Scribbling the Cat: Travels With an African Soldier

Rating:
Summary: Richly painted, haunting, humorous, and timely.
Review: Satisfying and captivating. This is a haunting, yet beautifully textured, continuation of Fuller's younger life memoired in "Don't Let's Go to The Dog's Tonight". After skimming over seven years of living the fat life in the US she's drawn back to the raw life of her African childhood to research the wars which raged on around her youth. She encounters soldiers reluctant to reveal the realities of being a warrior, including her father. Bo's faced with a new understanding of her own history, the people she's left behind and of the war torn Africa (specifically former Rhodesia and Mozambique) that was beyond understanding as a child.
Though this isn't meant to be a history lesson in itself, however, it's timely; considering the HIV epidemic and the many conflicts currently raging round the globe, the attitudes of those that start wars, and how wars effect so many for so long.
Her travels are written with the eyes of a painter along with humerous, soulful, philosophical observations of what it is to be human here on earth. It's all here; love and longing, fear and hatred, courage and bravado, depression and abuse, faith and endurance, peace and tranquilty: and advice from Alexadra Fuller's father, "Don't look back so much or you'll get wiped out on the tree in front of you".
We're left wondering if Fuller has learned the lessons from her travels with a soldier that are obvious to the reader regarding accountability and vulnerabilty. I missed the unapologetic observations she's famous for regarding her view of her role in this journey. Fuller finds herself, however, unapologetically halfway around the world from her husband and children with some pretty questionable characters and claims she is the same person she was at the beginning of her journey. I loved this book but I can't help but feel it's a memoir written too close to real time to be completely told. I'm not sure if she hit the tree or not but maybe that was her intention. Read it and decide.

Rating:
Summary: Could have been more focussed
Review: The author Alexandra Fuller grew up as a young white girl in both Southern and Northern Rhodesia in the 1970s as black freedom fighters or guerilla soldiers fought a violent war for independence from their colonial master, Great Britain. Clearly, there is confusion to be overcome when you are brought up as a good, honest, caring, responsible person and yet you end up on the losing side. Were your values wrong and were you really a bad person underneath? Fuller, now married with kids and settled in the USA revisits her parents still living in Zambia, the former Northern Rhodesia. The trip back was an attempt to find answers to that conundrum.

Fuller embarks on an overland journey from Zambia through Zimbabwe, the former Southern Rhodesia, to Mozambique visiting the sites of former guerilla skirmishes and hiding holes where the white resistance fighters camped in the African bush. She is driven by a man known only as "K" who himself fought on the losing side in the Rhodesias before moving to fight as a mercenary in Mozambiqe only to become a loser again. K is a complex character, a one time murderer and torturer, moody, a blindly faithful born-again Christian and understandably carrying a lot of psychological baggage. He lost his young son to illness and has long since been abandoned by his former wife. He now farms a few hectares of land and ekes out a simple living alongside a river in Zambia near Fuller's parents. Her and K's journey to the old battlefields brings Fuller into contact with other former white mercenaries. Gradually their ongoing nightmares and "lives on a knife's edge" are revealed through a bizarre series of incidents. It is clear that they are afflicted in the same way as veterans from other conflicts such as Vietnam and the Gulf wars.

This hardly surprising revelation appears to be the conclusion to the book which meanders rather meaninglessly. The story was disappointing in the sense that it really went nowhere and didn't shed any light on Fuller's original quest to find out about herself and the childhood influences on her personality and character. Sadly, "Scribbling the Cat" didn't reach the heights of her best selling maiden novel "Don't let's go to the Dogs Tonight".


Rating:
Summary: Fuller of White Guilt
Review: Though she was only a child, the memory of cheering white soldiers on to victory in the Rhodesian war haunts Alexandra Fuller, and probably always will. Fuller, author of the acclaimed memoir Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, understands that war-which ultimately led to black minority rule and democratic elections-probably as well as anyone alive today.

It was a war about race, she explains in her latest book Scribbling the Cat. Minority white leaders did not want to surrender the upper hand in Rhodesia, later renamed Zimbabwe. Even so, the good guys are not always so easy to sort from the bad guys: black soldiers fought on the side of white oppression and black communities have been known to nurture their own tyrants.

On a visit to her parents in Zambia, Fuller concludes that writing about the war from the point of view of "K," who fought to keep Rhodesia white, will unlock previously untold secrets. She contrives to travel with him to Mozambique, the site of many war atrocities.

They travel in about the worst discomfort imaginable-unpaved roads, a dearth of modern plumbing and no refrigeration. Being on the road with a nosy journalist might try anyone's patience, and K is no exception. Adding to the tension, K has a crush on Fuller.

Fuller hopes to deliver something meaningful about the nature of war and the scars it leaves on its fighters, especially those whom contemporary ethics have found to be in the wrong. K discloses gruesome memories; most shocking is his assault on a young village woman who later died-after betraying the location of Rhodesian liberation soldiers. But K's stories don't add up to much in the way of revelation or insight.

"Nothing K and Mapenga had told me, or shown me-and nothing I could ever write about them-could undo the pain of their having being on the planet," she writes. Her frustration in trying to make sense of war's horror is her finest point.


Rating:
Summary: You learn something new every day...
Review: While I was waiting for my copy to arrive, I wondered at the title, and what could be meant by 'scribbling'.

As a schoolboy in Rhodesia, growing up as the clouds of war gathered, I had never heard the term used, except in the sense of something you did with crayons, on paper. As a teenager, living in the married quarters of KGVI Barracks in Salisbury, where my father was a regular Army officer, I never heard the expression being used in the context of killing someone. In January 1976, when I was conscripted into the Army, and in the subsequent years that I spent in an operational unit, as a national serviceman, and later as a territorial, I never heard of anybody being 'scribbled'. Like 'K', I spent time at Mukumbura-by-the-Sea (good ol' Siddi-el-Mukkers!), but nobody that I recall ever used the term.

We talked of culling gooks; slotting floppies; drilling zots. Getting 'pulled' meant getting shot (fatally or otherwise) as did 'taking a round'. Getting 'blallered' (as 'K' puts it) generally meant getting very drunk, although it also meant to kill. Sometimes you heard of people getting whacked, or popped; the American personnel who drifted in, looking for post-Vietnam excitement, added a whole new glossary to our war-talk -but, still, I never heard of anybody being 'scribbled'.

In common with the casual brutality of all wars, we had a variety of terms for killing - but I never heard that one.

So - belief suspended - it was no surprise to read some of 'K's' fantasies about operating in Mozambique. Although the Rhodesians spent plenty of time in 'Porkers', it was generally as part of a large, organised cross-border operation. Single 'sticks' didn't go wandering into Mozambique, in hot pursuit or otherwise - only the Selous Scouts did that, and only for very high-level intelligence gathering. The notion that an RLI commander would let four of his men go deep into Mozambique after a single terrorist is ridiculous. FRELIMO might not have been the greatest soldiers in the world, but there were a helluva lot of them.

Although it was an interesting read, it was a disappointing one; despite Ms Fuller's undeniable writing skills, I guess you can't really expect a third-party account to be accurate.

Will I be buying Bobo's next work? I doubt it.

Rating:
Summary: A Big Disappointment
Review: With so few books about the conflict in Rhodesia, it's disappointing when somebody comes up with something that is so factually inaccurate. Although the story is well written, there are too many mistakes - or exaggerations - to make it a plausible or credible account of the Rhodesian war, and the people who fought it.

Two thumbs down.