Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

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As the tension builds in the novel the author knows when it has reached the breaking point and throws in some humor. The writing is poetic, yet understated, letting the beauty and harshness of the landscape and her experiences speak for themselves. OK, I couldn't live there but this author made me love Africa and that is strange because it has so many problems, there is so much wrong, so much that has to be fixed.

This is a book I definitely plan to read again, knowing that I will get even more out of it the second time. This is the only hint of commentary that really came through, with the implication that this was the first time Fuller started re-evaluating what she had been told to think her entire life, instead reflecting on her firsthand experiences. As more black students and staff transfer in, a drought comes on and the students are made to share bathwater. At times funny, at times tragic, at times eccentric, at times heroic, Fuller gives us a wonderful story told through the eyes of a gradually maturing child.The adult Fuller includes enough details (her habitual childhood imperiousness to darker-skinned adults, those adults' dismay, then anger at her impossible harping) for us to understand exactly what is at stake, and also to let us understand the ironies. Fuller regards herself "as a daughter of Africa", who spent her early life on farms in Zimbabwe, Malawi and Zambia throughout the turbulent 1970s and 80s, as her parents "fought to keep one country in Africa white-run", but "lost twice" in Kenya and Zimbabwe. I suppose you could argue she should have done more to challenge the views around her, such as when Mum is bemoaning the fact that she wants just one country in Africa to stay white-run, but she was only a child at this point. The author tries to weave the story of her life in North Rhodesia,now Zimbabwe through a mixture of humour and emotions.

From 1972 to 1990, Alexandra Fuller--known to friends and family as Bobo--grew up on several farms in southern and central Africa. She hardly bothers to blink, it's as if she's a fish in the dry season, in the dried-up bottom of a cracking river bed, waiting for rain to come and bring her to life. Alexandra Fuller's book tells the story of her family of white Zimbabwean tenant farmers in the years before and after Independence. I suppose I enjoyed this book; I liked Fuller's honest, nostalgia-free style of writing and found her descriptions of her childhood Africa highly evocative. I appreciated that we, as whites, could not own a piece of Africa, but I knew, with startling clarity, that Africa owned me.She did a masterful job creating distinct realistic voices with multiple accents to distinguish between the different ages, genders, and nationalities found within the stories.