Africa: the reality far exceeds the romance

 

I hate misery memoirs with a passion.

To me they’re basically sob-porn.

So when a book titled Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight appeared some years go, I gave it a miss even though it was mainly set in the town where I was born, Umtali in Eastern Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia).

My mistake – and something I have just rectified.

For the author, Alexandra Fuller, catches in vivid prose the essence of what it’s like to be a displaced white African.

In other words, love the continent passionately, but never really feeling you belong.

That sounds worse than it is as most white Africans I know have no doubt they belong.

Most could not live anywhere else.

Two of management’s nephews and her niece, for example, had a stab at living in England or America. They didn’t like it much.

But I’m not speaking of South Africa as it has a sizeable, deeply-rooted white population.

Instead, I’m referring to colonial Africa where whites have always been a tiny expat sliver and everything, from land ownership to residency, has been at the ruling regime’s whim.

South Africa is different and is extremely unlikely ever to have a Robert Mugabe or Hastings Banda style leader.

Alexandra Fuller has written about a supremely African experience, sparing nothing from her parents’ alcoholism to her mother’s manic depression.

As she says, ‘I try to dispel the romantic myths of Africa, the Out of Africa motif, which really exists only in safari camps any more.

‘Very few people live that existence’.

Exactly.

Mating call

But the main thing is that far from being a misery memoir, this book is instead a love letter to her parents.

Despite the heavy drinking, the partying, the chaos – they are quixotically magnificent.

When her father met her mother he introduced himself saying, ‘I’m Tim Fuller, of no fixed abode.’

Most women would have done an instant runner. To her wilful, beautiful mother, it was a mating call.

Her parents were tobacco farmers on the Mozambique border – the hottest of the hot zones during the Rhodesian bush war – and at the start of each planting season her mom would pawn her jewellery for seed.

If it was a good harvest, she got her rings back.

If the crop failed – well, there was always next year.

They lost the farm to squatters after independence.

Along the way her mother also lost three children – two soon after the birth, the other in a freak drowning accident.

They were so busy living on the edge with AK47-toting insurgents daily crossing their land that they didn’t notice a slime-filled hole with just enough sludge to smother a two-year-old.

Alexandra was in charge of her sister at the time. It’s an albatross she carries every day of her life.

Her parents now have a fish farm in Zambia.

How they got it is basically a blueprint for doing business in backwater Africa.

Her father, unable to buy land, approached a chief on the banks of the Zambezi and asked about leasing a plot near the river where he could breed tilapia.

It would give the tribes-people food and jobs.

The chief said good idea, but come back in three months time and bring a pair of flip-flops as a bonsella.

This carried on for two years, with the bonsellas getting more and more outrageous.

Just when Tim was about to give up the headman suddenly gave him a long-lease.

He was now sure Tim was serious.

Malaria

The farm is thriving; the Fullers employing locals and making a living themselves.

They could never live anywhere else.

But Alexandra does.

She now lives in Wyoming, having married an American whitewater river guide whom she met on the Zambezi.

But when he ditched his kayak for a suit, the marriage hit the rocks.

Her father was once asked by his bank manager what he had planned for his retirement.

He meant money. Tim answered without blinking, ‘A bloody good, permanently fatal dose of malaria.’

The symbolism is stark.

Alexandra is her fabulously chaotic father; her husband is the staid banker.

Like it or not, that’s what wild Africa will do to you.

It’s never boring.