Before the Knife: Memories of an African Childhood Book

The novelist Carolyn Slaughter digs deep into her childhood to write Before the Knife, a bleak and disturbing memoir about growing up in pre-independence Africa under the spell of parental sexual abuse. Her story appears to involve "an ordinary English family living in a very remote part of southern Africa during the lingering years of British colonial rule". However, at the age of six Slaughter was raped by her own father, which "obliterated in one moment both the innocence of my childhood and the fragile structure of our English family life. We all knew". The book proceeds to paint a desperate portrait of the increasingly unhappy child and her emotionally crippled sister, controlled by a depressive, unsympathetic mother and a terrifying, violent father, a colonial official who enjoys beating the natives almost as much as abusing his family. Before the Knife is ostensibly about growing up in Botswana at a time when "cracks in the rigidly maintained colonial structure" began to appear, and there are deeply lyrical descriptions of the African landscape and Slaughter's identification with its inhabitants, but the horror of abuse pervades the book. Slaughter's problem is that she has tried to write two books, one about Africa, one about abuse. For her, both are inextricably connected, but her understandable hatred towards her father prevents her from speculating on the connection between colonialism and familial abuse, or explaining how she learnt to forgive, years after the death of both her parents. Some readers might find that Before the Knife is ultimately a little too personal for comfort. --Jerry BrottonRead More