Alexandra Fuller stares at the scene inside the diorama in the Field Museum’s darkened exhibit hall. She draws in her breath, squints and walks closer; a female cheetah and her two babies are crouching together, as if seeking shelter from a prowling predator.
“Cheetahs are my favorite animals,” Fuller says. “They’re great mothers. They never waste anything.”
Fuller knows plenty about cheetahs, hyenas, baboons, leopards, not to mention scorpions in the swimming pool and pythons in the pantry. The author of a new memoir, “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood” (Random House, $25), Fuller, 32, grew up on a farm in southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) just before the end of colonial rule.
During a stopover in Chicago, Fuller’s one-hour visit to the Field Museum’s Africa exhibit stirs up lots of memories from her childhood years. “I have such a passion for Africa,” she says. “If you could live there, why would you choose to be here? Whenever I get off the plane in Africa, I literally want to drink in the air.”
Fuller’s book has won widespread critical praise. The New York Times called it “gripping.” It is being compared to Isak Dinesen’s “Out of Africa” and Elspeth Huxley’s “The Flame Trees of Thika.”
But glowing reviews–and movie-star good looks–don’t seem to have gone to Fuller’s head. She laughingly mocks herself while sporting well-worn jeans, hiking boots and a gray turtleneck sweater that looks like it has seen at least a few horse corrals. She has cowgirl hands.
Her mother and father, British farmers who had no tolerance for the gray shroud of winter, first moved to Rhodesia when Fuller was a baby. They were unabashed racists and British supremacists; her father took up arms in 1979 to maintain white rule and her mother pronounced herself ready to die to keep the country run by whites.
Besides being on the wrong side of the anti-colonial revolution that swept across the African continent, Fuller’s parents seemed to have had bad luck all around. When they lost their farm, they moved to Malawi, into an area stamped on a map: “Not Fit for White Man’s Habitation.” Three of their five children died–one from meningitis, one in an accidental drowning and one at birth. Fuller’s mother suffered from manic depression. Both parents drank, seemingly whenever they got the chance. The book’s title is a clear play on those down-and-out years.
An unapologetic account
Fuller’s account is clear-eyed and unapologetic; she neither rationalizes nor offers excuses. Raised in the middle of a guerrilla war, Fuller, nicknamed Bobo, learned how to clean and load rifles, shoot to kill and administer blood transfusions, all by the age of 5. Her parents slept with loaded guns under their beds. Her mother tells her, “Don’t come creeping into our room at night. Don’t startle us when we’re sleeping. . . . We might shoot you.” Fuller looked for comfort in her older sister, who wasn’t armed. To go to town, the family traveled in a convoy, led by a mine-detecting vehicle and several trucks filled with Rhodesian soldiers. They wore their Sunday best, so if they were killed, they would “be presentable to go and sit on the left hand of God the father.”
When white rule ended and their farmland was allocated under a plan of “land redistribution,” squatters set up shanties outside the family’s front door. Fuller’s mother, enraged and also pregnant, saddled up a horse, grabbed her rifle and headed out for a confrontation. In a pathetic, one-woman last stand against the revolution, she rode her horse indiscriminantly at women and children, yelling, “Get the hell off my farm.”
Soon after, soldiers visited the family. They told her father, “You just keep your wife under control from now on. This is Zimbabwe now. You can’t just do as you please from now. From now it is we who are in charge.”
Fuller remembered it as “only one of so many incidents of Mum’s rage toward Africans.” Fuller was 14 before she was formally invited into an African home to share a meal, but she doesn’t find it odd that she herself does not hate Africans.
“I grew up on isolated farms, so I played only with Africans,” she recalled. “My caretaker was an African and she was way more intimate with me than my mother ever was. In fact, all the people I loved were African, so it didn’t occur to me to be racist.” Race didn’t really “register” with her until she was 7 and went away to boarding school, she said. “That’s when I realized, `Oh, I’m not black.’ “
Left to look after her younger sister, Olivia, while her parents went out, Fuller was off playing when the child drowned in a pond. For many years, Fuller blamed herself for the accidental drowning and prayed that her mother would have another child.
When she visited her parents last year for Christmas, they urged her to move on. “My dad turns everything into riding a horse,” she said. “Said keep looking ahead or I’ll get wiped out of the saddle. My parents are big believers in the fact that you’ve got to keep on breathing, take the next step, keep going, you can’t stop.”
War and family tragedy
For Fuller, who describes herself as “headstrong,” that was probably a good thing, too, since her mother slipped into alcoholism and depression after the death of her third child. “Her last thread to sanity snapped,” Fuller recalled. “She was unstable until about four years ago. Of course, alcohol never helps.”
Fuller not only braved war and family tragedy; there were the everyday physical hardships of life in Africa. She came close to death from dysentery. Nights were “so dense with humidity we feel as if we might absorb water through our skins, as sheep are said to do.” When there was drought, crocodiles would leave the riverbanks to scrounge through a neighboring farmer’s land for a drop of water.
Still, she said she finds herself longing for Africa.
She moved away to Nova Scotia in 1987 and earned a degree in English literature at Acadia University, then moved back to Africa, where she met her husband, Charlie Ross, who worked as a safari guide in Zambia. After she started a family and her infant daughter suffered eight bouts of malaria in six months, the couple decided in 1994 to move to Wyoming, where her husband had spent summers as a child. They live on a ranch there, near the Grand Tetons. “We thought it might be better to bring her to milder, malaria-free climes,” she said. At year’s end, though, they plan to move back to Africa to start a safari business. “I think I miss people who know me so well that I don’t have to explain myself all the time.”
Calling herself “a rabid greeny,” Fuller said, “We’re so far removed from where we grow our food. Everything is wrapped in cellophane here. We’ve lost our sense of touch; we’re cutting off all our senses.
“Here, the more removed you are from food, water and clean air, the more society praises you; if you can afford to live in the top of some skyscraper somewhere, you’re thought to be highly successful,” she said.
Fuller, who awoke every day at 3 or 4 a.m. before her children so she could find some quiet time to write her memoir, says she’s planning a second book about Africa. She said she hopes her book has spawned an interest in Africa. “I only hope next time something comes up about Zimbabwe on the news, people will open up to it–hear a real story and connect a face.”
