Two sisters awake in the depths of an African night. They are scared of what might be outside. They are scared of what might be inside. But they are forbidden to creep into their parents’ room for comfort because their mum and dad keep loaded guns on their bedside rugs and, if startled, might shoot them by mistake.
The death-defying opening of a continent-crossing thriller? A heart-in-mouth crime novel perhaps? A searing work of domestic noir? No. This is the opening scene of Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood, a work of non-fiction by Alexandra Fuller, published in 2002.
As a non-fiction author myself, I’ve grown familiar with the assumption that novels have a monopoly on thrills. Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight exemplifies the fact that the best fiction and nonfiction books often share the same qualities. Fuller’s memoir has a memorable setting, artfully and poetically evoked. It tangles comedy and tragedy so that you can’t separate them. Her story is peopled with characters for whom we care deeply even though they confound us, and it’s animated by dialogue so authentic it twangs your eardrums. There are turns of sentence so striking you want to read them over and over, and enough questions of moral and ethical complexity to keep the most committed reading group talking for days. All this, and a propulsive plot too. Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight was one of the first books to convince me that non-fiction can have all the attributes that an inveterate fiction reader could ever want.
Fuller opens by telling us that she was conceived in a hotel close to where the Zambezi River plunges ‘a hundred metres into a blacksided gorge’. Although she was subsequently born in Britain, from the age of 2 she grew up in southern Africa. Don’t Let’s Go
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Subscribe now or Sign inTwo sisters awake in the depths of an African night. They are scared of what might be outside. They are scared of what might be inside. But they are forbidden to creep into their parents’ room for comfort because their mum and dad keep loaded guns on their bedside rugs and, if startled, might shoot them by mistake.
The death-defying opening of a continent-crossing thriller? A heart-in-mouth crime novel perhaps? A searing work of domestic noir? No. This is the opening scene of Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood, a work of non-fiction by Alexandra Fuller, published in 2002. As a non-fiction author myself, I’ve grown familiar with the assumption that novels have a monopoly on thrills. Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight exemplifies the fact that the best fiction and nonfiction books often share the same qualities. Fuller’s memoir has a memorable setting, artfully and poetically evoked. It tangles comedy and tragedy so that you can’t separate them. Her story is peopled with characters for whom we care deeply even though they confound us, and it’s animated by dialogue so authentic it twangs your eardrums. There are turns of sentence so striking you want to read them over and over, and enough questions of moral and ethical complexity to keep the most committed reading group talking for days. All this, and a propulsive plot too. Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight was one of the first books to convince me that non-fiction can have all the attributes that an inveterate fiction reader could ever want. Fuller opens by telling us that she was conceived in a hotel close to where the Zambezi River plunges ‘a hundred metres into a blacksided gorge’. Although she was subsequently born in Britain, from the age of 2 she grew up in southern Africa. Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight – its arresting title a line from a poem by A. P. Herbert – is a memoir of childhood that charts her white settler family’s experiences as they attempt to cultivate a series of farms, moving location every few years in civil war-torn Rhodesia (before it became Zimbabwe), and then to Malawi and Zambia. When the book opens in 1975 Fuller has just woken in the middle of the night, desperate for the loo but too terrified to get up and go on her own. She wakes her elder sister Vanessa who lights a candle and escorts her, waiting impatiently as Bobo pees ‘as much as a horse’. Their spiky sibling relationship is established in this opening scene:‘Hurry up, man.’ ‘Okay, okay’. ‘It’s like Victoria Falls.’Woven around this dialogue is Fuller’s first hymn to her book’s African setting, as she evokes the night-time breeze blowing in through the lavatory window. It has trapped midday scents: ‘the prevalent cloying of the leach field, the green soap which has spilled out from the laundry and landed on the patted-down red earth, the wood smoke from the fires that heat our water, the boiled-meat smell of dog food’. Very early on we learn that Fuller’s family considers itself posh. ‘We have breeding,’ her mother tells her daughters, ‘which is better than having money.’ Fuller’s mother clings to this belief despite having to pawn her jewellery every year to help the family make ends meet, trusting each time that the harvest will bring in enough money to allow her to redeem it. What a character this mother is. She regularly drinks herself into a stupor. She’s a bigoted woman who tells people ‘We were prepared to die . . . to keep one country white-run’. She is also bold and openhearted, trailed by a devoted pack of dogs that she’s rescued. She buys a book on belly-dancing and tries out her techniques ‘on every bar north of the Limpopo River’. She is also a grieving mother who gives birth to five children, only two of whom – Fuller and her sister – survive infancy. A series of tragedies wipe out her three other children one by one, hollowing her once ebullient settler spirit. It does not spoil the plot to reveal these traumas because by p.34 Fuller has already stated that hers is ‘a story for people who need to find an acceptable way to lose a multitude of babies’. Fuller’s father, meanwhile, refers to African border guards as ‘Bloody Baboons’. His deeply held conviction of the superiority and rights of the white settler means that his surviving children are brought up in a place that will – long into adulthood – leave them startlingly alert ‘in the quick, grasping way of all people who have lived in a war (and for which there is no cure ever, not even now)’. Thanks to her parents, by the time she is 8 Fuller already believes that basketball and soccer are ‘things white children do not do, like picking your nose in public’ or ‘dancing hip-waggling to African music’. Before she is 10 she declares that when she grows up, ‘I’ll be in charge of muntus and show them how to farm properly.’ Just in case it comes to it, she already knows how to handle an Uzi submachine gun. In 1978, Independence comes to Zimbabwe, ‘readyornot’, as Fuller puts it. The times they are a-changing, and her previously all-white boarding school begins to take black students. The combined children of the new nation must now brush their teeth next to each other, ‘pee on top of each other’s pee’. When Fuller shows a reluctance to share the same bathwater as her black fellow students, the new black matron tells her to stop her nonsense. ‘Skin is skin. In you get.’ There is not a single dull moment. At the end of the memoir Fuller marries Charlie, her American fiancé. She walks down the aisle delirious from a bout of malaria, her head spinning with the gin and aspirin her parents have given her to stave off its symptoms. A wild party follows, which ends only when the electricity fails and Fuller’s father drunkenly sets himself alight. He is extinguished with a bottle of champagne. Despite all their flaws and their prejudices, it is impossible not to warm to these crazy, larger-than-life characters. Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight is both vastly entertaining and a book of colossal themes. Perhaps the most colossal theme of all is the desire to possess land which won’t be possessed, that does not care which side anyone is on. From the perspective of adulthood Fuller writes of her African homeland that ‘you can call it what you like, fight all the wars you want in its name. Change its name altogether if you like. The land is still unblinking under the African sky.’ This is as topical a theme today as when the book was first written. Fuller’s memoir shows us that it doesn’t matter which side of a mythical divide books are on, that the names different kinds of stories are given matter less than the stories themselves. Fiction and non-fiction need not sit at opposite ends of the spectrum, as if it were necessary to make a choice between the two. It is enough simply to set great books free to roam through a vast landscape of things worth reading.
Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 86 © Caroline Sanderson 2025
About the contributor
Caroline Sanderson has previewed forthcoming non-fiction for The Bookseller every month for the past twenty-three years, except for the month when her daughter was born in 2001. Given this relentless focus on books that haven’t yet been published, her idea of heaven is to reread a book that came out years ago.
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