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Description
The book is set within the background of a country fighting for a life breath. A memoir tells several stories at once. Neighboring to the civil war-stricken Mozambique, Rhodesia was slowly moving towards a Nationalist regime. The country was a trap with road mines and guerillas around the corner. The book finds Bobo, Alexandra Fuller, growing in and around several farms in central and southern Africa, from 1972 to 1990. Her mother was the ordinary African homemaker worried about household chores. However, her father took sides with the whites during the Rhodesian civil war and fought with black guerrillas. Nicola was not a soft-hearted mother. The story recounts Fuller’s effort to find laughter when there was nothing to find it in. Her mother wanted her children to be self-reliant, and self-sufficient, and with an iron will to take life head-on. Not that she loved her children less but due to the circumstances, that life demanded of them. Alexandra Fuller writes how a girl matured into a woman in the background of her home. With her mother prompting and guidance, Alexandra Fuller grew to be a great reader and storyteller (Adamson. P11).
Main body
It is difficult to follow the subjects the book handles. Her father has joined with the white side and her mother is left with the kids. Her parents’ racism and the relations between the whites and blacks during the time of war make the complicated narrative. The whites in Rhodesia were trying hard to keep the country under their rule. The best of school and other things were reserved for the whites. The book moves through so much that it is difficult for the reader to imagine. How the nights are full of sounds, the atmosphere always forecasting trouble at any moment. Their mother saving them from an Egyptian spitting cobra, her father going out every morning into the bush to fight the guerillas, Fuller’s book has the promise of much reading to come. Her innocence shines throughout the book. That she has captured the beauty of every night sky and each desert puddle is out of the question. Fuller had given her heart to Africa and finally becomes aware that “Africa owned” her (Adamson. P12).
Her purpose and how she tries to achieve it
The book is a vivid and very personal account of the war, more powerful than any sociopolitical analysis. She is looking back at the life of an extraordinary family during very trying times. It is a fact that the book not only lets us see Africa But also feels it as well. The smells and pictures of the great continent are too vivid in the book. She says that whatever she writes about, she should be able to smell it first. The most important book, says Fuller, during her childhood was Anne Frank’s diary. She wonders how with such innocence and clear voice is ignored. If this book could not prevent us from fighting class wars and the foolish death of innocents for such foolish reasons, she wonders what could. Now critics feel that this book talks about the relations of the white settlers with black natives of Rhodesia. It brings out the mindset of the settler. It is also about how Fuller is trying to unlearn this mindset. Her mother is the dominating, unchanging, willful, dominating and manic-depressive, the typical settler. She leaps out of the page as a symbol before us of the settler ideology. Through her family, she analyzes the settler racism, of how the whites, settled in that part of the world, both cared for and utilized the natives. Ultimately, she learns, or every settler at heart learns that Africa is not hers/his (Adamson, p11).
Personal reflections and reactions
For me, the book was a good read. Its way of dealing with the sights and smells of Africa is really touching. A world totally foreign to me had opened up. To imagine children of the age of five, whom we find watching animations and crying all the time; cleaning and stripping rifles sounds frightening. Then the same parents, who gave them rifles, teaching them Shakespeare, well I would say that was just the part of being a settler in a civil war-torn country. My next thought was that it was a hand-to-mouth existence. Even though the parents are rather negligent, they seem to be clothed in romanticism. Because it is their daughter’s eyes filled with love that’s describing them. Yes, there is a charm to the childlike view expressed by the author. Mother ‘Nicola’, the self-reliant and self-willed, a dominant woman becomes part Florence Nightingale, the part animal. With the father gone into the bush more or less often, they could not have done without the mother. Therefore, Nicola, I would say is dominant throughout the book. Even the harshest critics would say that the story was at least worth reading. But with all this, there is often the repetition of things not happening in spite of expectation. The only answer that I could find for myself to this was that this is not fiction, but life. Things do not happen too often, but whatever happens, the small triumphs and the big tragedies, alter life and its course, forever. The author treats even the death of three siblings like this. Everything, the smaller and larger tragedies of life are put down to ‘bad luck’. After reading this, I felt that my reading would have been more rewarding if I had more knowledge of Africa and its settlers (Adamson, p12).
Works cited
Adamson, Linda. Thematic guide to popular nonfiction. Westport: Greenwood Press. 2006. P11-12.
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