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Books : History : Countries & Regions : Africa : Southern
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Don't Let's go to the Dogs Tonight is a wonderfully evocative memoir of Alexandra Fuller's African childhood. 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. This is a profoundly personal story about growing up with a pair of funny, tough, white African settlers, and living with their "sometimes breathlessly illogical decisions", as they move from war-torn Zimbabwe to disease and malnutrition in Malawi, and finally the "beautiful and fertile" land of Zambia.Central to Fuller's book is the intense relations between herself and her parents, a chain-smoking father able to turn round any farm in Africa, her glamorous older sister Vanessa, and the character who sits at the heart of the book, Fuller's "fiercely intelligent, deeply compassionate, surprisingly witty and terrifyingly mad" mother.
Fuller weaves together painful family tragedy with a wider understanding of the ambivalence of being part of a separatist white farming community in the midst of Black African independence. The majority of the book focuses on Fuller's early years in war-torn Zimbabwe, with "more history stuffed into its make-believe, colonial-dream borders than one country the size of a very large teapot should be able to amass." This is the most successful dimension of the book, as Fuller describes growing up on farm where her father is away most nights fighting "terrorists", and stripping a rifle takes precedence over school lessons. The sections on Malawi and Zambia are more prosaic, but this is a lyrical and accomplished memoir about Africa, which is "about adjusting to a new world view" and the author's "passionate love for a continent that has come to define, shape, scar and heal me and my family." --Jerry Brotton
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On Good Friday in 1914, a young British Army officer named Stewart Gore-Browne first glimpsed a lake in what was then Northern Rhodesia that the local Bemba tribe called Shiwa Ngandu ("Lake of the Royal Crocodiles"). At that moment, a love affair began which would last his lifetime, as the enraptured Gore-Browne set about creating a very British idyll in the African bush, complete with redbrick house and a terrace on which uniformed staff would serve champagne and cocktails. This is the complicated story of a man, his colonial vision, and the burden it became, set against the country in which he battles to realise it.Christina Lamb has assembled the story from the mass of diaries and correspondence that lay within the now crumbling and neglected house. It is an extraordinary tale that leaps off the page with the grace of a springbok. Gore-Browne initially appears an extinct species, all Harrovian vowels, and prone to pepper with lead shot anything that moves. He is, however, infused with a liberal, humane streak that leads him in later life to support Kenneth Kaunda and the UNIP in their fight for power. Indeed, Kaunda said of him, "... he [Gore-Browne] was born an English gentleman, and died a Zambian gentleman".
Gore-Browne's personal life progressed from an unrequited love to a dramatic marriage, while still indulging in a formidably passionate correspondence with a favourite aunt. There are times when you wish for a timely swipe of the novelist's pen, but it is the nature of this beast that questions remain unanswered; what holds this engrossing chronicle in place is the Africa House itself, and the lives that unfold in and around it, perched incongruously as it is in a country that has outgrown it. --David Vincent
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Martin Meredith's new book on Robert Mugabe, Mugabe: Power and Plunder in Zimbabwe comes as a welcome antidote to the current one-dimensional portrayals of the president as an "evil monster" that narrow our understanding of the man. Meredith has spent most of his career reporting on Zimbabwe and South Africa, first as a foreign correspondent and latterly as an academic, so his credentials are impeccable. He does not shirk from condemning Mugabe for his single-minded obsession with power that has left Zimbabwe's roads flowing with blood and its economy bankrupt, but Meredith reminds us that in his earlier days Mugabe was a much more considered political radical. Mugabe spent his early years under the tutelage of the Jesuits, and only abandoned religion in favour of Marxism after he won a scholarship to study at university in South Africa where he quickly became a highly politicised member of the African National Congress. He came to Western attention in the late 1970s when the apartheid regime in Rhodesia, as Zimbabwe was then known, creaked to its inevitable demise and Britain set about establishing an independent African regime in its former colony. Britain did its best to rig the results in favour of its preferred candidate the moderate and easily controlled Bishop Muzorewa, but much to the surprise of the Thatcher government--but to no-one in Zimbabwe--Mugabe's ZANU party romped home as landslide victors. Britain held its breath for the backlash and... nothing happened. In fact, Mugabe showed himself to be surprisingly conciliatory and Christopher Soames, the British governor-general who had been appointed to supervise the elections reported that he "ended up not only implicitly trusting him but also fondly loving him as well".So where did it all go wrong? It is tempting to suggest that his father's desertion and the death of his young son were key factors in Mugabe's subsequent emotional detachment, but Meredith resists drawing such a linear psychological equation. Instead he catalogues the landmark events, such as the scandal of the war veteran pensions, that led Mugabe to compromise both his morality and his country and one is left with the impression that Zimbabwe's fate was inevitable given that Mugabe's only guiding motivation was to hang on to power whatever the cost. Mugabe: Power and Plunder in Zimbabwe is the first book of a brand new non-fiction imprint, PublicAffairs Ltd, that is dedicated to following the standards of IF Stone and Benjamin Bradlee: both would be more than happy to be associated with Meredith's volume. --John Crace
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Owen Sheers, already picked out as poetry's bright hope by poet laureate Andrew Motion, reveals with The Dust Diaries that he is also a dab hand at biography, travel writing and fiction--all in one gripping book. A stray comment from his grandmother one summer afternoon whets his interest in her uncle--a poet called Arthur Shearly Cripps--and the more Sheers finds out, the more Cripps and his life intrigues him. Gradually, a fragmentary portrait emerges of this distant relative who left England for Southern Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe) where he lived as a missionary until his death.Given the assumption of guilt against missionaries of the era, readers may well be surprised to find themselves warming to Cripps. He was clearly a thorn in the side of both the colonial administration and the Anglican church, constantly siding with the Africans. Yet Sheers does avoid the temptation of making him a saint. Why did this successful man leave England? The untold dust diaries of experience are what Sheers imagines as he tries to come closer to his relative. The book successfully shuffles fictionalised episodes from Cripps's life, including wartime adventure, with Sheers's visits to Zimbabwe. Sheers writes lyrically and vividly of each experience. We come to know his remarkable ancestor, the Shona people he lived with and the troubles and beauty of their land. Fittingly, it is at the all-night, all-singing, all-dancing Shearly Cripps Festival--held at Cripps's grave--that Sheers finally learns what his ancestor means to him, in a very Shona way. --Stefan Tobler
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