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

  We wedge Mum into the back of the pickup along with my suitcase and satchel and books and the spare tires, next to the half-built generator we are taking into Lusaka to be fixed. She is humming “Flower of Scotland.” And then Dad and I climb into the front of the pickup and set off down the farm road. I am going to start crying. There go the horses, two white faces and one black peering over the stable doors, waiting for Banda to bring them their breakfasts. And here come the dogs running, ear-flapping hopeful after the pickup, willing us to stop and let them ride along in the back. And there goes the old cook, hunched and massive, his bony shoulders poking out of the top of his threadworn khaki uniform. He is almost seventy and has just sired another baby; he looks exhausted. He’s sitting in the kitchen doorway with a joint the size of a sausage hanging from his bottom lip, a fragrant pillow of blue marijuana smoke hangs above his head. Marijuana grows well behind the stables, where it thrives on horseshit, cow dung, pilfered fertilizer intended for Dad’s soybean crop. Adamson raises one old hand in salute. The gardener stands to attention on his bush-broom, with which he is sweeping leaves from the dusty driveway. “Miss Bobo,” he mouths, and raises his fist in a black power salute.

  Mum leans over the rim of the pickup briefly, precariously, to blow the dogs a kiss. She waves at the staff for a moment, royally, and then collapses back into the folds of the tarpaulin.

  Dad offers me a cigarette. “Better have one while you still can,” he says.

  “Thanks.” We smoke together for a while.

  Dad says, “It’s tough when you can’t smoke.”

  I nod.

  “Don’t smoke at school.”

  “I won’t.”

  “They won’t like it.”

  “They don’t.”

  It’s past seven in the morning by the time we leave the farm. I have to be at school by five-thirty that evening to make it in time for sign-in and supper. That leaves us half an hour for business and lunch in Lusaka and an hour to get through the border between Zimbabwe and Zambia.

  I say, “Better be polite to the blokes at the border today. We don’t have time for silly buggers.”

  “Bloody baboons,” mutters Dad.

  When we get to Lusaka, Dad and I drop off the generator at the Indian’s workshop on Ben Bella Road.

  “Hello, Mr. Fuller,” says the Indian, head bobbling like a bobbin of thread on a sewing machine. “Come in, come in, for tea? Coffee? I have something for you to look at.”

  “Not today,” says Dad, waving the man away. “Big hurry with my daughter, you see.” He talks between clenched teeth.

  He gets in the pickup. Lights a cigarette. “Bloody Indians,” he mutters as he reverses out of the yard, “always up to something.”

  We buy boiled eggs and slabs of white cornbread from a kiosk on the side of Cha Cha Cha Road, near the roundabout that leads to Kafue, the Gymkhana Club, or home, depending on where you get off. We wave some food at Mum, but she isn’t moving. She has some oil on her face from the generator, which has been leaking thick, black engine blood. Otherwise she is very white, bordering on pale green.

  We stop before Chirundu, the small hot nothing town on the Zambezi River which marks the border crossing into Zimbabwe, to make sure she is still alive. Dad says, “We’ll get into trouble if we try and take a dead body over the border.”

  Mum has undone the tarpaulin which was meant to keep the dust out of my school clothes, and has wrapped herself up in it. She is asleep with a small smile on her lips.

  Dad puts his forefinger under her nose to feel for breath. “Still alive,” Dad announces, “although she looks nothing like her passport photo now.”

  From the back, as we ease into the melting hot, tarmac-shining car park in front of the customs building (broken windows like thin ice in the white sun) we can hear Mum shuffling back into life. She eases herself into a sitting position, the vast tarpaulin over her shoulders like a voluminous plastic operatic cloak in spite of the oven-breath heat. She is singing “Olé, I Am a Bandit.”

  “Christ,” mutters Dad.

  Mum has sung “Olé, I Am a Bandit” at every bar under the southern African sun in which she has ever stepped.

  “Shut your mother up, will you?” says Dad, climbing out of the pickup with a fistful of passports and papers, “eh?”

  I go around the back. “Shhhh! Mum! Hey, Mum, we’re at the border now. Shhh!”

  She emerges blearily from the folds of the tarpaulin. “I’m the quickest on the trigger,” she sings loudly.

  “Oh, great.” I ease back into the front of the pickup and light a cigarette. I’ve been shot at before because of Mum and her singing. She made me drive her to our neighbor’s once at two in the morning to sing them “Olé, I Am a Bandit,” and he pulled a rifle on us and fired. He’s Yugoslav.

  The customs official comes out to inspect our vehicle. I grin rabidly at him.

  He circles the car, stiff-legged like a dog wondering which tire to pee on. He swings his AK-47 around like a tennis racket.

  “Get out,” he tells me.

  I get out.

  Dad gets uneasy. He says, “Steady on with the stick, hey?”

  “What?”

  Dad shrugs, lights a cigarette. “Can’t you keep your bloody gun still?”

  The official lets his barrel fall into line with Dad’s heart.

  Mum appears from under the drapes of the tarpaulin again. Her half-mast eyes light up.

  “Muli bwanje?” she says elaborately: How are you?

  The customs official blinks at her in surprise. He lets his gun relax against his hip. A smile plays around his lips. “Your wife?” he asks Dad.

  Dad nods, smokes. I crush out my cigarette. We’re both hoping Mum doesn’t say anything to get us shot.

  But her mouth splits into an exaggerated smile, rows of teeth. She nods toward Dad and me: “Kodi ndipite ndi taxi?” she asks: Should I take a taxi?

  The customs official leans against his gun for support (hand over the top of the barrel) and laughs, throwing back his head.

  Mum laughs, too. Like a small hyena, “Hee-hee,” wheezing a bit from all the dust she has inhaled today. She has a dust mustache, dust rings around her eyes, dust where forehead joins hairline.

  “Look,” says Dad to the customs official, “can we get going? I have to get my daughter to school today.”

  The customs official turns suddenly businesslike. “Ah,” he says, his voice threatening hours of delay, if he likes, “where is my gift?” He turns to me. “Little sister? What have you brought for me today?”

  Mum says, “You can have her, if you like,” and disappears under her tarpaulin. “Hee, hee.”

  “Cigarettes?” I offer.

  Dad mutters, “Bloody—“ and swallows the rest of his words. He climbs into the pickup and lights a cigarette, staring fixedly ahead.

  The customs official eventually opens the gate when he is in possession of one box of Peter Stuyvesant cigarettes (mine, intended for school), a bar of Palmolive soap (also intended for school), three hundred kwacha, and a bottle of Coke.

  As we bump onto the bridge that spans the Zambezi River, Dad and I hang out of our windows, scanning the water for hippo.

  Mum has reemerged from the tarpaulin to sing, “Happy, happy Africa.”

  If I weren’t going back to school, I would be in heaven.

  Kelvin

  CHIMURENGA I:

  ZAMBIA, 1999

  “Look,” Mum says, leaning across the table and pointing. Her finger is worn, blunt with work: years of digging in a garden, horses, cows, cattle, woodwork, tobacco. “Look, we fought to keep one country in Africa white-run”—she stops pointing her finger at our surprised guest to take another swallow of wine—“just one country.” Now she slumps back in defeat: “We lost twice.”

  The guest is polite, a nice Englishman. He has come to Zambia to show Africans how to run state-owned businesses to make them attractive to foreign investment, now that we aren’t Social Humanis
ts anymore. Now that we’re a democracy. Ha ha. Kind of.

  Mum says, “If we could have kept one country white-ruled it would be an oasis, a refuge. I mean, look what a cock-up. Everywhere you look it’s a bloody cock-up.”

  The guest says nothing, but his smile is bemused. I can tell he’s thinking, Oh my God, they’ll never believe this when I tell them back home. He’s saving this conversation for later. He’s a two-year wonder. People like this never last beyond two malaria seasons, at most. Then he’ll go back to England and say, “When I was in Zambia . . .” for the rest of his life.

  “Good dinner, Tub,” says Dad.

  Mum did not cook the dinner. Kelvin cooked the dinner. But Mum organized Kelvin.

  Dad lights an after-dinner pipe and smokes quietly. He is leaning back in his chair so that there is room on his lap for his dog between his slim belly and the table. He stares out at the garden. The sun has set in a red ball, sinking behind the quiet, stretching black limbs of the msasa trees on Oribi Ridge, which is where my parents moved after I was married. The dining room has only three walls: it lies open to the bush, to the cries of the night insects, the shrieks of the small, hunted animals, the bats which flit in and out of the dining room, swooping above our heads to eat mosquitoes. Clinging to the rough whitewashed cement walls are assorted moths, lizards, and geckos, which occasionally let go with a high, sharp laugh: “He-he-he.”

  Mum pours herself more wine, finishing the bottle, and then she says fiercely to our guest, “Thirteen thousand Kenyans and a hundred white settlers died in the struggle for Kenya’s independence.”

  I can tell the visitor doesn’t know if he should look impressed or distressed. He settles for a look of vague surprise. “I had no idea.”

  “Of course you bloody people had no idea,” says Mum. “A hundred . . . of us.”

  “Cool it, Tub,” says Dad, stroking the dog and smoking.

  “Nineteen forty-seven to nineteen sixty-three,” says Mum. “Nearly twenty bloody years we tried to hold on.” She makes her fist into a tight grip. The sinews on her neck stand taut and she bares her teeth. “All for what? And what a cock-up they’ve made of it now. Hey? Bloody, bloody cock-up.”

  After independence, Kenya was run by Mzee, the Grand Old Man, Jomo Kenyatta. He had been born in 1894, the year before Britain declared Kenya one of its protectorates. He had come to power in 1963, an old man who had finally fulfilled the destiny of his life’s work: self-government for Africans in Africa.

  Dad says, mildly, “Shall I ask Kelvin to clear the table?”

  Mum says, “And Rhodesia. One thousand government troops dead.” She pauses. “Fourteen thousand terrorists. We should have won, if you look at it like that, except there were more of them.” Mum drinks, licks her top lip. “Of course, we couldn’t stay on in Kenya after Mau Mau.” She shakes her head.

  Kelvin comes to clear the table. He is trying to save enough money, through the wages he earns as Mum and Dad’s housekeeper, to open his own electrical shop.

  Mum says, “Thank you, Kelvin.”

  Kelvin almost died today. Irritated to distraction by the flies in the kitchen, he had closed the two doors and the one little window in the room, into which he had then emptied an entire can of insect-killing Doom. Mum had found him convulsing on the kitchen floor just before afternoon tea.

  “Bloody idiot.” She had dragged him onto the lawn, where he lay jerking and twitching for some minutes until Mum sloshed a bucket of cold water onto his face. “Idiot!” she shrieked. “You could have killed yourself.”

  Now Kelvin looks as self-possessed and serene as ever. Jesus, he has told me, is his Savior. He has an infant son named Elvis, after the other King.

  Dad says, “Bring more beers, Kelvin.”

  “Yes, Bwana.”

  We move to the picnic chairs around the wood fire on the veranda. Kelvin brings us more beers and clears the rest of the plates away. I light a cigarette and prop my feet up on the cold end of a burning log.

  “I thought you quit,” says Dad.

  “I did.” I throw my head back and watch the light-gray smoke I exhale against black sky, the bright cherry at the tip of my cigarette against deep forever. The stars are silver tubes of light going back endlessly, years and light-years into themselves. The wind shifts restlessly. Maybe it will rain in a week or so. Wood smoke curls itself around my shoulders, lingers long enough to scent my hair and skin, and then veers toward Dad. The two of us are silent, listening to Mum and her stuck record, Tragedies of Our Lives. What the patient, nice Englishman does not know, which Dad and I both know, is that Mum is only on Chapter One.

  Chapter One: The War

  Chapter Two: Dead Children

  Chapter Three: Insanity

  Chapter Four: Being Nicola Fuller of Central Africa

  Chapter Four is really a subchapter of the other chapters. Chapter Four is when Mum sits quietly, having drunk so much that every pore in her body is soaked. She is yoga-cross-legged, and she stares, with a look of stupefied wonder, at the garden and at the dawn breaking through wood-smoke haze and the thin gray-brown band of dust and pollution that hangs above the city of Lusaka. And she’s thinking, So this is what it’s like being Me.

  Kelvin comes. “Good night.”

  Mum is already sitting yoga-cross-legged, cradling a drink on her lap. “Good night, Kelvin,” she says with great emphasis, almost with respect (a sad, dignified respect). As if he were dead and she were throwing the first clump of soil onto his coffin.

  Dad and I excuse ourselves, gather a collection of dogs, and make for our separate bedrooms, leaving Mum, the Englishman, and two swooping bats in the company of the sinking fire. The Englishman, who spent much of supper

  warily eyeing the bats and ducking every time one flitted over the table, has now got beyond worrying about bats.

  Mum, Dad, Van—Kenya

  Guests trapped by Mum have Chapters of their own.

  Chapter One: Delight

  Chapter Two: Mild Intoxication Coupled with Growing Disbelief

  Chapter Three: Extreme Intoxication Coupled with Growing Panic

  Chapter Four: Lack of Consciousness

  I am here visiting from America. Smoking cigarettes when I shouldn’t be. Drinking carelessly under a huge African sky. So happy to be home I feel as if I’m swimming in syrup. My bed is closest to the window. The orange light from the dying fire glows against my bedroom wall. The bedding is sweet-bitter with wood smoke. The dogs wrestle for position on the bed. The old, toothless spaniel on the pillow, one Jack Russell at each foot.

  “Rhodesia was run by a white man, Ian Douglas Smith, remember him?”

  “Of course,” says the unfortunate captive guest, now too drunk to negotiate the steep, dusty driveway through the thick, black-barked trees to the long, red-powdered road that leads back to the city of Lusaka, where he has a nice, European-style house with an ex–embassy servant and a watchman (complete with trained German shepherd). Now, instead of going back to his guarded African-city suburbia, he will sit up until dawn, drinking with Mum.

  “He came to power in 1964. On the eleventh of November, 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.”

  Bumi, the spaniel, tucks her chin onto the pillow next to my head, where she grunts with content before she begins to snore. She has dead-rabbit breath. I turn over, my face away from hers, and go to sleep.

  The last thing I hear is Mum say, “We were prepared to die, you see, to keep one country white-run.”

  In the morning Mum is Chapter Four, smiling idiotically to herself, a warm, f
lat beer propped between her thighs, her head cockeyed. She is staring damply into the pink-yellow dawn. The guest is Chapter Four too, lying grayly on the lawn. He isn’t convulsing, but in almost every other respect, he looks astonishingly like Kelvin did yesterday afternoon.

  Kelvin has brought the tea and is laying the table for breakfast As If Everything Were Normal.

  Which it is. For us.

  Village

  CHIMURENGA:

  THE BEGINNING

  In April 1966, the year my parents moved to Rhodesia with their baby daughter, the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) launched an attack against government forces in Sinoia to protest Smith’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Britain and to fight for majority rule.

  Sinoia, corruption of “Chinhoyi,” was the name of the local chief in 1902.

  The Second Chimurenga, it was called by the black Africans in Rhodesia, this war of which the 1966 skirmish in Sinoia was just the start.

  Chimurenga. A poetic Shona way of saying “war of liberation.”

  Zimbabwe, they called the country. From dzimba dza mabwe, “houses of stone.”

  The whites didn’t call it Chimurenga. They called it the Troubles, This Bloody Nonsense. And sometimes “the war.” A war instigated by “uppity blacks,” “cheeky kaffirs,” “bolshy muntus,” “restless natives,” “the houts.”

  Black Rhodesians are also known by white Rhodesians as “gondies,” “boogs,” “toeys,” “zots,” “nig-nogs,” “wogs,” “affies.”

  We call the black women “nannies” and the black men “boys.”

  The First Chimurenga was a long time ago, a few years after the settlers got here. The welcome mat had only been out for a relative moment or two when the Africans realized a welcome mat was not what they needed for their European guests. When they saw that the Europeans were the kind of guests who slept with your wife, enslaved your children, and stole your cattle, they saw that they needed sharp spears and young men who knew how to use them. The war drums were brought out from dark corners and dusted off and the old men who knew how to beat the war drums, who knew which rhythms would pump the fighting blood of the young men, were told to start beating the drums.