This review is from: Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood (Paperback)

Today, I came across a critical review in an esteemed journal, wherein the author emoted that whereas Alexandra Fuller pleads that she and her parents don't go to the dogs tonight, it would be better if they did.

For each historical era there have been a group of people whom it is considered politically fashionable to hate. I sometimes sense a resounding cry of "leave the others alone, and hate only these ones!" In the mid 20th Century is was okay to hate the Jews, if you were alive in Europe at that time. Blacks have often been hated -- especially in the American 20th Century. Women are still regarded as sub-human in myriads of cultural and social contexts.

In Rhodesia, and more so the Republic of South Africa, one wouldn't have wished to be born black in the 20th Century. The contemporary state of Zimbabwe is not much kinder, economically or politically, to the average person who has been born black. Still, there is a spirit of freedom in the air that was not there before. People are happier, lighter, and act in a more harmonious way with their surroundings, compared to what I had observed during the colonial era.

Such wonderful change comes at a price. I lost my identity when my family emigrated. (I was fifteen.)I didn't know where to begin, so I tried various things. Experiments. One of these was to embrace fundamentalist Christianity. It made me increasingly sick. Sick to the heart. Sick to the bone. I tried to recapture the possibility for adventure I had earlier enjoyed in my life. That seemed to work up to a point, but something was still wrong.

I didn't resolve the issue until I wrote my PhD thesis on a Zimbabwean writer and the traumas he faced, due to racialism and war. Since I was also traumatized by my post-emigration experiences by this point, I found Dambudzo Marechera's writing to be cathartic.

Fuller's writing captures the life of real people, many of whom, like Fuller's mother, were traumatized for some reason. She details the magic of the Rhodesian experience, which involved transcending the immediacy of one's personal traumas and finding pleasure even in the midst of hardship.

Here Fuller speaks about such aspects of Rhodesian colonial life as the complete media shut-down, the psychological impact of the sudden end of the war, and the violence that was directed against women: