About this deal
Alexandra Fuller’s family arrived in Rhodesia via way of Darby, England in 1966 when she was only a toddler. When she is obliged to wash in water a black child has used she is surprised to discover that “Nothing happens … I do not break out in spots or a rash.
And she instilled in Bobo, particularly, a love of reading and of storytelling that proved to be her salvation. Children and chickens and dos scratch in the red, raw soil and stare at us as we drive thought their open, eroding lives. Meanwhile, her parents sleep with loaded guns by their beds, and her mother sews a camouflage band to cover her father’s watch, to keep him safe.These children cheer when they hear the “stomach-echoing thump” of a mine exploding in the hills, because it tells them “either an African or a baboon has been wounded or killed”.
It is a gallant way to live, perhaps, but Fuller is also thwarted by her parents’ cheery refusal to give the events around her a proper name. At the centre of Alexandra Fuller’s first memoir is a terrible, avoidable death for which she, as a child, feels responsible. I appreciated that we, as whites, could not own a piece of Africa, but I knew, with startling clarity, that Africa owned me.
Usually when I choose to re-read a book I feel like I'm wasting time that could be devoted to reading a new book. it's a slipping and damp thing she's doing with her lips which looks as much as if she's lost control of her mouth as anything else. The rainy season that brought with it gray solid sheets of water which rendered roads as thick and sticky as porridge.