Ei hunningolle tänään : afrikkalainen lapsuuteni (2001)

Writing at its best. Takes you into her life. ( )

This is a classic example of the good old-fashioned "I grew up on a farm in Africa" memoir, complete with beautiful African scenery and smells, frightening political upheaval, grinding ecological disaster, family tragedy and comic interludes, and featuring embittered, gun-toting, drunken white people and lovable, impoverished, unreliable, drunken black people. And a lot of very heavy drinking.

Except that it's not set in the Olive Schreiner/Karen Blixen era, or even the Doris Lessing era, but much closer to our own experience, in the 1970s and 80s. Fuller describes her childhood on her parents' farm in Zimbabwe during the guerrilla war; after Mugabe comes to power they lose their farm and move first to another less promising farm in Zimbabwe, then to the poverty and political oppression of Hastings Banda's Malawi, and finally to Zambia.

Although the Fullers are probably not people you would want to be trapped with in a restaurant, they are fun to read about, and the author's talent for vivid description and the warmth of her obvious love for Africa more than makes up for the occasional bit of overwritten purple prose. She's not Doris Lessing, and there's no deep political analysis going on here, still less any suggestion of how she thinks Africa should be run, but she doesn't hesitate to criticise the attitudes of the colonialist class she was brought up in when they are clearly wrong. But, equally, she wants us to see that farmers like her parents are not just colonial exploiters, but they are also people who have built up a lot of knowledge about how to make African land productive in sustainable ways. It's just a pity that they should invest all that effort in tobacco, a product the world would be a lot better without... ( )

This has been on my reading list for a long time. I found it to be disappointing, rather pedestrian. A much better memoir of "an African childhood," that engages with the issues, is "Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa", by Peter Godwin.

> "[In] 1965, he made a Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Britain. He made it clear that there would never be majority rule in Rhodesia." Even when Mum is so drunk that she is practicing her yoga moves, she can remember the key dates relating to Our Tragedies. "So we moved there in 1966. Our daughter—Vanessa, our eldest—was only one year old. We were prepared"—Mum's voice grows suitably dramatic—"to take our baby into a war to live in a country where white men still ruled."

> She taught the horses not to be scared of guns. She burst paper bags at their feet for a whole morning. She popped balloons all afternoon. And the next day she shot guns right by their heads until they only swished their tails and jerked their heads at the sound, as if trying to get rid of a biting fly. So the horses lazily ignore gunshot when we're out riding, but they still bolt if there's a rustle in the bushes, or if a cow surprises them, or if they see a monkey or a snake, or if a troop of baboons startles out of the bush with their warning cry, "Wa-hu!" ( )

White Rhodesians were delusional and intrusive in what is now known as Zimbabwe. Bobo is raised by a family plagued by poverty, disease, and death that managed to survive and use what privilege they had to always manage to find a piece of land to work. They find beauty in a difficult land and insanity in tragedy. ( )