Cruelty and beauty haunt two views of Africa

By SUE YOUNGER*

Carolyn Slaughter's Before the Knife is a clear-eyed stare into the heart of darkness. It is her memoir of a 1950s and 60s childhood in the Kalahari Desert, the daughter of British parents grieving for the recent loss of their glorious life in India under the Raj.

But while the hardship and confusion that is Africa in the dying stages of colonialism surround her, the cruellest blow is that her father rapes her, beginning at age 6 and continuing even after her mother's discovery of the secret.

This is not explored explicitly in this memoir much at all. There are, thankfully, no awful scenes of sexual abuse. On the surface the book is more a description of the emotionally impoverished life of a colonial officer and his family. Nevertheless, the abuse lies at its heart. Her only comfort is the stunning beauty of the landscape she grew to love and which she skilfully describes for us.

Slaughter is angry and clearly identifies with the victims of colonisation - fellow victims of the cruelty of men like her father.

By contrast, Alexandra Fuller does not feel like a victim of her parents or her circumstances. Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight tells of her 1970s and 80s childhood, first in Ian Smith's Rhodesia as it becomes Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe and then in Malawi and Zambia as her highly eccentric farmer parents search for a white haven.

Fuller has a lighter, more humorous touch than Slaughter. She sticks to a child's eye view, allowing her to eschew any overt judgment of her parents in favour of funny, affectionate, unflinching description of the way they were - drunken, racist, hard-working, vital and alive. Because she refuses to deal in guilt and blame and feels far less bitterness about her childhood, her memoir is an easier read.

This non-judgmental approach is appealing and disarming. While at first I longed for analysis, I was gradually won over as I realised how much truth was emerging.

That is not to say, and Fuller never suggests for one minute, that it is okay or understandable to call people, as her parents did, kaffirs or muntus and treat them accordingly. Nor does she deny the suffering of the black workers she comes into contact with - indeed, she (occasionally overdramatically) horrifies the reader with the way her family are seemingly completely unmoved by their agony. But she does vividly evoke the kind of milieu where this racism is possible, if not excusable.

While not an apologist for her parents, it is their story that she is telling. It is true that often while reading one can feel robbed of the African point of view but, as a child, and even a young adult, Fuller's view of the world is egocentric and naive.

Some may think she is being disingenuous but her memoir sheds just as much light on events in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe as a more critical, angry piece would have done. She does admire her parents as indomitable survivors, even while seeing the absurdity of their situation. Is this all part of the colonial myth? Who knows? But this book certainly stimulates the reader to think about it.

The external complexity of post-colonialism is reflected beautifully within Slaughter's family. While her mother is, without doubt, a terrible mother - often drunk, driven quite mad by the deaths of several of her children as well as the harshness of her life - she is full of life. The fierce love Fuller feels for her is perfectly transmitted to the reader. (Who could resist a woman who goes to great lengths to rig up BBC shortwave radio in the trees in order to sway drunkenly to popular music in her garden?)

Together these books create a disturbing and vivid picture of growing up in an adopted continent fraught with danger, cruelty and complexity, against a backdrop of overwhelming beauty.

Carolyn Slaughter: Before the knife: Memories of an African childhood

Black Swan

$29.95

Alexandra Fuller: Don't let's go to the dog's tonight: An African childhood

Picador

$37.95

* Sue Younger is an Auckland documentary-maker