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

by Alexandra Fuller

  I stand up and pull the motorbike up. “Are you okay?”

  She shrugs and smiles. The boy nestles into the soft crease of her neck and calms himself with soft, diminishing sobs.

  “Pepani, pepani. I’m so sorry,” I say. “I didn’t see him. Is he okay?”

  The woman shrugs and smiles again and I realize that she does not speak English. I have only learned a few phrases of Chnyanja, none of which (“Thank you”; “How are you?”; “I am fine”; “What is the name of your father?”) seem appropriate for my current predicament.

  I put my right hand to my heart and bob a curtsy, right knee tucked behind left knee, in the traditional way, to reinforce my apology. The woman looks uneasy; she pats her young son’s head almost as a reflex and glances, as if for help, into the shadows under the drying crop of tobacco hanging in a long, low shed next to her hut.

  “It’s no problem, madam,” a man’s soft voice says from the shadows. I shade my eyes against the harsh, blanching sun. There, under the cool, damp leaves, lying on a reed mat, is a man lying almost naked, with a young boy of twelve or thirteen, also hardly clothed, by his side. For a moment I am too surprised to reply. The man, obviously the father of the toddler into whom I have just crashed, props himself up on one elbow and rubs his bare, pale-shining collar bone with the thick fingers of one hand. The boy at his side stirs, rolls over, and hangs an arm over the older man’s neck, his face stretched up in a grimace which is half-smile, half-yawn. The boy’s shorts have worn through at the crotch and his member is exposed, flaccid and long against his thigh.

  The man begins to softly caress the boy’s arm, almost absentmindedly, as if the arm draped around his neck were a pet snake. I am suddenly aware of how softly quiet the hot afternoon is: a slight buzzing of insects, a crackle of heat from the drying thatch that covers the barn and house, the distant cry of a cockerel clearing his throat to warn of the coming of mid-afternoon when work will resume. My stomach growls, empty-acid. I feel the sun burning the back of my neck, my eyes stinging, my muscles aching. I pull the motorbike up and have begun to climb back onto it when the man suddenly pulls himself off the mat, the child still hanging from his neck.

  The man is smiling. I see now that he is much older than I had first thought. I also see that the boy around his neck is disabled; he is a combination of helplessness (his arms and legs are as thin as bones and devoid of muscles) and of uncontrollable, rigid spasms, which send him backward against the softly restraining cradle of his father’s arms. His head rolls, his mouth sags open sideways, and saliva hangs to his chin. He makes soft, puppy noises. I have never seen this, an African child in this condition. It comes to me, in one sweep, that most children like this boy are probably allowed to die, or are unable to survive in the conditions into which they are born.

  The man says, “Are you fine?”

  I nod. “Thank you.”

  He frowns and points at the sun with the flat of his hand, which also supports his son’s head. “You are out now? In this hot sun? You can see from the sun that it is time to rest.”

  I nod again. “I was stuck.” I point to the motorbike. “I fell in a well.”

  “Ah.” The man laughs. “Yes, that is difficult.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say—I indicate the toddler, embarrassed in case the man thinks I am apologizing for his older, disabled child. I quickly add, “I didn’t see your baby.”

  “Baby?”

  “Your small boy.”

  “Ah, yes. I see. We also have a baby, you see.”

  “Yes. Big family,” I tell him.

  “Lowani,” says the man suddenly.

  I grin and blink. “What? I don’t speak Chnyanja,” I tell him.

  “Come inside,” says the man in English. He speaks quickly to his wife in Chnyanja and she disappears into the hut. “Please, we have some food. You must take your lunch here.”

  I hesitate, torn between lies (“I’ve already eaten”; “They’ll be waiting for me at home”) and an impulse to please this man, to make up for the disruption and the accident. I nod and smile. “Thank you. I am hungry.”

  And this is how I am almost fourteen years old before I am formally invited into the home of a black African to share food. This is not the same as coming uninvited into Africans’ homes, which I have done many times. As a much younger child, I would often eat with my exasperated nannies at the compound (permanently hungry and always demanding), and I had sometimes gone into the laborers’ huts with my mother if she was attending someone too sick to come to the house for treatment. I had ridden horses and bikes and motorbikes through the compounds of the places we had lived, snatching at the flashes of life that were revealed to me before doors were quickly closed, children hidden behind skirts, intimacy swallowed by cloth.

  I am aware suddenly of watching my manners, of my filthy, oil-stained, and dust-covered skirt, of my dirty hands. I turn my dirty fingernails into the palm of my hands and duck out of the heat into the soft, dark, old-smoke-smelling hut. I blink for a few moments in the sudden dim light until shapes swim out of the grayness and form into four small stools crouched around a black pot on a ring of stones. The floor is fine dust, infinitely swept into pale powder. The father is pointing to a stool. “Khalani pansi,” he says. “Please, sit here.”

  I sit on the small smoothly worn stool, my knees drawn up above my hips.

  The father crouches at the far end of the hut and shouts an order, throwing his voice beyond me and into the hot afternoon; he is half-balancing, half-supporting, the retarded boy on his knee, an elbow crooked to catch the youth’s head if it should suddenly lurch back. The boy appears to be grasping at the hanging silver particles of dust that jostle in the fine swords of sunlight slicing through the thinning gray thatch of the hut. The mother leans over the fire. She bends at the waist, gracious and limber. Her baby is suckling at an exposed breast. The woman pounds at the pot on the stones where hot nshima is bubbling and steaming, letting out burps of hot breath as it cooks. A smaller pot is emitting fiery gasps of greasy fish.

  A girl child comes into the hut, tottering under the sloshing weight of the basin of water that she balances, clearly straining, on her head. She stops when she sees me and looks likely to drop her burden and run.

  The father laughs and points to me.

  The girl hesitates. The father encourages.

  The girl lowers the basin from her head and holds it in front of me. I see that I am to wash my hands. I rinse my hands in the water, shake the drops at my feet and smile at the little girl, but still she stands there, the muscles in her thin, knobbly arms jumping under the pressure. Water and sweat have mixed on her face. Large drops quake on her eyebrow and threaten to spill at any moment.

  “Thank you.” I smile again.

  The whole family is watching me. “Zikomo kwambiri,” I try, smiling in general at everyone, for lack of knowing what else to do. The smell of the food and the heat it is giving off while cooking make me sweat. I point at the little girl. “Your daughter, too?”

  The father beams and nods.

  “How old?”

  He tells me.

  The mother hands me a plate (enameled but rusted on the edges). She spoons food.

  “Thanks,” I say when the plate is just covered, making a gesture of sufficiency, half-ducking the plate out of reach.

  Her large spoon hovers between her pot and my plate.

  “No, really,” I say, “I had a late breakfast.”

  The mother glances at her husband. He nods, barely, and she lets her spoon drop back into the pot. Carefully she covers the leftover food.

  “Isn’t anyone else going to eat?”

  The father shakes his head. “No, please . . . Thank you.”

  The nshima is surrounded by a gray sea of barbel and oil. “This smells very good.”

  Schoolboy

  The children are watching me hungrily. The disabled youth has stopped patting dust fairies and is staring at me. A trembling, nervous cord of
saliva runs from the corner of his mouth to his chin. The toddler has started to cry, weakly, plaintively, like a small goat. The mother absently pats the boy, nurses the baby, rocks and rocks, staring at me. The father swallows. “Eat,” he says. He sounds desperate. I sense that it is only through the greatest exertion of will that my spectators don’t fall on the food on my plate in a frenzy of hunger.

  “It looks delicious.”

  I make a ball of nshima with the fingers of my right hand, the way I had been taught to do as a small child by my nannies. I insert my thumb into the ball, deep enough to make a dent in the dense hot yellow porridge. Onto the dent, as if onto a spoon, I scoop up a mouthful of the fish stew.

  Almost before my mouth can close around the food, the young girl (who has not left my side and whose arms still strain at the ends of the bowl) offers me the water and I see that I must wash my hands again. I am conscious of the little girl’s breath-catching effort to hold the basin, and of the groaning, sometimes audible hunger pangs that ripple through the hut. The food, which is sharp and oily in my mouth, has been eagerly anticipated by everyone except for me. I know that I am eating part of a meal intended for (I glance up) five bellies.

  There are bones in the fish, which I try to maneuver around to the front of my mouth. I spit the bones into my hand and carefully wipe them on the side of the plate. I stare at the food. A fish eye stares balefully back at me from the oily pool of gravy. I have a long meal ahead of me.

  It is mid-afternoon by the time I wash my hands for a final time and swim backward out of the hut, back into the mellowing heat of a yellowing afternoon, where light from the sun is sucked up and diffused by so many smoking fires over which fish are drying near the edge of Lake Chilwa. I pat my heart and bend one knee behind the other, lowering my eyes. “Thank you very much,” I say, “Zikomo kwambiri. Zikomo, zikomo.”

  The family watch as I kick the motorbike into life. I wave, and slowly drive away up the avenue of tenants’ houses, which no longer feel like an anonymous, homogenous row of grass-fronted, mud-stiff huts.

  That evening I return to the hut with a good proportion of my already meager closet. I have plastic grocery bags hanging from the handlebars of my motorbike in which I have put shorts, T-shirts, skirts, a dress, one pair of shoes (worn through at the toe), and some outgrown toys and books. Mum has stopped me from taking towels and blankets. “We barely have enough for ourselves,” she told me. But 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.

  Mum shakes her head. She says, “I know, Bobo.”

  “But it’s so awful.”

  “It won’t go away.” She is watching me stuff plastic bags with clothes. “You can’t make it go away.”

  I sniff.

  “It was there before you noticed it.”

  “I know, but . . .”

  She gets up with a sigh, dusts her knees. She says, “And it will be there after you leave.”

  “I know, but . . .”

  Mum pauses at the door. “And bring back my plastic bags, we’re always short of those,” she says.

  At the hut, I feel suddenly self-conscious, aware of all the curious, maybe suspicious, eyes on me from all the other huts up and down the road. Children abandon their games and cluster around me. All are in worn-through clothes; most are swollen-bellied. I hand over the plastic bags to the mother of the child I had crashed into earlier and I say, “Here.”

  She looks at the bags uncomprehendingly.

  “For you,” I insist.

  She looks embarrassed. “Thank you.” She holds the bags against the round lump of sleeping baby in the hammock at her breast. “Zikomo, zikomo.”

  I back away into the crowd of children who are now bouncing and clamoring around the motorbike: “Miss Bob, Miss Bob, what have you brought for me?”

  When I drive away, the children run after me as long as they can keep up, shouting, “Miss Bob! Miss Bob! What have you brought for me?”

  Bobo—Cape Maclear

  THE GOAT SHED

  The T-shirts we buy at the small white hotel overlooking the beach on Lake Malawi or at the small kiosk at the airport declare, malawi—the warm heart of africa.

  We call it the Warm Fart of Africa, hee, hee.

  Dad’s face erupts in boils. Mum begins to grow thick wings of gray at her temples. I become white-gilled and lethargic until Mum diagnoses anemia and feeds me liver and chopped rape. For the first time, we are all regularly malarial. Vanessa has to be hospitalized, she becomes so ill, yellow, thin, weak, fevered. In the two years we live in Malawi, all three of our dogs die. The new Rhodesian ridgeback contracts a deadly venereal disease; the spaniel contracts fatal tick fever, which turns her gums and eyeballs yellow and then kills her; ancient, faithful Shea spouts foul-smelling lumps, her ears bleed yellow pus, she scratches and whines until we shave her coat in sympathy. And then she dies in her sleep.

  We feel more dangerously, teeteringly close to disease and death (in a slow, rotting, swamp-induced fashion) than we did during the war in Rhodesia where there was a zinging, adrenaline-filled, anything-goes freedom and where we were surrounded by violent, quick mutilation and a sudden, definitive end. Which now seems preferable to death by swamp rot. Death by spies. Death by lack of social contact.

  In Malawi we frequently see children bent backward, as easily and rigidly as twisted paper clips, with cerebral malaria, from which, if they emerge alive, they will rarely recover completely. And here we see the effects of malnutrition and the effects of overcrowded, unsanitary shantytowns and overfilled garbage dumps and we see thin, ribby, curly-tailed dogs digging on heaps of decomposing rubbish on which children play and pick and shit.

  Our nearest white neighbors are a German couple who have come out to Africa as aid workers. They are our first experience of foreigners in Africa who are here for that purpose; until now, in Rhodesia, we had seen foreigners only as missionaries or mercenaries.

  Dad says, “At least death by mercenary is quicker.”

  “Than what?”

  “Death by aid.”

  But we are desperate enough for company to visit the Germans.

  “Perhaps they drink beer,” says Mum hopefully.

  Dad lights a cigarette. “Maybe they cure sausages.”

  I have only ever heard of Germans in the context of the Second World War.

  I say, “I hope they don’t have a gas oven. Hee hee.”

  Mum says, “Bobo!”

  “Okay, okay.”

  “Don’t mention the war,” says Dad.

  “Ve have vays and means of making you talk.”

  We start to giggle, hiccuping our hilarity.

  But we find, to our surprise, that we are very fond of the Hartmans. Barbara does not wear makeup, she does not shave, and she smells naturally (in a pleasant way) of her own very clean body: a salty, oniony, cooking-bread smell that reminds me of the homely, breast-milk scent of my old nannies. Gerald is keen on saving the environment, which, until then, I had not noticed needed saving. I had been more concerned with staying alive myself.

  Gerald lends me books. He is patient, gentle, intelligent, passionate, methodical. I fall in love with his hard accent, the way his words cut so efficiently through the sickly, sticky heat. I listen to the stories he weaves of the living planet around us. “We are minute,” he tells me. “We are grains of sand on the beach of time. We are not important. There was a time when the planet was without people and, especially with the way we are going, there will sooner or later be a time when again we are gone from this earth.”

  I declare my adolescent difference from my family as a passionate environmentalist, and if I had a choice I’d wear baggy, tie-dyed clothes like Barbara’ s. Except I don’t have a choice. I have to wear what clothes we can find at the secondhand market and castoffs from Vanessa (which I supplement with scarves and wooden beads). I consider taking up vegetarianism
, briefly.

  But mostly we are white and alone, an isolated island in a pressing, restless, relentless sea of Malawians whose lives continue on the periphery of ours in a seeming miracle of survival. At night, by the throb of the generator that gives us a few hours of electric light, we scramble for the tape recorder, on which we now play a recently extended collection of music (Bizet, Puccini, Chopin, Brahms, Rachmaninoff, Debussy, to augment our old standards Roger Whittaker and the 1812—Mum is trying to expose us to all the usual suspects in a glut of “Best of” tapes purchased from the budget bins at classical music stores in England). And we drink Carlsberg lager into the mosquito-humming night which is so dense with humidity we feel as if we might absorb water through our skins, as sheep are said to do.

  We play fierce games of poker, Dad, Vanessa, and I. We have no money, so we use Dad’s matches as chips. We play for “If you lose you have to get the next round of beer,” which means asking Mum to hand a beer around to all of us. We play for “If you lose you have to light the next round of mosquito coils,” which burn fragrantly, like incense, at our ankles and are supposed to ward off mosquitoes although every morning our legs are polka-dotted with bites. We play for “If you lose you have to bring me a tray of tea whenever I ask for it for the next week,” which is an idle threat because we have a houseboy (who arrived one morning announcing he was here to help Doud in the kitchen) to fetch us tea.