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

by Alexandra Fuller

  Dugout canoes—Lake Malawi

  FEDERAL FULLERS

  Vanessa and I are sunbathing on the cluster of rocks at the far south of the beach, where fishermen from the local villages sometimes suddenly appear, as if organically rising from the deep, clear water, their ancient, finger-smoothed canoes smoke-smelling and fish heavy. They try to sell us marijuana (which they will also exchange for cigarettes or fishing line), fish, or sometimes baskets and beads.

  I said, “I’ll pay you two kwacha for a ride in your canoe.”

  “Three kwacha.”

  I hesitate.

  “Okay, okay, two kwacha.”

  Vanessa sits up and shades her eyes from the sun. “Don’t go too far, hey.”

  I scud down the rock, gripping on a narrow ledge, toes stretching toward the canoe.

  “Hands first,” says the paddler, holding the canoe steady against the rock.

  “How can I put my hands first?”

  “Ah, but you must.”

  “It’ll be all right. You just keep the thing still.” I make a clumsy lurch for the canoe, there is a brief vision of the paddler’s dismayed face, and then we are all over, upside down, the water around me suddenly lively with paddles, dead fish, grasping nets, despondent soggy cigarettes.

  Vanessa peers over the edge of her perch. “You’re going to have to pay him for everything you’ve sunk.”

  “I will. I will.” I cling to the upturned canoe. “Sorry,” I pant to the fisherman. But he is too busy recovering his goods to respond. I clear myself from the debris, from the leg-heavy fishing nets which threaten to pull me down, and thrash back to the beach, where I lie on my belly staring at the glassy sand and coughing. The fisherman is still hanging on to his upturned canoe, saving cigarettes, which he is placing in a row on the canoe’s sky-facing bottom.

  He kicks the canoe to shore. He has lost his day’s catch. He does not look at me as he lays out his life on the beach. He has lost not only his catch, but also his knife, a basket, a plastic bag in which he had an old wine bottle filled with cooking oil, and a tin bowl containing a fistful of dry cornmeal for nshima. I watch the muscles hop on his angry back and dig my toes into the sand. “I’m sorry.”

  He does not answer.

  “I’ll pay you. How many kwacha?” But even those usually magic words fail to elicit a response.

  He turns his canoe upright and pushes out into the lake, balancing briefly, as lightly as a cat, on the gunwale before lowering himself into the canoe, bent like a dancer, from where he digs into the water with his paddle and slides out into the glare of the bright afternoon sun.

  I pick my way back up to the top of the rock, where Vanessa’s pink shoulders are beginning to hum a more urgent shade of red.

  “You’re burning,” I tell her.

  “That’s so typical,” she says.

  “Put your shirt on.”

  “You’re so annoying.”

  I sit, contrite, next to Vanessa. “He wouldn’t let me pay him.”

  “No wonder no one will snog you.”

  I light a cigarette.

  Vanessa scratches under her chin, her jaw thrust out. She is looking far out into the water, as if reading it for further insights into my shortcomings. “Everything you do is a disaster.”

  The cigarette is bitter on my tongue. Tears sting behind my eyelids and make a hard painful lump in the back of my throat.

  “You’re fourteen years old and you haven’t even been kissed.”

  I shrug. “Who says I want to be?”

  She pushes out her lips at me. “Can’t you be just a little less . . .? Can’t you? I mean, can’t you just be normal?”

  “I am normal.”

  Vanessa closes her eyes. We have been taking it in turns spraying a bottle of Sun-In into our hair. It has streaked Vanessa silver-blond and has turned my hair orange, in unsightly blocks. She runs her fingers through her hair and turns her face to the sun.

  I have had my hair cut, in an unflattering pudding bowl, by an African hairdresser in Blantyre. My fringe is very short and crooked. I look like a grasshopper wearing a wig. I hang my head on my knees and sigh. Tears roll down my cheeks and splash onto my legs.

  “Geoffrey might snog you,” says Vanessa at last.

  He looks like a small, greasy weasel. “Thanks.”

  “It’s better than nothing.”

  Which is how I come to be snogged, at the next New Year’s party, by the rodent-faced Geoffrey, whose tongue takes me by such surprise that my teeth clamp down on it in a startled reflex.

  “Well, what were you expecting?” says Vanessa.

  I shrug. “Not his tongue.”

  “What did you think snogging was?”

  “Not tongues.”

  Vanessa rolls her eyes. “You can’t say I didn’t try,” she says.

  “I know, I know. I didn’t.”

  Vanessa considers. “Geoffrey was your best bet,” she says at last.

  There are few expats-like-us, which translates to very few snoggable sons. I say, “I’ll be okay.”

  “It’s not healthy.”

  “What isn’t?”

  Vanessa looks at me, at a loss for words, and waves at me. “You,” she says at last. “Your whole . . . everything.”

  I press my lips together to prevent tears from coming.

  “I hope Geoffrey didn’t tell everyone that you bit him.”

  But he had.

  Which is why it is a relief when Dad announces that he will not be renewing his two-year contract with the President for Life as manager of Mgodi Estates.

  “We’re moving,” he announces.

  Our choices are Papua New Guinea, Mozambique, and Zambia. It is 1983.

  Papua New Guinea is floating anonymously off the tip of Australia. I read that it is mostly covered with forest. It is famous for its mineral reserves and cannibals.

  Mozambique is seven years into a civil war, which follows on from its ten-year war of independence against the Portuguese. It is widely acknowledged to be the most miserable nation on earth. It is famous for its land mines and child soldiers.

  Zambia is recovering from belly-rocking, land-sucking drought. It is famous for its mineral reserves and political corruption.

  I am keen to move to Papua New Guinea, which is as far from Geoffrey’s injured tongue as we can get without actually falling off the planet.

  Dad thinks Mozambique might have a future.

  “In what?” Vanessa wants to know.

  “A future,” Dad insists. “Everything has a future.”

  “Not if you’re dead,” I mutter.

  Vanessa looks away. “Are there any other . . . people there?” she asks.

  Dad says, “That’s the best part. There’s no one there.”

  No snoggable sons.

  The Germans for whom we would farm in Zambia have clothing factories there. They make a tremendous profit manufacturing uniforms for the various and numerous armies of Africa (no shipment of uniforms without payment). Their seven-thousand-acre farm is a tax ruse but they still want the place to run at a profit. They have found their last three farm managers to be incompetent, dishonest, and drunk (usually in combination).

  The Germans have offered to buy Mum horses if Dad will agree to work on their farm. They will pay for Vanessa and me to attend our private schools (in Zimbabwe, where Vanessa is now at secretarial college) and they will buy us tickets to and from Zambia so that we can fly back home during the holidays.

  So Mum and Dad go to Zambia and take a look at the farm. There are virgin forests and three dams, two rivers and passable roads. There is a large main house and a guest cottage, and a total of three flush loos at our disposal (if you count the loo in the guest cottage). There is more or less full-time electricity (when the Zambian Electricity Supply Commission can compete with summer storms). There is a schoolhouse and a building for a clinic for the farm staff (neither have operated for some years). There are whitewashed stables and a dairy, an old, dr
y orchard (“But it might revive with some water and fertilizer”), and a swimming pool (“A bit green and slimy, but that’s all right”).

  There is a farming community of twenty or thirty families in Mkushi district (where the farm sits), not far from the border with Zaire. If Zambia were a butterfly, our farm is situated right where Zambia’s wings would meet.

  If we move to Mkushi, we will neighbor Yugoslavs, Afrikaners, Englishmen, Zambians, Indians, Greeks, Czechs.

  “Too many people,” complains Dad.

  “You don’t have to socialize with them.”

  “It’s the bloody League of Nations.”

  “So?”

  Dad mutters something.

  Mum says, “If we move to Zambia, then we will have lived in every country in the former Federation.”

  And the symmetry of this fact seems to be enough to seal the decision. We will move to Zambia in January, too late to catch even the tail end of the planting season.

  Mum with horses

  MKUSHI

  Depending on the state of the roads, our farm is three to six hours from Lusaka and two to four hours from the Copperbelt.

  Either way you arrive at it, the farm does not come as a surprise.

  Drive out of Lusaka, its shantytowns spreading like a tea stain away from the city center and its hum of commerce. Drive away from the clamor of market women in their shack-shanty stalls where they trade vegetables, oil, cloth, clothes. Drive past the Planned Parenthood building and under the great, stark, concrete archway proclaiming Zambia’s freedom, one zambia, one nation. Leave the city concentration of poverty behind—leave behind its stench and the place where social diseases come together to shout the misery of the truly almost-dead-from-it poor. And the one-in-three with AIDS and the one-in-six with TB. Leave behind the Gymkhana Club, where red-faced expats-like-us drink and shout their repeated stories to one another, cigarettes waving. Leave behind the expat, extramarital, almost-incestuous affairs bred from heat and boredom and drink. Leave behind the once-grand, guard-dogged, watchman-paced, glass-top-walled compounds of the rich and nervous.

  Msasa forests are thicker here.

  And the trees are swollen against one another, giving the impression that they can outlast the humanity which presses up against them. Charcoal burners trudge toward the gray haze of the big city, pushing piles of charcoal in burlap bags strapped high onto bicycles, but their axes don’t seem to have dented the forest yet. The road is a narrow strip of potholed black on which few vehicles swing and rock, avoiding the deeper holes and slamming into some of the shallow, surprising dents.

  We hurry through the rotten-egg stench of Kabwe, which belches smoke from copper and cobalt mines. There are, here, some reminders of our European predecessors, who long ago returned to the ordinariness of England where they now remember (with a fondness born of distance and the tangy reminder of a gin-and-tonic evening) the imagined glory of sunburnt gymkhanas and white-clothed servants. These long-gone Europeans had tried to turn Kabwe into something more powerful than its smell (which is strong enough to taste; bitter, burning, back-throat-coating, like the reminder of vomit). There are some surviving trees from the dream of the Kabwe Gardening Club—dusty, droughted, diseased, root-worn. These expat trees (brittle frangipani, purple-flowered jacaranda, and pod-exploding flamboyant) line the streets like soldiers who continue to stand, even as their comrades fall.

  The mine houses, which are now sand-covered and chicken-littered, contain some reminders of the mazungu madams who once designed water-sucking lawn and rose gardens around a gauzed veranda. There is the Elephant Head Hotel (peeling paint, stained green plaster, urine-smelling), a Church of England, and a hospital (where lines of fevered patients curl out of the door). A magnificent green and white onion-domed mosque rises out of the center of Kabwe; neither colonial decomposing, nor yet postcolonial socialist (which is to say gray cement-block), but of some other resilient culture, defying time and place.

  At Kapiri Mposhi (comprising a railway stop, whore-riddled bars, and an Indian store where everything from bicycles, to nylon scarves, to made-in-China sunglasses, pencils, and alarm clocks is sold) we will turn right. But first there is the third of the four roadblocks we must negotiate from the city to our farm. Back-to-front spikes tooth the road, sandbags burst heavily and spill white onto the tarmac, and the military lounge on their rifles. We must produce passports, reflective triangles, the car’s registration; but all this can be avoided if we would only produce a fistful of notes and some cigarettes, soap, oil.

  Dad loses his temper. It’s hot and we have been up since long before dawn in order to make it to and from town before dark, when bandits, the poor roads, and unlit, sometimes drunkenly driven vehicles make travel hazardous. Dad lights a cigarette and stares out of the windscreen; he is seething, very quiet, but he seems to be in his own thought world, completely ignoring the antagonism of the militia man. Finally Dad turns to the man with the gun and says, “Fergodsake, either let us go, or shoot us.” The man with the gun is clearly drunk, but he is startled into a brief state of alertness.

  In the backseat Vanessa and I sink into ourselves. I want to say, “He was just kidding. Only a joke. Don’t shoot, really.”

  But the soldier starts laughing. “Ah, Fuller,” he says, “you are too clever. Too clever.”

  Dad doesn’t wait for him to wave us through, but drives ahead; the wheels of the car spit gravel up against the drums that guide us away from the spike-toothed barrier.

  People have died like this. They have driven through roadblocks when it has not been clear that they have been waved through and a drunken sergeant has pumped several rounds of ammunition into the backs of their heads. Cause of death: Accident.

  We say, “Acci-didn’t. Acci–didn’t stop. Ha ha.”

  There is a madman who lives on the road to Mkushi. Every full moon he comes out onto the tarmac and digs a deep trench across the road. Dad would like to find the madman and bring him back to the farm. “Think what a strong bugger he is, eh?”

  “Yes, but you could only get him to work when there was a full moon.”

  “Which is twice as hard as any other Zambian.”

  We cross the second bridge (one more roadblock) and reach the gum trees, their ghostly white limbs stretching into the sky, and now we are almost home. The road is dirt, washed, potholed and ribbed from here, spitting up a fine, red, throat-coating dust, but the peace of the farm is already spreading her fingers toward us.

  The farm does not come as a surprise, because it’s where I would put a farm. It’s where any sensible person would put a farm. We have driven hundreds of kilometers and each kilometer brings land more beautiful and fertile and comforting and with each passing kilometer the air clears and the sky appears wider and deeper. And then, when it feels as if the land could not have settled itself more comfortably for human habitation, there it is—Serioes Farm—lying open like a sandy-covered, tree-dotted blanket. Softly, voluptuously fertile and sweet-smelling of khaki weed, and old cow manure and thin dust and msasa leaves. It seems the logical place for this family to stop. And mend.

  Zambia has been independent since October 1964.

  The president, Kenneth Kaunda—affectionately known as KK—is a deeply religious teetotaler, the son of a missionary. He is prone to tears and long speeches and calls himself a Social Humanist. He speaks of love and tolerance and reconciliation.

  “One Zambia, one nation.”

  “UNIP is the people’s party.”

  UNIP stands for United National Independence Party. It is the sole legal party in Zambia.

  KK orders his critics and those who oppose his government to be tortured, killed, imprisoned. He is the only presidential candidate at election time, winning a landslide victory against no one year after year.

  Election times come and go and nothing changes; the pointless elections are not memorable.

  The occasional, quickly squashed coup attempts are what I remember.

  A
nyone can stage a coup. I have the impression that even I could arm myself with enough gin and anger to walk into the radio station in Lusaka and break off the nightly broadcast of African rumba to declare myself the new leader of the country.

  “Stay calm,” I would say into the microphone, “it is me, Bobo Fuller, in charge. I hereby declare the third Republic of Zambia.” And by the time my words reach the rural areas (days, maybe weeks later) I will have been locked up and will be on my way to death.

  The leaders of the coups, the political detainees, the student rioters are quickly forgotten in jail. Their heroic dissent melts in the tropical heat and washes away with the next rainy season.

  Vanessa is away at secretarial college in Zimbabwe when we arrive on the farm, that first night. The workshop manager—a rough-looking ex-Rhodesian named Gordon (“Call me Gordy”)—has been instructed to stock the kitchen with enough food to get us started. Accordingly, there are half a dozen beers and a few slabs of meat in the leaky gas fridge, a loaf of stale crumbling bread, an old jam jar containing oil, and a small bowl of salt. Gordy says, “We haven’t had electricity for six weeks. These bloody guys, hey? The first rains and all the lines go down and then you’re fucked-excuse-my-French.” We smile politely, excusing his French. “So you’ll have to build a fire for your supper, hey?”

  “That’s okay,” says Mum.

  “I brought a muntu for you. He used to be the cook here.” An African in a grubby khaki uniform grins broadly behind Gordon’s shoulder.

  “Hello,” Mum says to the African.

  I say, “How are you?”

  “Bwino, bwino, bwino.”

  “What’s your name?” Gordy asks him.

  “Adamson,” says the African.

  Gordy shrugs. “I can’t keep track,” he says. “They like to change their names like it’s going out of style, hey.” He waves in the direction of Adamson, as at a mosquito or a fly.

  Gordy has preceded us on the farm by a couple of months. He is supposed to be fixing the stable of tractors, combine harvesters, motorbikes, generators, water pumps, and trailers with which Dad will rework—regenerate—this exhausted, lovely farm. Gordy lights a cigarette and tells us, “Aside from your truck, there’s only one working vehicle on the whole bloody farm.” He takes a drag off his cigarette and adds, “Which is my motorbike.”