Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [2]
Horses—Serioes
GETTING THERE:
ZAMBIA, 1987
To begin with, before Independence, I am at school with white children only. “A” schools, they are called: superior schools with the best teachers and facilities. The black children go to “C” schools. In-between children who are neither black nor white (Indian or a mixture of races) go to “B” schools.
The Indians and coloureds (who are neither completely this nor completely that) and blacks are allowed into my school the year I turn eleven, when the war is over. The blacks laugh at me when they see me stripped naked after swimming or tennis, when my shoulders and arms are angry sunburnt red.
“Argh! I smell roasting pork!” they shriek.
“Who fried the bacon?”
Bo and Kenneth
“Burning piggy!”
My God, I am the wrong color. The way I am burned by the sun, scorched by flinging sand, prickled by heat. The way my skin erupts in miniature volcanoes of protest in the presence of tsetse flies, mosquitoes, ticks. The way I stand out against the khaki bush like a large marshmallow to a gook with a gun. White. African. White-African.
“But what are you?” I am asked over and over again.
“Where are you from originally?”
I began then, embarking from a hot, dry boat.
Blinking bewildered from the sausage-gut of a train.
Arriving in Rhodesia, Africa. From Derbyshire, England. I was two years old, startled and speaking toddler English. Lungs shocked by thick, hot, humid air. Senses crushed under the weight of so many stimuli.
I say, “I’m African.” But not black.
And I say, “I was born in England,” by mistake.
But, “I have lived in Rhodesia (which is now Zimbabwe) and in Malawi (which used to be Nyasaland) and in Zambia (which used to be Northern Rhodesia).”
And I add, “Now I live in America,” through marriage.
And (full disclosure), “But my parents were born of Scottish and English parents.”
What does that make me?
Mum doesn’t know who she is, either.
She stayed up all night once listening to Scottish music and crying.
“This music”—her nose twitches—“is so beautiful. It makes me homesick.”
Mum has lived in Africa all but three years of her life.
“But this is your home.”
“But my heart”—Mum attempts to thump her chest—“is Scottish.”
Oh, fergodsake. “You hated England,” I point out.
Mum nods, her head swinging, like a chicken with a broken neck. “You’re right,” she says. “But I love Scotland.”
“What,” I ask, challenging, “do you love about Scotland?”
“Oh the . . . the . . .” Mum frowns at me, checks to see if I’m tricking her. “The music,” she says at last, and starts to weep again. Mum hates Scotland. She hates drunk-driving laws and the cold. The cold makes her cry, and then she comes down with malaria.
Her eyes are half-mast. That’s what my sister and I call it when Mum is drunk and her eyelids droop. Half-mast eyes. Like the flag at the post office whenever someone important dies, which in Zambia, with one thing and another, is every other week. Mum stares out at the home paddocks where the cattle are coming in for their evening water to the trough near the stables. The sun is full and heavy over the hills that describe the Zambia-Zaire border. “Have a drink with me, Bobo,” she offers. She tries to pat the chair next to hers, misses, and feebly slaps the air, her arm like a broken wing.
I shake my head. Ordinarily I don’t mind getting softly drunk next to the slowly collapsing heap that is Mum, but I have to go back to boarding school the next day, nine hours by pickup across the border to Zimbabwe. “I need to pack, Mum.”
That afternoon Mum had spent hours wrapping thirty feet of electric wire around the trees in the garden so that she could pick up the World Service of the BBC. The signature tune crackled over the syrup-yellow four o’clock light just as the sun was starting to hang above the top of the msasa trees. “ ‘Lillibulero,’ ” Mum said. “That’s Irish.”
“You’re not Irish,” I pointed out.
She said, “Never said I was.” And then, follow-on