An African Childhood

Title: Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight
Author: Alexandra Fuller
Publisher: Random House
Publication Year: 2001
Rating: A

Alexandra Fuller has shared a world full of life, color and racial tensions. Her memoir follows her childhood in Africa, where she must deal with the tragedies of her family and the danger of political and social backlashes from unsettled African nations.

Fuller pulls readers into her world by exploring the sights and sounds, glorious and horrifying, of all things African. Her descriptions are so powerful that you can almost feel the sweat pouring of her or feel the heat permeating from the horse beneath her. The clouds of mosquitoes and bugs are so dense you begin to itch just imagining them.

One of the strongest characters of the book is Fuller’s mother, Nicola. Throughout Fuller’s life, her mother has been at once maniacal, devastated and cheerfully drunk. Although her bouts of insanity are heartbreaking to encounter from the perspective of a young child, it is also reassuring the way Nicola ultimately loved all living creatures, and her children. Three of Nicola’s five children died of various causes. Yet – outside of her several mental episodes – she still managed the farm, was strong-willed and hardworking, and unfailingly loved her husband and children.

Although Fuller and her family were immersed in a country where they were the minority – originally from Scotland – Fuller takes a more subtle approach at exploring racial tensions. In the first part of the book, there are comments made regarding drinking of the same cups as the locals, or Fuller’s poor treatment of her nannies. Fuller is shocked as a child in Zimbabwe when black children begin to attend her all-white school. Soon, she is the minority again, at school and at home.

But with maturity comes a wider view of her surroundings and the poverty that has surrounded them her whole life. At 14, Fuller is first invited into the home of a black African.

This is not the same as coming uninvited into Africans’ homes, which I have done many times. As a much younger child, I would often eat with my exasperated nannies at the compound (permanently hungry and always demanding), and I had sometimes gone into the laborers’ huts with my mother if she was attending someone too sick to come to the house for treatment. I had ridden horses and bikes and motorbikes through the compounds of the places we had lived, snatching at the flashes of life that were revealed to me before doors were quickly closed, children hidden behind skirts, intimacy swallowed by cloth.

Fuller is touched by the fact that this family has invited her to share food and shade. She is moved by the fact that her hosts are sharing their food, which they have little of, and who are emaciated from hunger. She is taken aback by their poverty. When she leaves, she rushes home to gather clothes and toys to share with the family. Her mother wisely tells her before she leaves that no matter what she does, it won’t go away. “It was there before you noticed… And it will be there after you leave.” This experience presents a very different view to a young Fuller of the Africa she thought she knew.

At times the Fullers have very little social interaction with anyone but their servants and farm workers. This is one of the reasons such a close bond was created between Fuller and her family, especially with her sister Vanessa. Vanessa seemed to be everything Fuller was not: older, feminine, artistic. But they had grown up in the same harsh environment that created a tough core. Their banter was that which only the closest of sisters can experience. In some instances they were downright mean, but this did not stop them from being there for each other in the most distressing of circumstances.

Tim Fuller is the last piece of this complex family puzzle. Not many mentions of him exclude the mention of some type of drink in his hand or a cigarette hanging from his lips, but it is apparent Fuller loves her father very much. No matter the faults of any of the Fuller family members, each are strong, loving people. They have survived death, violence, storms and wars. They moved from one decrepit country to another, but always together.