Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

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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”. She had absorbed the notion that white people were there to benevolently shepherd the natives, but came to question it when she met Africans for herself. 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. Weekend holidays on the shores of Lake Malawi running wild with expats-like-us while burning to a crisp.

In "Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller remembers her African childhood with candor and sensitivity. Her debut book, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood (Random House, 2001), was a New York Times Notable Book for 2002, the 2002 Booksense best non-fiction book, a finalist for the Guardian’s First Book Award and the winner of the 2002 Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize.Her 2004 Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier (Penguin Press) won the Ulysses Prize for Art of Reportage. NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - A worthy heir to Isak Dinesen and Beryl Markham, Alexandra Fuller shares visceral memories of her childhood in Africa, and of her headstrong, unforgettable mother. Then there is a life-changing tragedy, for which Bobo feels responsible: "My life is sliced in half". I was captivated by the “larger than life” personalities of her parents: Alexandra’s childhood revealed a wild, dysfunctional family with eccentric parents who lived life to the fullest, but also drank a lot, acted recklessly, lived on the edge, and practiced an extreme degree of hands-off parenting. It is so hot outside that the flamboyant tree outside cracks to itself, as if already anticipating how it will feel to be on fire.

The author tries to weave the story of her life in North Rhodesia,now Zimbabwe through a mixture of humour and emotions. Alexandra Fuller's story of her life as a child growing up in Rhodesia and various other East African countries in the late sixties, seventies and eighties is a gritty, uncompromising account of a family determined to continue in the colonial tradition of white farmers, despite the huge political and social changes occurring around them. The family clearly love Africa - but it certainly wasn't easy for them and they seemed to move between countries very easily. The author has that rare gift, being able to speak to us through the eyes and mind of the child that she was.Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, a memoir of life with Alexandra Fuller and her family on a farm in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe. Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight is about living through a civil war; it's about losing children and losing that war - and realising that the side you have been fighting for may well be the 'wrong' one. At first, it seemed that the entire book and the author herself would have laughed mockingly at that quaint desire for commonality. This British family was always in hostile, desolate environments, moving from Rhodesia to Zambia and Malawi.

I was completely mesmerized reading this highly compelling memoir of Alexandra Fuller's childhood experiences as a British expat family living in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), during the time of ending colonialism in the 70s-90s. It is the story of one woman's unbreakable bond with a continent and the people who inhabit it, a portrait lovingly realized and deeply felt. I envy her when I should probably not -- her life has clearly not been easy, but it has been rich with experiences. The mosquito coils, the baobab trees, the explosion of day birds, the greasy fish stews over rice, the smells of black tea, cut tobacco, fresh fire, old sweat, young grass. Even when it comes to her parents’, her white neighbours’, or black officials’ racist attitudes (to one another and to Indian merchants), she doesn’t excuse or condemn anyone; she lets their words and actions speak for themselves.I know that a lot of white Africans are terrible racists and have servants and are so prejudiced but if she showed us that some white africans (the narrator, perhaps) redeems themselves through seeing black people as human then it would have been a better, more poignant book. If Fuller's family and friends are any indication, it would appear that white people can only cope with African life through heavy boozing. That's the individual mystery of talent, a gift with which Alexandra Fuller is richly blessed, and with which she illuminates her extraordinary memoir. It describes her life in Africa so well that you can almost feel the heat and breath the smells and the atmosphere. Where it's normal to live carrying guns and needing escorts just to go to the local village, in case you drive over landmines or get assaulted.