I’m a true believer that how much you enjoy and take from a book has a lot to do with the timing and setting of where you read it. I first read Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight when I spent a year in Zambia between college and grad school. It was the perfect time to read a story that took place in that very part of the world. I came across it again and read it with just as much enjoyment as the first time. This is a memoir that tells of an African childhood. The story of a girl born in England and raised in Rhodesia, Zambia and Mozambique during a time of civil war in Rhodesia in the 1970s.
Alexandra tells a story of a childhood full of hard times. Some of her siblings died young due to disease and accidents, her mother depends on alcohol, and fighting and landmines were a daily reality. There was racism coursing through her childhood, in all directions. Her parents make some statements about black Africans that make me wince, and later they lose their farm in redistribution of land from white people to black people. She tells about how she is invited into the home for the first time by a black African after being in a motorbike accident at almost fourteen years old. Later that evening she returns to that families home “with a good proportion of my already meager closet.” She writes about how, “our faux-Spanish house, with its stucco walls and its long, cool stretches of linoleum and its vast veranda and its spacious garden, seems, suddenly, exhaustingly, too much.”
Yet amidst hardship she writes about her childhood in Africa and the land that she lived in with a great love that is clear. “What I can’t know about Africa as a child (because I have no memory of any other place) is her smell; hot, sweet, smoky, salty, sharp-soft. It is like black tea, cut tobacco, fresh fire, old sweat, young grass.” It describes both the harshness and the goodness of south central Africa. This is a wonderful memoir told with a frankness, humor and honesty that I enjoyed very much.
20/08/2009 at 6:08 am Permalink
I’ve also read Don’t let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight and really enjoyed it. I thought it described the plight of the immigrants who went to Africa to make money and have a colonial lifestyle but ended up almost as poor as the people around them, very well indeed.