Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood

by Alexandra Fuller

  Mum slumps forward damply as Dad slows down. Dad gives her an anxious look. Mum feels his glance and smiles crookedly. She says, “Why are you slowing down?”

  “Hitchhikers.”

  “Oh.”

  Dad says, “Well, I can’t bloody well leave them on the side of the road, can I?”

  “I don’t see why not. It’s where we found them.” Mum, who picks up every stray animal she ever sees.

  Dad says, “Stupid bloody buggers.”

  At this point in our journey, when we see the hitchhikers, Vanessa has built a barrier of sleeping bags and suitcases between us so that she doesn’t have to look at me because, she has told me, I am so disgusting that I make her feel carsick. We have run out of the toilet paper we had brought for the trip. It now lies strewn in our wake or clings, fluttering, to thorn trees by the sides of the road. We have played I Spy until we accused each other of cheating.

  “Mu-uuum, Bobo’s cheating.”

  “I’m not, Vanessa is.”

  “It’s Bobo.”

  I start crying.

  “See? She’s crying. That means she was cheating.”

  Mum turns around in her seat and swipes ineffectually at us, slow-motion drunk. Until now she has been spending an agreeable hour looking at herself in the rearview mirror and trying out various expressions to see which most suits her lips. Now she says, “Anything more from either of you and you can both getoutandwalk.”

  Like a hitchhiker.

  And now this. The two mazungu figures looming out of the hot rush of road.

  “We don’t have room for hijackers,” says Vanessa, pointing at the pile between us and the back of the car, which is already stuffed to overflowing with suitcases and sleeping bags.

  “Hear that, Tim, ha ha. Vanessa calls them hijackers.”

  Dad stops and shouts out the window. “Where are you going?”

  “Wherever you’re going,” says the little blond one in an American accent.

  “We don’t have a plan,” says Dad, getting out and trying to make room for the two men among our luggage, among the sleeping bags, between Vanessa and me.

  “That’s fine with us,” says the little one.

  “Not us,” mutters Vanessa.

  The hitchhikers squeeze into their allotted spaces and Dad drives on through the empty land.

  The little one says, “I’m Scott.”

  “You’re a bloody idiot,” says Dad.

  Scott laughs. Dad lights a cigarette.

  The big, dark one says, “I’m Kiki.” He has a thick German accent.

  Mum turns around and smiles expansively to make up for Dad’s unfriendliness. “I’m Nicola,” she says, and then the effort of staring back at our new passengers obviously does not mix with coffee and brandy because she pales, hiccups, and turns abruptly to the front.

  “I’m Bobo,” I say. “I’m eight. Nearly nine.”

  Dad says, “Did you know there’s a war on?”

  “Oh, ja. Ve thought it vould be a good time to travel. Not too many other tourists.”

  Dad raises his eyebrows at our hitchhikers in the rearview mirror. He has sky-blue eyes that can be very piercing. He blows smoke out of his nose and flicks ash out of the window and his jaw starts to clench and unclench so I know it will be a long time before he speaks again.

  I say, “And that’s Vanessa, she’s eleven, nearly twelve.”

  Our avocado-green Peugeot heads into the sunset, toward the Motopos Hills. We stop to pee behind some bushes and Mum gives us each a banana and a plastic mug of hot, stewed tea from the thermos flask. We’re all reluctant to get back into the car. Kiki sleeps, Scott reads. Dad smokes, Mum looks at herself in the side mirror. I am reduced to staring out of the windows. Reading my collection of books (I have brought a small library to accompany me on my journey) is making me carsick, and the pungent rotting-sausage smell emanating from Kiki’s socks doesn’t help. The effort of being confined in a small space is making Kiki sweat. With six of us in one station wagon, Kiki has to lie with his nose pressed against the roof, on top of the suitcases and sleeping bags in the rear of the car. His feet poke out on either side of Scott and me.

  On the stretches of road that pass through European settlements, there are flowering shrubs and trees—clipped bougainvilleas or small frangipanis, jacarandas, and flame trees—planted at picturesque intervals. The verges of the road have been mown to reveal neat, upright barbed-wire fencing and fields of army-straight tobacco, maize, cotton, or placidly grazing cattle shiny and plump with sweet pasture. Occasionally, gleaming out of a soothing oasis of trees and a sweep of lawn, I can see the white-owned farmhouses, all of them behind razor-gleaming fences, bristling with their defense.

  In contrast, the Tribal Trust Lands are blown clear of vegetation. Spiky euphorbia hedges which bleed poisonous, burning milk when their stems are broken poke greenly out of otherwise barren, worn soil. The schools wear the blank faces of war buildings, their windows blown blind by rocks or guns or mortars. Their plaster is an acne of bullet marks. The huts and small houses crouch open and vulnerable; their doors are flimsy pieces of plyboard or sacks hanging and lank. Children and chickens and dogs scratch in the red, raw soil and stare at us as we drive through their open, eroding lives. Thin cattle sway in long lines coming to and from distant water and even more distant grazing. There are stores and shebeens, which are hung about with young men. The stores wear faded paint advertisements for Madison cigarettes, Fanta Orange, Coca-Cola, Panadol, Enos Liver Salts (“First Aid for Tummies, Enos makes you feel brand new”).

  I know enough about farming to know that the Africans are not practicing good soil conservation, farming practices, water management. I ask, “Why?” Why don’t they rotate? Why do they overgraze? Where are their windbreaks? Why aren’t there any ridges or contours to catch the rain?

  Dad says, “Because they’re muntus, that’s why.”

  “When I grow up, I’ll be in charge of muntus and show them how to farm properly,” I declare.

  “You’re quite a little madam,” Scott tells me.

  “I’m a jolly good farmer,” I tell him back. “Aren’t I, Dad, aren’t I a good farmer?”

  “She’s an excellent farmer,” says Dad.

  I smirk.

  Vanessa sinks further into herself. She waits until I look over at her and wipes the smug look off my face with one, mouthed word: “Freak.”

  Bo and Burma Boy

  CHIMURENGA,

  1979

  The young African men whom we used to see sloped up against the shebeens in the Tribal Trust Lands have disappeared as the war has intensified. They have left their homes and have headed into neighboring countries to join the guerrilla military camps there. On a clear day we can see where there are new trails snaking up through the rocky scrub into the hills where the minefields are. Now, when those young men come back from Mozambique or Zambia, picking their way across the minefields and scrambling down into jungles or flat, hot savannah, they don’t go home to their villages but stay in the bush to fight the war of liberation.

  As we dust our way through the Zimunya TTL on our way from the farm into town, we see only the women, the elderly, and young children. They shrink from our gaze, from our bristling guns. Some of the bigger children run after us and throw rocks at the car. Their mothers shout but their words are snatched away by dust, sucked up in the fury of our driving.

  The guerrillas come back into Rhodesia from their training bases under cover of darkness and hide in the bush in secret camps. The camps are easy to disassemble if Rhodesian forces are nearby. Ghost camps. Sometimes, my sister and I find the ghost camps on the farm; cold fires, empty tins, smashed bottles, bits and pieces of broken abandoned shoes. The grass is crushed in small circles, like the circles left by sleeping animals, when they are gone. The wind blows dryly though the hills. The traces of the camp are covered with dust, leaves, grass.

  If we perch on rocks around the ghost camps we can look out and see what t
he guerrillas must have seen when they were camped here. We see that they have watched us, that they must know where we go every day, our favorite walks, the way we ride. They can see me running down to the dairy first thing in the morning, and Mum and me leaving the house (too late to be back before it is dark) for her evening walk. They have seen Vanessa alone in the garden painting and reading. They have seen Dad striding down to the barns or kicking up sand as he scuds off on his motorbike. Still, they have not swooped from the hills and killed us, leaving us lipless, eyelidless, bleeding, dead.

  The guerrillas only come back into the villages from their bush camps at night. They come to hold pungwe (political rallies) and to recruit mujiba (young boys) and chimwido (young girls) to bring supplies to their bush camps. Under the black, silent, secret, careless African skies, they urge children, barely older than my sister, to come back into the bush with them, to join them in their fight for independence. They tell the mujiba and the chimwido to supply information about the movements of the Rhodesian forces.

  The mujiba and the chimwido are the small, dark, moving shadows in the thick jungle terrain. They are the high, crying voices, like hooting owls, on the still night air. They are the scurry of activity in the bush on the sides of the road. They can secrete themselves in culverts, in hollow trees, behind small rocks. Now the war has grown calmly violent, secret, earnest.

  Over a million African villagers are forced to live in “protected villages” surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by Rhodesian government forces so that there can be no more pungwe. Children of fighting age are kept at gunpoint. Toddlers, the elderly, and women crouch under the watchful eye of their captors. They are allowed to fetch water. They are fed. But the captives, too, are watching. Shading their eyes against the sun, they stare into the hills, which rustle suddenly with movement: a chain of swaying grass and bushes. The Rhodesian forces look quickly over their shoulders, but they see nothing. Only the grass moving in the wind. What the old women and the small children and the mothers see are familiar bodies (soldier brothers, sisters, fathers, aunts) in a column, moving quickly over rough ground. The women pull their babies to their breasts, sink back on their heels, and wait for liberation.

  The untended crops in the TTLs wither in the hot sun, curl up, and blow away. The African cattle hunch, starving, untended, until at last they push through the fences of neighboring commercial farms run by whites, where the grazing is fat and cultivated.

  The long-horned, high-hipped village Sanga cattle spread ticks to our pampered, pastured cows, who instantly succumb to heartwater, redwater, and sweating sickness and whose bellies swell with the babies of the native bullocks. They run in the hills behind our house, unhandled, until they become wild. At night we hear them roaring to each other, not the gentle pastoral calling of our domestic cattle in the home paddocks, but the noise of wild animals in the hills, kraaling against leopards and baboons for the night or calling in randy, unrequited shouts.

  Dad is away more and more, fighting. The material of his uniform wears thin, like wings, across his shoulder blades. The skin on his shoulder is bruised in a stripe, where his FN rifle hangs. Mum runs the farm now. When Dad is away, we are given a Bright Light—an armed man deemed unworthy to fight the actual war, but worthy enough to guard European women and children—to take care of us. Our Bright Light is called Clem Wiggens. He has tattoos from head to toe; his eyelids read “I’m” and “Dead.” His feet are labeled “I’m Tired” and “Me Too.” He comes to breakfast late, rumpled, having slept soundly through his watch. He has fiery red eyes, wafting marijuana. He is kind to the dogs, but if we ever get attacked, Mum says, “it’s just one more kid to take care of.” Sometimes she tells him to go and check up on the other women-without-men and their children. And so he leaves us and sits all day on another woman’s veranda and drinks gallons of her tea and stares with undisguised lust at her maids.

  Mum and I are having breakfast. Vanessa is painting on the veranda. The cook comes with a tray of toast: “Philemon wants to see you, madam.”

  I follow Mum outside, to the back door. The dogs, hoping for a walk, are at our feet.

  “Yes, Philemon?”

  “The wild cattle came into the home paddock last night, madam,” says Philemon. “They are jumping the dairy cows.”

  “Oh, hell.” Mum bites the inside of her lip.

  “They will make the cows sick,” says Philemon.

  “I know. I know that.”

  Philemon waits, dropping to his haunches and rolling tobacco in a square of newspaper.

  Mum sniffs. “I’ll see what I can do,” she says.

  She whistles up the dogs, orders me to put on my tackies for a walk, and stalks down to the paddock with my air gun tucked under her arm and her Uzi, as usual, slung over her front (where it is starting to rub permanent gray marks on her clothes). I am trotting breathlessly behind her.

  “What are you going to do?” I ask, hopping over a patch of paper thorns and ducking under the barbed wire as Mum strides through the Rhodes grass toward the native cows, colorful and raw-boned against our square-rumped red cows.

  “Shoot the buggers in the balls,” she says.

  “Oh.”

  “See?” she says, as we come up to the native cattle, who are grazing near our cows, but in their own distinct group, like newcomers at a party. “They’re getting at my little heifers.”

  “Oh.”

  She says, “Get away from my nice cows,” and aims a shot at the offending bullocks’ rear ends with my air gun. She misses.

  “Bugger it.”

  “We need Vanessa,” I say. But Vanessa is in the middle of another art project, which means she won’t be off the veranda for days now.

  Mum edges closer to the native cows, who move mildly away from her, swishing their tails and keeping their heads steadfastly low in the high, tangled Rhodes grass. “Now,” Mum says, raising the air gun to her shoulder and letting go with a pop. Nothing happens.

  “Did I miss?”

  “Which one were you aiming for?”

  “Any of them. Did I hit one?”

  “I don’t think so.” I frown into the high summer sun, a big ball of red hanging through the haze of wildfires, over the yellow fig tree on the edge field. “It’s hard to tell in this light.”

  Mum hands me the gun. “You have a go,” she says.

  I break the gun, slip a pellet into the barrel, take aim, and fire.

  But the native cattle are tough. The pellets from my air gun ping off their unyielding hides even at close quarters.

  “Damn it,” says Mum. She picks up a clod of earth and throws it feebly toward the offending cows. “Go away!” she screams. “Go home!” The clod of earth falls to the ground not far from our feet and crumbles in a little sighing breath of dust. Some egrets, startled, fly out of the grass, like a tattered white picnic cloth being shaken out of the earth, and then settle again at the cows’ feet.

  Mum’s shoulders sink, and her face folds, defeated.

  I say, “They’re quite fat, some of them.”

  “On our grazing.”

  We start to walk back to the house, up past the diesel-smelling workshop and the sharp-tobacco-smelling barns. Mum is silent and angry, stomping along the road.

  The next morning when I come to breakfast Mum is already two-thirds of the way through her pot of tea.

  I sit down and wait for July to bring me a bowl of porridge. I order two fried eggs with toast.

  Mum says, “Eat up,” looking over my shoulder and out of the window. “The horses are ready.”

  I am surprised. Usually Mum dawdles through breakfast, listening with half an ear to the radio if it is the news or Story on the Air and reading a book propped up on the toast rack while simultaneously dealing with the constant flow of requests that come from laborers at the back door, via the trembling hand of the cook, who is greeted with a hostile “What is it now?”

  “Malaria, madam,” says July, or “Sick baby,” or “S
nake bite,” or “Accident with fire.”

  But this morning Mum tells July, “I am not seeing anyone. Tell them to go away. They can come tomorrow.”

  The cook hovers, distressed. “But, madam . . .”

  “But nothing. I mean it,” says Mum. “They won’t die if they wait another day.”

  She shoulders her Uzi and pulls on her hat. “Come on, Bobo,” she says. “You’ll have to leave the rest.”

  I stare in dismay at my half-eaten bowl of porridge and my promising plate of eggs and toast.

  “But—”

  “We’ve got work to do.”

  “What?”

  “We’re going to round up every bloody stray cow on this farm,” she says, “and have a cow sale.”

  That day Mum and I ride up into the foothills on game paths and tracks that the terrorists have used. These paths are already strangled with fresh growth, with the promise of a new rainy season coming, the quick green threads of creepers stretching over old, dry tracks, swallowing footpaths, and demonstrating how quickly this part of Africa would reclaim its wild lands if it were left untrodden. The horses struggle over rocks, their unshod hooves slipping against the hard ground as we climb ever higher into the mountains. Mum rides ahead on Caesar, her big bay Thoroughbred, an ex-trotter rescued from an abusive home and made ridable again under Mum’s patient training. I am on my fat chestnut pony, Burma Boy, a bad-tempered and ill-behaved animal; bucking, bolting, kicking, and biting regularly—all of which, Dad says, is good for me. The dogs swarm, noses down, through the bush ahead of us, yelping with excitement when they put up a hare or mongoose and bounding hysterically through the bush if they catch sight of a duiker or wild pig.

  By late morning, we are on the border of our farm in the high, thick bush, as close to Mozambique as I have ever been on a horse.

  “Keep your eyes peeled for buffalo bean,” says Mum.

  I start to itch at once and look ahead nervously. Buffalo bean is a creeper boasting an attractive purple bloom in the spring, followed by a mass of beans that are covered in tiny velvet hairs, which blow off in the wind and can lodge in your skin. The hairs can stimulate a reaction so severe, so burning and persistent, that it has been known to send grown men mad, tearing into the bush in search of mud in which to roll to alleviate the torture. I am also compelled to crouch, my head pressed against Burma Boy’s neck, to avoid the strong, elaborate webs that spread taut across our path. In the middle of these bright, tight webs there are big red- and yellow-legged spiders waiting hopefully for prey to fall. Burma Boy’s ears are laced with the silvery threads.