Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

This biography of an African childhood is nothing short of a literary triumph.

The writing is of the highest quality and an extraordinary story. It is about White farmers being forced into a semi-nomadic existence by civil war, expropriation of their farms, climate change, and the loss of children. And the deteriorating mental health of a sparklingly-insightful mother suffering from manic depression and alcoholism.  

Described through the eyes of the girl narrator who confronts the worst and best of Africa with almost shocking humour (and a deep, deep love for the continent)- you will find you have a classic in… show more.

This memoir of Alexandra Fuller’s childhood is a hilarious take on her family’s experience of farming in Zimbabwe, Malawi, and Zambia in the 1970s and 1980s. It is a refreshing reminder of what it was like to live and grow up as a member of the white minority intent on remaining in power during a fast-changing, violent, and deeply unstable period in the history of southern Africa. It is a wonderful portrayal of some of the traumas of growing up with a witty, mad, and heavy-drinking mother who had to endure the unspeakable tragedy of losing a child, a chain-smoking… show more.

When I first read Alexandra Fuller’s memoir twenty years ago, I felt so glad that someone had finally put words to what I experienced as an expatriate youth in Africa. The book inspired me to speak my own story, which had been hiding inside me for 40 years, suppressed every time I sidestepped the question, “Where are you from?” My family was quite different than Fuller’s. We came to Ethiopia from midwestern America, not England. My father was a doctor, not a farmer.  And there was no alcohol in our teetotalling missionary bungalow. But Fuller, with her story of Rhodesia’s… show more.

In this wonderful memoir, it’s Fuller’s crazy mother who dominates the story. With her husband and two daughters, Fuller’s often maniacal mother forges a life farming in Rhodesia, beating the bush for stray cattle, fighting the brutal climate, cobbling together enough food, money, and beer to survive. Through Fuller’s child-eyes, we look at her white, colonist family, at the Rhodesians who don’t welcome them, and at the struggle to endure and overcome. It’s a story that finds humor and humanity in spite of the family being forced from their farm to end up tenant farmers.

Fuller’s astounding account of growing up in Africa is singular, engrossing, and unforgettable. She never once shies away from ugly truths or attempts to justify the behavior of the family and community whose ideals and destructive vices she is powerless—as a child—to gainsay. With raw and unvarnished language, the author leads us through her young life punctuated by loss, compounded by the trauma of growing up in a war zone, and inexorably unmoored by her mother’s descent into mental illness.

This book resonates strongly with me as it is partly set in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) when I was there as a young, naive geologist. But it is much more than that. It is a child’s view of a dysfunctional family struggling amidst the chaos of civil war and the changes that independence brings. Yet, despite her mother’s alcoholism and the trials of getting by in a radically changing society, Fuller never loses a child’s perspective and the story is laced with beauty and humour—there are places for tears and belly laughs.