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

by Alexandra Fuller

  “Call your dogs!” Mum shouts into the raw new village (the bush poles that have been cut to make the huts are still bleeding and wet; the thatched roofs smell green—they will not stop water from leaking into the huts when it rains).

  The squatters are standing in a row in front of their huts. The baby that has been crying stops now and looks at us in silent astonishment. He is hanging from his mother’s back. The other women have slung their small children onto soft, ready hips. The men stand in a row, chins high, mouths soft and sullen. One of the children is coughing, eyes bulging, hair fuzzed a telltale protein-deficient red: kwashiorkor hair. He is naked except for a pair of threadbare shorts through which I can see his shriveled penis and the tops of his stick-thin legs.

  Mum circles around the huts; Caesar spins up the newly stripped earth as he paces. I pull Burma Boy up under one of the huts and sit, crouched into my saddle, watching.

  “This is our land!”

  The squatters stare back, their expressions not changing.

  Mum spurs Caesar on, charging into the impassive group of men, women, and children. The African dogs yelp and flee, cowering, into the dark mouths of the huts. One of the young children, too big to be on a hip but too small to be far from his mother, screams and follows the dogs. The mother with the baby on her back is holding a gourd, used for carrying water or beer. She suddenly, in a rage of bravado, runs at Mum, shouting in a high, tremulous, singing voice, and strikes Caesar on the nose with the container. Caesar backs up, but Mum spins him around again, digs down into her saddle, legs tight. “Come on,” she growls, and then as Caesar surges forward, his nostrils wide and red-rimmed with surprise, Mum screams at the woman, “Don’t you hit my horse! You hear me? Don’t you hit my bloody horse. . . .”

  Mum charges at the squatters repeatedly, kicking Caesar fiercely and running indiscriminately at the women, the children, the men. And then she turns her horse onto the freshly planted maize field and begins tearing through it, between the still-bleeding stumps of the newly cut msasa trees. “You fucking kaffirs!” she screams. “Fucking, fucking kaffirs.”

  Some of the men break from the huddle around the huts and start to run after Caesar, shouting and waving their badzas and machetes. The children are all crying now. The women wrap the children in their arms and skirts and shield their faces.

  “You bastards!” screams Mum. “You bloody, bloody bastards. This is our farm!”

  One of the men starts to hurl clumps of earth at Mum. They fall damply against Caesar’s flank. He shies away, but Mum hunches down and clamps her legs onto him so that his breath comes out—umph—and she charges again and again at the squatters. The women scream and run into the huts with the children, shutting the flimsy bush-pole doors behind them. The men stand their ground, heaving whatever comes to hand at Mum and her horse. They are shouting at us in Shona.

  I shout, “Come on, Mum!” Scared. “Mu-uuum.”

  Still she wheels Caesar around again and again; the white froths of sweat gathering in balls on his neck and flecking out from between his hind legs.

  I stand up in my stirrups and scream as loudly as I can, “Mum! Let’s go.”

  I start to cry, pleading, “Mum-umm, please.”

  Finally the fight seems to bleed out of her. She turns to the men one last time and shakes her riding crop at them. “You get off my farm,” she says in a beaten, broken voice, “you hear? You get the hell off my farm.”

  Mum has come back from the ride pale and with a light film of sweat on her top lip. She doesn’t talk. When we get back to the yard, she slips off the horse, sliding down the saddle on her back, and then grimaces, holding her belly. She lets Caesar wander off, still saddled, reins looped and dragging on the ground, to graze in the garden. I shout for Flywell, frightened by the look of Mum.

  Mum pours herself a glass of water and goes into her room. When I go in there, the curtains are drawn and it sounds as if Mum is breathing through her voice.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Can I get you some tea?”

  “That would be nice.”

  So I order the cook to make tea and I bring Mum a cup but she does not drink it.

  When Dad comes in from the fields, he goes into the bedroom and stays there. I hear them talking softly to each other. It sounds as if Mum is crying.

  Vanessa says, “Why don’t we make a cake for Mum?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t feel like it.” I go to my room and lie on my bed, staring at the ceiling. It is a hot, sleepy afternoon and I am tired and salt-stinging from the excitement of the morning. My eyes are closing. Puncho, a rescued dog who has attached himself to me, sidles up to my head, licks my face, and settles himself happily next to me on the pillow. Sleepily, I start to search under his ears for ticks.

  Suddenly, Puncho leaps off the bed, his hackles up, barking in high excitement, and I can hear the other dogs scrambling off the veranda and bursting outside with a volley of barking. An instant later I hear Dad shout, “You bloody baboons!”

  I spring off my bed and run onto the veranda. Mum comes running out of her bedroom, still pale and holding her stomach. “Quick,” she says, pressing herself against the front door, a simple wooden affair on a hook latch, but without a lock or bolt, “lean on the door.”

  “What’s going on?” I ask, pinning my shoulder up against the door.

  “Shhh,” Mum hisses. She looks around wildly to see what dogs we have inside. “Hey Puncho!” Puncho is whining, his nose pressed to the bottom of the door. “Hsss,” she says to Shea and Sam, “bark! Sound fierce.”

  I can hear Dad shouting on the other side of the door but I cannot hear what he is saying.

  “Who is it?”

  “Soldiers,” says Mum.

  “Army guys?”

  “No, not army guys. Soldiers.”

  Mum and I are losing the battle of the door. There are two of us leaning with all our might against the door, but it is being pushed from the other side by three grown men. Suddenly, our resistance proves too feeble and the door collapses inward, sending Mum and me sprawling and a clatter of soldiers in on top of us.

  I fall as I have been taught. Curl into a ball and cover your head. I bring my arms up and close my eyes. I take a deep, shaky breath.

  I am going to die now. I wait. Does a bullet feel red hot coming into you? Do you feel it slicing into your flesh? Will I be dead before I feel pain?

  Mum says, “Fergodsake, Bobo, get off the floor.”

  I open my eyes.

  The Zimbabwean army soldiers are standing with their backs against the door. They are staring down at me.

  I sit up and find that I have not been shot. The soldiers’ eyes are blazing red, and they smell strongly of ganja and native-brewed beer. Now that they have pushed our feeble wooden door open and have us at gunpoint, they look a bit sheepish.

  Mum says, “Up!” And then she looks at me strangely. “Bobo, where’s Vanessa?”

  “Making a cake.”

  “Vanessa!” Suddenly Mum is screaming, “Vanessa!” and pushing her way past the three soldiers at the door. “Get out of my way you stupid bloody— Vanessa!”

  Vanessa is still in the kitchen, where fright has turned into her habitual seeming-calmness. Two soldiers are observing her from a polite distance, guns aimed casually at her belly, while she pours batter into a cake tin, scrapes the side of the bowl, puts the cake in the oven.

  “Are you all right?” screams Mum, rushing toward Vanessa.

  “Fine.” Vanessa points to the cookbook lying open on the greasy-topped kitchen table. “It says forty minutes in a medium oven for the cake.” The woodstove is belching smoke. “Would you say that is a medium oven?”

  “Oh, God,” Mum says. She catches her breath sharply and holds the edge of the table.

  “Are you all right, Mum?”

  Mum nods. The soldiers look from Mum to Vanessa and back to Mum, uncertainly. They wave their guns. “Come on
, come on. Outside,” says one of them. They herd Vanessa and Mum out onto the veranda.

  “Don’t let me forget. Forty minutes,” says Vanessa.

  Dad is negotiating with five or six more soldiers on the veranda. They are the new Zimbabwean army, fresh out of guerrilla troops. They are still war-minded. They are still war-trigger-happy.

  “You called us baboons.”

  “You jumped into my bedroom window. That is not a civilized thing to do, that is a baboon thing to do.”

  The soldiers stare belligerently at Dad. There is a long, shuffling silence.

  At last Dad says, “Look, either shoot me or put your fucking guns down and let’s talk about this sensibly.”

  I want to say, “Dad was only joking about shooting him. And don’t be touchy about being called a baboon. I’m their kid and they call me Bobo. Same thing.”

  One of the soldiers says, “Ah, comrade . . .”

  Dad says, “And there’s another thing. You can call me Mr. Fuller or Silly Old Bugger or Old Goat Fuller or any damn thing you like but comrade . . . never! You can never call me comrade.”

  The soldiers look at Dad in astonishment.

  “I’m not your comrade.” Dad takes the tip of one of the soldier’s guns and moves the barrel out of the way. He says, “Didn’t anyone teach you not to point these things at live targets?”

  The afternoon turns into a thick mellow evening, the light filters syrup-yellow and as the heat of the day melts away, so does the anger in the men. The soldiers grow tired; some of them sprawl on the top of the wall, slouched over the barrels of their guns and watch, eyes hooded, as Dad speaks to the soldier who seems to be in charge. Vanessa and I sit on the steps with the dogs, picking ticks out of their coats and popping the little gray and red bodies on the stone flags. Mum is very pale, breathing in quick shallow breaths. At last the soldier in charge stands up and stretches, “Okay, okay. Let’s leave this incident to sleep now. You just keep your wife under control from now on,” he tells Dad. “This is Zimbabwe now. You can’t just do as you please from now. From now it is we who are in charge.”

  They drive away. We watch them until their lorry humps over the culvert at the bottom of the drive.

  Dad says, “You okay, Tub?”

  Mum nods. She says, “Let’s have a drink.”

  Vanessa says, “Oh no! My cake.”

  That night we go out to the Club. While Vanessa and I sit on the black plastic chairs in the smoky bar sipping Cokes and crunching on salt-and-vinegar chips, kicking our heels against the chair legs, Mum and Dad drink and tell the story of their day’s adventure. By the time deep night has come and the nocturnal creatures have started to sing and croak and screech, Mum and Dad are drunk and Vanessa and I are curled up in the back of the car, staring out of the windows at the slowly swinging bright stars as they make their way across the cloud-scudding sky. We are eating our third packet of chips and sipping on dumpy-sized bottles of Coke.

  “Did you think you were going to die?” I ask Vanessa, carefully licking a chip to get the salt off it before I put the whole thing into my mouth.

  “What?”

  “Did you think we were going to be shot by those Affies?”

  Vanessa yawns and scrunches up her chip packet. “Have you finished your chips?”

  “No.”

  “Give them to me.”

  “No!”

  “Do you want a Chinese bangle?”

  I stuff the remaining chips into my mouth. My eyes sting and tears roll down my cheeks with the effort of it. Vanessa scrambles over the seat and squashes my cheeks together until the food squeezes out of my mouth.

  I start to cry. “I’m telling on you,” I weep. “I’m telling Mum and Dad.”

  Vanessa snorts. “Go ahead,” she says.

  Robandi is put up for mandatory auction under the new land distribution program. It is sold, in the loosest sense of the word, to a black Zimbabwean. The money that changes hands in this exchange doesn’t even touch the sides of our pockets. Everything from the farm is given to the Farmers’ Co-op, from which we had borrowed money to buy the farm in the first place.

  Robandi never belonged to us, and it doesn’t belong to the new Zimbabwean farmer. It belongs to the mortgage company. They, alone, seem unmoved by the fierce fight for land through which we have just come.

  The Fullers—Devuli

  DEVULI

  On a recent map entitled “Comfort-Discomfort Belts,” Devuli Ranch is shown in the area of Zimbabwe that is shaded with tight red lines. This means that it is an uncomfortably hot place, bordering on oppressive. “Health and efficiency suffer,” the map’s legend says.

  The older maps, drawn up in the 1920s, are more blunt. On these old maps, the area in which Devuli Ranch sits has stamped across it in bold black letters, “Not Fit for White Man’s Habitation.”

  Dad bends over a map and shows me: “See?” He lights a cigarette and points with the two fingers which hold the cigarette at the ranch. Blue smoke floats over the flat, yellow, red-lined patch of map.

  There are no towns anywhere near the ranch, and only one thin road leads past it, described on the map as a strip road. I point this out to Dad.

  He says, “Great, isn’t it?” He takes a deep pull on his cigarette and shows me. “Look at the rivers.” There are three rivers running through the ranch.

  “Well, that looks watery,” I say, more hopefully.

  Dad snorts. “It just looks that way. Dry as a bloody bone.”

  “Will we grow tobacco?”

  “Cattle,” says Dad. “I’m going to find their cattle.” His thumb covers hundreds of miles and he moves it slowly across the bottom of the map. “All this, see? That’s where the cattle are. They think.”

  The herd went wild during the war. They’ve started to range and roam like wild herds of eland or kudu. Dad is going to find, herd, dip, vaccinate, dehorn, castrate, cull, and brand a few thousand head of wild Brahman cattle.

  “Will we be the only white people?”

  “Almost. There’s the ranch manager and his wife.”

  “Are there any kids?”

  “Not white kids.”

  “Oh.”

  “You can help me round up the cattle.”

  “Okay.” I am not enthusiastic.

  “There are wild horses, too.”

  “Oh. Can we train them?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “How long will we live there?”

  Dad smokes and squints up his blue eyes. He says, “I’ve told them if they give me a year, I’ll give them their herd back.”

  “And then?”

  “We’ll cross that river when we get to it.”

  The Turgwe, Save, and Devure rivers flood once or twice each year, each flood within a few weeks of the last. A great wall of water gushing brownly through the scrubby low mopane woodland makes a roaring sound like a thousand Cape buffalo galloping over hollow ground. Floating carcasses of large animals are caught, legs poking up among washed-away trees. Smaller animals, still alive, cling wide-eyed to the branches of the barreling trees, bodies hunched, wet faces pinched with fear. By morning, the flood is over. The rivers lie almost still, swollen, sluggish. And then the rivers dry into smaller and smaller pools, stinking and lurking with scorpions, until nothing is left of them but glittering white sand.

  The Africans and animals who have learned to live down here near the ranch, in the lowveldt, dig deep wells into the dry riverbeds until they reach the black, dank water that lies there. For nine months out of every year, these warm, barely ample wells feed everything that is alive within a fifty-mile radius.

  Which will, very shortly, include us.

  Between the Turgwe and the Devure lies Devuli Ranch. Seven hundred and fifty thousand mostly flat acres of scrubby, bitter grass, mopane woodland, acacia thorn trees, thorny scrubs, and the occasional rocky outcrop. The cattle have not been touched for ten years—almost the entire war. There are second-, third-, and fourth-generation Br
ahman cows running wild on the ranch.

  Brahman cows are the wildest of all domesticated cattle, notoriously jumpy and hard to handle even when they do have frequent human contact. They are strangely feral-looking, with their elaborate humped shoulders and sweeping dewlaps and floppy ears. And these cows have been alone so long that they have become hardy and prone to spooking, like prey animals.

  For there is also an abundance of leopard in the kopjes. Kopje, Afrikaans for “head.” That’s how these small hills look, like buried black giant heads in the hot sand. The leopards are as still as dappled blankets rumpled against the gray rock, their flanks beating in the heat like fluttering leaf-shadows. They watch the young spring Brahman calves by day and they hunt by night. Leopards kill at the throat, one efficient, powerful bite to the jugular. Which is why they can hunt alone.

  We bring our new cook, Thompson, with us from the farm, and our nanny, Judith, who has recently changed her name to Loveness. They step out of the car and their faces twist with disgust.

  “It’s alone,” says Judith/Loveness.

  “Alone what?” asks Mum.

  “All alone.”

  Thompson says, “Too much sand, madam.”

  Cephas, our tracker, has also come with us from Robandi and it is as if his feet have hit the earth on which he was meant to walk when he steps out of the car. His whole body seems to twitch with excitement in the stupefying heat. The rest of us blink at the shiny, flat, scrubby landscape and feel thirst. Cephas scans the horizon, his nostrils grow wide, and he feels Life.

  “They drink blood,” he tells me.

  “Who?”

  “Leopards.”

  “Why?”

  “For fun. Leopard beer.” He laughs.

  Cephas has been designated the family’s tracker. For most of the time, while I am at school, he is tracking wild cattle for Dad and wild game for the pot. During the holidays, I can go anywhere on the ranch, as long as Cephas is with me—he tracks to make sure we are not walking into a leopard’s tree or the place where a snake likes to sleep. And in this landscape, which is turn-around-the-same no matter which way you face (more mopane and scrub and acacia), Cephas makes sure we don’t get lost.