Interrogating Fuller’s ideological innocence in Don’t Lets Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood.

Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood (2001) is made up of ideologically packed recollections of memories by someone who confessed that “we, as whites could not own a piece of Africa, but, [who] new with startling clarity, that Africa owned me [her]” (p.306). The protagonists there are the Fullers who are in constant conversations with their neighbours and environment: which for the most part is nations that constituted the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland.

Fuller’s recollections make up a moving story where serious identity, belonging and power issues are continuously hammered through day-today family talk and activities that are then transferred to the immediate community, nation and region at large. These manifests through stereotypical attachments placed on humanity’s names, behaviour and attitudes which in most cases are cast on race. Thus acts like wiping the nose with the back of the hand, putting up with hostile places like Devuli Ranch and Chirundu, and unorganised farming methods are associated with muntus, a term referring to Africans in the text. As a result, Alexandra sees herself as a person “in charge of muntus and show them how to farm properly” (p.103). The dream is misplaced once it fails to historicise the processes that leave the muntus in such state as they were squashed in reserves and Tribal Trust Lands with no space for the growing population.

Using the term muntu referring to the Black African  denies the Fullers, Canadians, Americans, Indians and other ethnicities the humanity that Fuller essentially wants to accord them in a place she believes is hostile to them. This is actually when the linguistic meaning of the term is analysed with the knowledge of what the word carries in as far as what humanity is. Muntu or munhu simply refers to a human being. 

As an ideologically packed text, Fuller’s story exposes the binaries that separates humanity into ‘us’ and ‘them’ binaries as they contest for belonging and entitlement to resources. The binaries in so many cases threaten social cohesion and harmonious existence of people of diverse skin pigment and ethnicities. Fuller gives incidents where the binaries are but not limited to race, class, gender, ethnicity and place of origin. Thus at one point in time at Devuli we have Thomson threatened with death by the locals whom he feels hate and fear him. At the end he quits his job and went back home. Whilst in Malawi, the Fullers met up with the Germans, whom Alexandra confessed she knows of the Germans through World War history much to the discomfort of her parents.

It is worth noting that in Fuller’s text race and ethnicity are embedded with power. Whilst in Rhodesia, whites are engulfed with power to the extent that little Alexandra’s child innocence is lost in the power of her skin pigment. As a pikinini (little) madam she boasts to her child minders and threatens them with firing if they don’t obey her orders. She feels and senses her superiority over her child minders who are of African origin. 

Power is also manifest through one’s location, school, residential side and type of work and profession. Thus children from white farming communities are different from town dwellers. As a consequence Alexandra is transferred from Chancellor Junior School to an all-white school in Harare after her former school was infested by black students after independence. Everyone at Chancellor Junior School is white except the grounds men, cleaners and maids, whom of course are supervised by ‘drunken old [white] man’, ‘old white lady’ and a ‘deaf’ matron. 

As a matter of fact it’s the children of the emerging black elites, most of them government and politically connected business people occupied the formerly all-white schools. It’s a fulfilment of a yearning, by the emerging elites to live that grandeur lifestyle as their former colonisers. Fanon conceptualised it as ‘black skin, white masks’ as he opens our eyes to the unquenchable desire to be like the former colonialist that occupies the African’s heart, soul and mind. 

The ever present ideological markers that characterises Fuller’s story is denigrating stereotypes that run throughout human history of slavery, colonisation and neo-colonialism- that is now manifest in catchy term called globalisation. Fuller’s presentation of the full circle of the former Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland states gives identical images of nations full of hunger, disease and poverty. Zimbabwean (Rhodesian) farms are depicted as inhabitable places where scary animals, unbearable weather and wars threaten life and existence. Black workers are always viewed as potential rapists and murderers. Since the whites view themselves as from a perfect race they even chose to ignore Mr Swift’s unpalatable behaviour towards Van when he attempted to rape the girls.

In her discussion of their available routes to Malawi (formerly Nyasaland), Fuller has this to say: 

In any normal situation, the journey through Tete would be the more sensible choice. But this is Africa, so hardly anything is normal. If we go through Mozambique, we will have to elude landmines, Renamo rebels, bandits, and road so decayed they are worse than the tracks that army lorries and trucks have worn beside them (p.221). 

In Malawi they are frequented by images of skinny children suffering the “effects of malnutrition and the effects of overcrowded, unsanitary shantytowns and overfilled garbage dumps and we see him thin, ribby, curly-tailed dogs digging on heaps of decomposing rubbish on which children play and pick and shit” (p.242).

In Zambia they are faced with the same roads they have seen in Malawi and Zimbabwe as well as threatening levels of corruption. Writing of her visit Zambia from trotting around Canada and Scotland Fuller said she was welcomed by the “[i]ncongruous, lawless, joyful, violent, upside-down, illogical certainty of Africa” (p.287). 

These are the ghastly horrible images of Africa one can see in imperial classics of Hegel, Darwin, Kipling, Conrad and others. They are images of a hunger stricken, disease infested and barbaric and war ravaged Africa offered a bit of sanity by white philanthropy. Such images are ever present on bulletins on Africa in ‘global’ news channels like the Aljezira, CNN, and BBC among others. Some of us are left asking are they not better images of the motherland to show. 

However, a second reading of the images presented on texts like Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood and the enlisted texts and some of the actual images I encounter on a day-to-day basis one is left contemplating if they are wrong to choose to give such imagery. I think we can learn a lesson from such depiction of the Africa we love with our hearts. The lesson is to accept things that are not right to humanity and strive towards perfecting it through love for ourselves and humanity in general, hate for corruption and scapegoating and hard work for a meaningful transformation of our African habitat as a people. There is really need to get rid of the “illogical certainty” of the motherland. 

Above all let’s learn one of the best lessons from Mr Fuller to her daughter concerning the German aid workers they met in Malawi “At least death by mercenary is quicker--- [than] Death by aid” (p.242). The revelation was so frightening.