Lament for a land that never was theirs

Embeth Davidtz's adaptation of Alexandra Fuller’s memoir, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, has touched an exposed nerve. While the film is getting rave reviews globally, the book it’s based on is not the first — nor will it be the last — to exploit the Out of Africa trope, for this is a well-trodden route that started on a road to Ixopo.   

It began with a little book, first published by Jonathan Cape in 1944. I have two editions — 1969 and 2003 — in pristine condition. The one is a small, almost pocket-sized novella. And to say the cover is cute is to overstate the fact. It's a figurative, Modigliani-meets-Brancusi style painting of three beautiful black boys, titled Three Boys, by Marianne Podlashuc. I look at it every day and weep.

Now let us soak in the story’s opening lyricism: “There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills. These hills are grass covered and rolling, and they are lovely beyond any singing of it.” The lyricism climbs the steep steps to somewhere, to Ixopo, or, like the best of jazz notes, to heaven. 

“The road,” it continues, “climbs into them, to Carisbroke: and from there, if there is no mist, you look down on one of the fairest valleys of Africa. About there is grass and bracken and you may hear the forlorn crying of the titoya, one of the birds of the veld.”

To readers who grew up before TikTok, these words are familiar. These are the opening lines from Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country. These are not only recognisable but also resonant, in multiple ways. Because they inspired a certain kind of old-world poesy in literature out of Africa by both Africans and colonial settlers or their descendants. While the Out of Africa genre — and its appeal to Europeans back in the “old” continent — is often associated with Isak Dinesen, the Danish baroness better known as Karen Blixen, it gained its heft and necessary complexity in the hands of a South African writer, arguably the father of South African social liberalism. 

This kind of register, this kind of novelistic au naturel writing — with or without the crimson sundown, tall grass, roaming buffaloes, and a Zulu sophisticate encountering the warrior clan from whence he originates — this “loss of innocence” memoir is not Paton’s invention. Nor is it Laurence van der Post's, or Olive Schreiner’s for that matter.

Often performed on the page with deft skill and a kind of balladry luminescence expressive of something the colonial dreamer cannot quite attain, this literature is not hard to miss. Ruminative, often lovelorn at heart, woven out of the indescribable love, perhaps, for that (land/s) which was never theirs to love to begin with, it is also a literature of tears. Hymns, war songs, folk liedjies, verse, round-the-fire family myths sewn deep into intergenerational sinews, have been composed, all in devotion to this land. For settler and descendant alike, this continent remains a mystery they could not disentangle from.

A two-headed hydra. At once a land full of beasts, darkness, barbarity and unconquerable topography. But also a liturgical “promised land”. It is the latter, with its desire, irretrievable dreams — dreams of a land emptied of its natives; a land the white God gifted the white race in its far-off travels — that seemed prevalent, particularly in “times of turbulence”. Which means whenever the natives appeared “out of nowhere” to claim their land or “steal” their cattle back.

In her debut memoir, first published in 2002, Alexandra Fuller — known as “Bobo” to everyone, and played with electrifying immersion by “the dirty, tooth-gapped, feral” seven-year-old actor Lexi Venter in the movie — writes: “Chimurenga. A poetic Shona way of saying ‘war of liberation’. Zimbabwe, they called the country. From dzimba dza mabwe, ‘houses of stone’.”

She tells us: “The whites didn’t call it Chimurenga. They called it ‘the troubles’, ‘this bloody nonsense’. And sometimes ‘the war’. A war instigated by ‘uppity blacks’, ‘cheeky Kaffirs’, ‘bolshy muntus’, ‘restless natives’, 'the Houts’.”

“The first Chimurenga was a long time ago, a few years after the settlers got here. The welcome mat had only been out for a relative moment, or two,” she writes, “when the Africans realised a welcome mat was not what they needed for their European guests. When they saw that the Europeans were the kind of guests who slept with your wife, enslaved your children, and stole your cattle, they saw that they needed sharp spears and young men who knew how to use them.” 

And yet, even in those instances, love for “the promised land” would not be broken, the literature has taught us. It is this entanglement that places the colonial not only in the heart of Africa, but also in communion with a disappeared Africa.                           

This Africa is gone, though the landscape remains. Like a dead lover, or the lover who packed up and disappeared in the witch hours before sunset, this Africa is invariably beguiling in its unpossessable beauty. The entire genre — and the cottage industry of books; films; chic safari bush fashion campaigns; essays; travelogues; and a multibillion tourism industry built on colonial nostalgia — can be referred to, in the great tradition of poetry, as a lament.

With a tangible voice as though you can touch it — spread it on your open palms and apply to a brittle skin like Vaseline, leaving your skin lustrous and sweaty, with tiny little stars beaming off the skin — Fuller is a writer’s writer. The gift she has, of scaling down storytelling into a living thing, with blood, skin and palpable sighs and fears, is the same gift that suffuses her on-screen character, Bobo, with such gleaming force.         

In the book, and in a chapter titled “Vacation”, she writes: “And when we stop singing, Dad shouts, ‘Sing’. So we sing, ‘Because we’re' — pause — ‘all Rhodesians, and we’ll fight through thickanthin, We’ll keep this land free, stop the enemy comin’ in.’” And, “Mum is softly, sadly drunk.” And, “Dad says, ‘OK, kids, that’s enoughofthat.’”

Her voice is the closest I’ve heard from a literary child since Frank McCourt’s “Little Frankie” in Angela’s Ashes, the screen adaptation of which is by far more well-rounded, much more a felt-in-the-gut a picture than Dogs can ever hope to be. And that’s a compliment to Dogs, because the budgets of these adaptations are oceans apart. 

And yet Fuller/young Bobo’s gift of the gab constructs fantastic whole worlds unto themselves, breathless description per breathless non-pause as Frankie’s. Consider the following: “We are driving through a dreamscape. The war has cast a ghostly magic, like a spell on Sleeping Beauty’s castle. Everything is waiting and watchful and suspicious. Bushes might suddenly explode with AK-47s and we’ll be rattled with machine-gun fire and be lifeless and fearless on the road in front of the burnt-out ... plastic and singed metal of our melting car.” 

Davidtz’s film is essentially a love letter wrapped in sombre nostalgia to what is popularly known as “the Rhodesians”, white settlers pre- and post-Zimbabwean independence. It is evocative, well shot in unsaturated colour. No silver gratuitous gelatin or clichéd oranges and browns in Willie Nel’s cinematography. Immediately after the establishment shot, we are introduced to the innocent but lippy Bobo, who quickly transports the viewer to the heart of the film — fear, loathing and distrust of the African.

“The country we lived in was called Rhodesia. But then some Africans say they found it first. And when those Africans turned into terrorists, that’s when the war started”, the narrator’s voice washes over the audience. “I keep a look out for terrorists. You are not supposed to talk to Africans. They might be terrorists, or mixed up with one.”

The battle lines — spoken through the voice of innocence — are immediately drawn. Disappointingly, though, the tension promised is one-sided and lopsided. It happens only within the head of the mother, Nicola, a paranoid drunkard who goes to bed cuddling a machine gun.

No Africans are really threatening. In the few scenes one expects serious racial combustion, the Africans are meek and allowed little screen time. Even the Fullers’ servants, Jacob and Sarah, are wooden cut-out figures with no interiority at all. We know nothing about them.

Nothing about their dreams, longing, challenges, joy, mishaps, children, families or whether they are even a couple or not — until the very last scene, when Sarah is dropped in the middle of nowhere as their white bosses make an escape in a Jeep. No goodbyes, no hugs, no tears, no snorts, no nothing.

The film has been and continues getting rave reviews by the establishment media. Just as well, because it is definitely targeted at a specific viewer — white, afraid and filled with the opprobrium that Africa is going down to, pun intended, “the dogs”. 

Embeth Davidtz, like the best of what we should refer to as the “White Mischief” intellectual set, or, should we rather dispatch a much more pin-pointed portrait, “The Un-Happy Valley” set, in the same way we now speak of the Bloomsbury set in literature, has conjured a beautiful film. 

And yet, the actor who held our gaze powerfully in Schindler’s List, can’t escape her own collusion with both the author, the history, and, ultimately, unnerving, but un-hysterical feeling of white loss.

Which is to say, she could not, and I don’t even think she tried: Escape her whiteness.  In all fairness, who can ?

Watching it as the only black person in an auditorium full of whites, I fell into a solipsistic slow trance full of questions. Specifically two that have been eating me up long before I even watched it. Why aren’t African filmmakers making films that tell their stories of wars and the aftermath of liberation?

The cautionary tale here is that, left to their own devices, African leaders cannot govern, cannot be trusted. That they are a greedy bunch of losers, thieves and ne'er-do-wells. Of course it is racially layered. And yet, looking at the short history of post-independence — looking at Southern Africa, at Zimbabwe, Zambia and now the current South Africa — one wonders why we, no, why they, keep on confirming the vilest expectations. More urgently, why do the black masses keeping on returning these midnight marauders to power?

Does the hate they gave run that deep? 

• Madondo is the author of 'Sigh, the Beloved Country: Braai Talk, Rock ’n' Roll & Other Stories'. He has written and directed a collection of documentary clips, 'ET, Encounters With Soweto’s Founding Father'. His travelogue, 'Last Train to Hartsdale', is included in the current issue of UK Conde Nast’s The World of Interiors Literary Issue