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May 12, 2002
SYNDICATED: Rout of Africa
V.S. NAIPAUL, in his 1971 Booker Prize-winning novel In a free state, offered a vision of the future for whites in sub-Saharan Africa in his portrayal of a European couple in flight from civil war. The couple eventually reach a fortified city at the southernmost tip of the unnamed country, where other whites are anxiously clustered and where they speak, as they do today in Cape Town, that last authentic white stronghold in Africa, of atrocities witnessed and prepared for the violence ahead.
In a free state can be read as a parable of the collapse into anarchy of Zimbabwe and, more generally, of the white retreat from Southern Africa, as settlers have fled first from the Congo and then from Zambia, Malawi, Rhodesia and post-apartheid South Africa, not forgetting the catastrophic exodus of the Portuguese from Angola and Mozambique, which condemned those states to perpetual conflict.
Today, Africa is a continent of failed states. Influential thinkers such as Robert Cooper, who advises New Labour, are calling for a new kind of benign, disinterested colonialism to counteract endemic corruption, tribalism and the failure of the African elite to produce workable civil societies. But the stain of imperialism is deep.
The traumas of nation-building of the kind being experienced in Zimbabwe, with its corrupt system of patronage and control, as outlined by Martin Meredith in his lucid new study, are the inevitable consequences of attempting to impose inappropriate Western models of government on artificially constructed nation-states. If Africa is ever to flourish — and perhaps the truth about Africa is that it may never flourish — it must be allowed to find its own way in the world, free from outside intervention.
Alexandra Fuller arrived with her parents and elder sister, Vanessa, in Rhodesia in 1972, seven years after Ian Smith had made his disastrous unilateral declaration of independence in opposition to black majority rule. Her parents were old African hands, having lived before in both Kenya and Rhodesia, and they had returned restlessly seeking something that had always eluded them in damp, restrictive Britain. Happiness, perhaps.
The family soon moves to a struggling farm in the remote Burma Valley on the eastern border with Mozambique, from where Robert Mugabe’s Shona Zanu guerrillas are launching cross-border raids at the start of the bush war, killing farmers on their isolated settlements. As many local whites prepare to flee, often under the cover of darkness, the Fullers become ever-more perversely entrenched on their farm. Protective razor-wire fencing is erected around their compound, the girls receive shooting lessons, and suffering and violent death are accepted as mere facts of life, rather like the weather.
When independence finally arrives, in 1980, and Mugabe, learning from earlier post-colonial struggles in Mozambique, cannily pursues reconciliation with the remaining whites, the Fullers decide to stay on in Zimbabwe. They move further south, to manage another ruined farm, but their lives there amount to little more than a chain of calamities and woes: a newborn child dies (Alexandra has already lost two siblings), the weather is relentless and debilitating, and Fuller monitors, out of the corner of her eye, her mother’s slow decline into alcoholism and madness.
She writes with wit and a tough, self revealing honesty of the loneliness, boredom and poverty of life in those shadowy borderlands, of the shattering silence of the long nights after the generators have been switched off and of continual fear. She does good weather, too; her book is saturated in heat and dust and dirt. Like many first-time writers, she invents her own idiom, at once mangling and stretching language as she seeks to speak and see with the immediacy of the child she once was.
At times, she experiments too much — with alliteration, compound adjectives and short verbless sentences — and in so doing her book becomes an engine of self-delight, a work of exhibitionism: look at me! Yet, once she relaxes into her style, the exuberance and magical readability of her narrative compels the suspension of all critical judgment. Her memoir is terrific.
Fuller’s parents still live in Africa, in Chirunda, Zambia, in ‘one of the least healthy, most malarial, hot, disagreeable places’ in the entire country. They are two hours by car from the home of Vanessa and a long way from urban life - ‘far from the madding crowd’, her father jokes.
The author is baffled by the wilful eccentricity and stubbornness of her parents and by the strange vacancy of her sister who, she concedes, for most of their time together resided in a place of ‘such profound, unreachable pain that she didn’t exist for me except as some shadowy, silent, very beautiful unattainable creature’.
From her new home in Wyoming, Fuller refuses to condemn her parents. They have suffered too much because of their profound love of the mysterious continent, never ceasing to mourn the death of their three children.
Fuller doesn’t see Zimbabwe through Western eyes. She sees the past repeating itself in the immediate violence washing over the country. ‘What I saw-,’ she says, ‘was yesterday’s terror.’
Don’t let’s go to the dogs tonight
By Alexandra Fuller
Picador
ISBN: 0330490230
400pp. £15.99
Mugabe: power and plunder in Zimbabwe
By Martin Meredith
Public Affairs
ISBN: 1903985285
243pp. £15.99
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