What Book to Read?

This rather odd title comes from a poem by A.P. Herbert, the next line of which is ‘For mother will be there’; these lines form the epigraph to the book (2002). ‘Going to the dogs’ usually means sliding into decay, and the phrase is used once in that sense in the narrative. But while there are many examples of poverty, neglect and misery in this memoir (or is autobiography?), it seems to me more about the survival of hope than the onset of despair. Fuller’s mother has many problems, but she isn’t presented, as in the poem, as a reason for staying away from a good time. The subtitle – An African Childhood – is perhaps more revealing.

Alexandra Fuller – BoBo for short – was conceived in Africa, where her parents were farmers, but was born in England in 1969. In 1972 her family – mother, father and elder sister – leave England for (the then) Rhodesia, just as the civil war between the white minority and the black African nationalists was hotting up. They settle on a farm close to the border with Mozambique, where many of the nationalists are trained and infiltrated back into Rhodesia. And if this wasn’t dangerous enough, the land is hot and barren, and the farming difficult. At the end of the war, their farm is ‘redistributed’ to a supporter of the incoming President Mugabe, and they move from what has become Zimbabwe to neighbouring Malawi, then under the dictatorial rule of President Banda. Later they move again, this time to Zambia. The family is poor by European standards, though both girls attend private boarding schools, and they always have native servants and farm workers.

A lot of the memoir deals with the many tragedies and rather fewer triumphs of family life in harsh conditions. A brother had already died before BoBo was born, a younger sister drowned and a younger brother was stillborn. This takes a terrible toll on her mother, who turns increasingly to alcohol. This doesn’t at least initially stop her from working extremely hard on whichever farm they were living on, and expecting her children to work hard and be self-reliant too. Many of the incidents tell of situations which most people would find horrendous, but which BoBo takes in her stride.

Then there is the war, which is the context for the family’s dramas. Fuller’s father fights on the white side, and her mother is ardently pro white minority rule. Writing from an adult point of view, Fuller is able to see both sides of the race issue; during the childhood she is describing, it dawns gradually on her that there are two sides. She doesn’t preach about it, but has simply woven this realisation into her story. Discussing the original expropriation of black Africans from their land by white settlers, she says: ‘What word can I use? I suppose it depends on who you are. I could say: Taking? Stealing? Settling? Homesteading? Appropriating?’ She feels a deep love of Africa, and understands that all Africans – black and white – feel an unbreakable bond with it. ‘In Rhodesia, we are born and then the umbilical cord of each child is sown straight from the mother onto the ground where it takes root and grows. Pulling away from the ground cause death …’ Returning from overseas aged 22, she says ‘that sweet, raw-onion, wood-smoke, acrid smell of Africa rushes into my face and I want to weep for joy.’ When young, she accepts her mother’s belief that Africans are inferior, and the black nationalist fighters are always described as ‘terrorists’. But she also shows her mother saving the life of one of their black maids. Even the loss of their farm is treated whimsically rather than bitterly; the new black owner will not own it any more than they had, for it would still belong to the mortgage company. ‘They alone of everyone, seem unmoved by the fierce fight for land through which we have just come.’ Yet by 1990, well after the Fullers had left, 70% of arable land was still owned by whites; it seems that Bobo’s family lacked the power and resources to hold onto their land, and were marginal even to the expat community.

Fuller writes in the present, jumping backward and forwards in time. I needed the dates and the map of South East Africa she provides to follow the story, where sometimes she is eight, and other times eighteen, sometimes in Zimbabwe and sometimes in Malawi, though always of course looking back at incidents of her childhood. If there is a pattern in this selection and placement of material, I wasn’t aware of it, though the narrative overall moves from Fuller’s childhood through teenage years to adulthood. She writes engagingly, presenting herself as naïve and rather gauche, which allows her to laugh gently at herself and her family, though she clearly loves them all, even, or maybe especially, her difficult mother.  There is also a lot of pain, particularly around the death of her younger sister.

I’ve called this a memoir rather and an autobiography because a lot of things are left out, and the completeness of the picture seems to be the point of differentiation. At the end of the memoir, Fuller is returning from studying in Canada and Scotland, but she never discusses her intellectual life. We read about the rigours of her boarding school, but nothing about what she learnt and how it affected her. She reads her way through her mother’s library – but what does she read? This means for me that the story is only about a partial coming of age. I also wondered often about her family’s origins, and their motivation for staying on under such difficult conditions, but this isn’t really discussed either.

Alexandra Fuller has written other non-fiction works, including Cocktail Hour Under The Tree Of Forgetfulness about her mother, Nicola Fuller. You can read more about Alexandra here.