Book Commentary about Africa

Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller

Settings in Zimbabwe, Zambia as well as Malawi.

I have plucked a new, different, worldly soul for myself- maybe a soul I found in the spray thrown up by the surge of that distant African river as it plummets onto black rocks and send up into the sun a permanent rainbow. Maybe I found a soul hovering over the sea in Africa.

In the hot, slow time of the day when time and sun and thought slow to a dragging, shallow, pale crawl, there is the sound of heat. The grasshoppers and crickets sing and whine. Drying grass crackles. There is a sound of breathing, of an entire world collapsed under the apathy of the tropics. And in the later afternoon, when the sun at last has started to slide west, the cool waves of air are mixed with the heat.

We frequently see children bent backward, as easily and rigidly as twisted paperclips, with cerebral malaria, from which, if they immerge alive, they will rarely recover completely. And here we see the effects of malnutrition and the effects overcrowded, unsanitary shantytowns and over-filled garbage dumps and we see thin, ribby, curly-tailed dogs (and goats) digging on the heaps of decomposing rubbish on which children play and pick as well as adults.

The rains are rhythmic, coming religiously (especially in the rainy season). The rains are gray solid sheets of water, slamming into houses and soaking everything in its way. Everything seems heavy and turning- green with moisture.

In spite of the devastation, Africa – as an idea- dawned on m e gradually. I appreciated that as whites, could not own a piece of Africa, but I knew, with startling clarity, that Africa owned me.