to-read list since the friends who founded Good Books Lately included it among their first recommendations. It's remarkable for its blatant, unquestioning racism; for how you find yourself inescapably in these alien lands, nations, cultures; for its descriptions of weather and landscape. It doesn't cohere into a single narrative with development and a plot but not everything has to. ( )

A vivid portrait of growing up white in central Africa. Fuller's love for her parents' hard-scrabble farms and the African landscape is palpable; her writing is lovely. She's unabashed about her family's post-colonial, racial attitudes, which made me wish for more reflection. With memoirs like this that are primarily a record of childhood, I usually wonder WHY these stories might matter, to the author or to her reader. But I did enjoy the read.

"What I can’t know about Africa as a child (because I have no memory of any other place) is her smell; hot, sweet, smoky, salty, sharp-soft. It is like black tea, cut tobacco, fresh fire, old sweat, young grass. When, years later, I leave the continent for the first time and arrive in the damp wool sock of London-Heathrow, I am (as soon as I poke my head up from the intestinal process of travel) most struck not by the sight, but by the smell of England. How flat-empty it is; car fumes, concrete, street-wet." (130) ( )

This is a vividly and clearly written memoir of growing up in Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi. The author’s parents are British colonials, come to farm the open land of Africa. They have five children there, and lose three of them, and one of the surviving daughters, Bobo, tells this story. Everyone and everything is described quickly, tersely and tellingly. At times it’s beautiful, at times funny, at times alarming, and only occasionally gentle.

No judgments are offered, and we fully enter into Bobo’s world. We see all the ways in which she was quintessentially African, and also all the ways in which she grew up separated from Africa.
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Why I didn't read this a decade ago, I have no idea. Sometimes I'm just dumb. I'm not sure I could have lived through such a childhood in as graceful a manner as "Bobo" Fuller. ( )