Scribbling the Cat
by Alexandra Fuller
Picador $120
From the author of the word-of-mouth best-seller Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, this is a journey into Zimbabwe in the company of K, a white Rhodesian who fought Ian Smith's brutal war against Robert Mugabe's independence movement. Alexandra Fuller, a fine writer of whom much can be expected, leaves her Wyoming home to explore the African bush, measuring her childhood complicity in so much murder, but also taking personal stock of how much Africa defines who she is. 'I knew, without really being told out loud, what happened in the war and I knew it was as brutal and indefensible as what I had just heard from K. I just hadn't wanted to know.' Through Fuller's observations of K, we learn a little about what happens when a man is given a gun and sent 'to a war in a world he thought was his to defend'. This is a book largely about reconciling with the past, when colour was a factor. It doesn't pretend to offer any clues for the future, perhaps because Mugabe's Zimbabwe has none, and colour has nothing to do with it.
