Scribbling the Cat: travels with an African soldier
Alexandra Fuller Picador, 269pp, £16.99
ISBN 033043327X
The white man in Africa does not enjoy a good press. Take Zimbabwe's white farmers. They may have been turfed off the land they toiled to make productive, but it is hard to feel much sympathy for them, with their tight shorts, long socks and sandals, references to munts (black people) and paintings of Mussolini over the fireplace. Elsewhere, public-school mercenaries try to engineer coups in the Comoros and Equatorial Guinea, and across the continent are scattered those settlers who stayed on after independence. Often educated in Britain, but not really fitting in either there or in Africa, they are frequently to be found in bars, soaked in gin-fuelled nostalgia about a past that was never really that good.
Alexandra Fuller's parents are part of this tribe, fleeing war or land seizure by shifting from country to country to run a succession of ever-poorer farms. Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, her memoir of growing up in Rhodesia, Malawi and Zambia with a manic-depressive mother, fears of terrorists under the bed and civil war all around, was deservedly hailed as a classic. Now she has turned her attention to the men who fought those wars.
As Fuller notes, there are some parts of Africa where almost anyone over the age of ten is an old soldier. "What is harder is to find an old soldier who will talk about the war with strangers." Then, while spending Christmas at her parents' fish and banana farm in Zambia, she meets a Rhodesian war vet, whom she identifies only as "K", who talks about everything. Fuller is warned by her father that K is a "tough bugger" and told by neighbours of his reputation as a thug, and their first encounter crackles with sexual tension. She describes him, tattooed and scarred, as "beautiful but in a careless, superior way, like a dormant lion . . . his lips were full and sensual . . . He looked cathedral." But Fuller is married with a husband and two children back in Wyoming, USA.
One of the thorniest problems journalists and writers face is that even a sympathetic telling of someone else's story does not always benefit them in any conceivable way. In K's case, one cannot help but feel he might have been better off had he never met Fuller. He tells her of his mother dying of polio when he was a boy; of his only child, the "angelic" five-year-old Luke, dying of meningitis; of finding his wife in bed with the friend to whom he had offered a home after an accident; of his days fighting; and, finally, of finding God.
Showing her around his banana farm, K talks of how he would nurture a woman, and tearfully asks God: "Why have you sent me this woman if she is not the one?" Clearly, the last thing he needs is a broken heart, and most married women would have left well alone at that point. But then Fuller would have lost a good yarn.
Instead, she persuades K to journey to Mozambique, where he was stationed for five years during the Rhodesian war, to face up to the demons that haunt his dreams. This is good for the reader, because Fuller has the most talented of pens. In her descriptions of Africa, she manages to be both brutally honest and sympathetic, humorous yet poetic. She describes Zimbabwe as "a land of screaming ghosts or of sun-flung possibilities, a land of inviting warmth or of desperate drought", then adds: "How you see a country depends on whether or not you can leave it, if you have to."
Unfortunately, the road trip itself is disappointing. Before they even set off she asks K how many people he has floored with his punches and he replies 200, of whom roughly a dozen ended up in hospital. That was outside of the war. During the war itself, there were atrocities on both sides, and K played his part in many. In Mozambique, he reveals how he poured hot sadza (porridge) into the genitals of a young girl to force her to reveal where rebel fighters were hiding.
Fuller and K meet up with a few of his old war buddies, all of whom are equally screwed up, and stay with one who lives on an island with a pet lion and subsists on beer and Ritalin. Fuller ends up kissing him, leaving K in a jealous rage.
"K and I met and journeyed and clashed like Titans," she writes at the end. Rather than telling the human stories of the wars that have riven the Dark Continent, this book is really the study of the relationship between a writer and her subject. It is ultimately unsatisfying, because we do not learn enough about Fuller's own feelings. Does she care about K? Why do her own husband and children merit only a glancing mention?
It was always going to be hard to follow up a book as riveting as Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight. I began Scribbling the Cat with great anticipation, but ended it feeling that although Fuller had taken me on a fascinating journey through Southern Africa, she hadn't provided the right maps.
A new edition of Christina Lamb's book The Africa House will be published by Penguin this winter
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