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

Don’t Let’s go to the Dogs Tonight is a wonderfully evocative memoir of Alexandra Fuller’s African childhood. Fuller regards herself "as a daughter of Africa", who spent her early life on farms in Zimbabwe, Malawi and Zambia throughout the turbulent 1970s and 80s, as her parents "fought to keep one country in Africa white-run", but "lost twice" in Kenya and Zimbabwe. This is a profoundly personal story about growing up with a pair of funny, tough, white African settlers, and living with their "sometimes breathlessly illogical decisions", as they move from war-torn Zimbabwe to disease and malnutrition in Malawi, and finally the "beautiful and fertile" land of Zambia.

Central to Fuller’s book is the intense relations between herself and her parents, a chain-smoking father able to turn round any farm in Africa, her glamorous older sister Vanessa, and the character who sits at the heart of the book, Fuller’s "fiercely intelligent, deeply compassionate, surprisingly witty and terrifyingly mad" mother.

Fuller weaves together painful family tragedy with a wider understanding of the ambivalence of being part of a separatist white farming community in the midst of Black African independence. The majority of the book focuses on Fuller’s early years in war-torn Zimbabwe, with "more history stuffed into its make-believe, colonial-dream borders than one country the size of a very large teapot should be able to amass." This is the most successful dimension of the book, as Fuller describes growing up on farm where her father is away most nights fighting "terrorists", and stripping a rifle takes precedence over school lessons. The sections on Malawi and Zambia are more prosaic, but this is a lyrical and accomplished memoir about Africa, which is "about adjusting to a new world view" and the author’s "passionate love for a continent that has come to define, shape, scar and heal me and my family." --Jerry Brotton

Alexandra Fuller was the daughter of white settlers in 1970s war-torn Rhodesia. "Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight" is a memoir of that time when a schoolgirl was as likely to carry a shotgun as a satchel. Fuller tells a story of civil war; of a quixotic battle against nature and loss; and of her family's unbreakable bond with a continent which came to define shape scar and heal them. In wry and sometimes hilarious prose she looks back with rage and love at an extraordinary family and an extraordinary time. 'Like Frank McCourt Fuller writes with devastating humour and directness about desperate circumstances ...tender remarkable' - "Daily Telegraph".'A book that deserves to be read for generations' - "Guardian". 'Perceptive generous political tragic funny stamped through with a passionate love for Africa ...[Fuller] has a faultless hotline to her six-year-old self' - "Independent". 'This enchanting book is destined to become a classic of Africa and of childhood' - "Sunday Times". 'Wonderful book ...a vibrantly personal account of growing up in a family every bit as exotic as the continent which seduced it ...the Fuller family itself [is] delivered to the reader with a mixture of toughness and heart which renders its characters unforgettable' - "Scotsman".'Her prose is fierce unsentimental sometimes puzzled and disconcertingly honest ...it is Fuller's clear vision even of the most unpalatable facts that gives her book its strength. It deserves to find a place alongside Olive Schreiner Karen Blixen and Doris Lessing' - "Sunday Telegraph".

'Told with all the intensity of Lorna Sage's Bad Blood ' The Times