Can-do Rhodie

Polly Hope

Before the Knife: Memories of an African Childhood by Carolyn Slaughter
Doubleday, 254 pp, £12.99, March 2002, ISBN 0 385 60344 4
Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood by Alexandra Fuller
Picador, 310 pp, £15.99, February 2002, ISBN 0 330 49023 0
The Healing Land: A Kalahari Journey by Rupert Isaacson
Fourth Estate, 272 pp, £7.99, February 2002, ISBN 1 85702 897 X

In 1983, when I was 11 and living in South Africa, I went to veldskool along with about twenty other girls from one of Johannesburg’s ‘liberal’ private schools. Veldskool – a compulsory annual week in the bush – was part of the national curriculum, for private schools as well as state ones. Despite privations we’d never faced before (cold group showers, breakfast at dawn, powdered eggs) and a vicious rethink of the pecking order (suddenly, the poorer children who’d spent time on farms had the upper hand), we learned some interesting things. How to use a compass, how to pin down and kill a poisonous snake without it killing you, how to set up a leopard-proof camp. We tramped over breathtaking country and wondered at the ancient ‘Bushman’ paintings on the rocky outcrops studding the landscape.

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Vol. 24 No. 15 · 8 August 2002 » Polly Hope » Can-do Rhodie (print version)
Pages 23-24 | 3061 words

Letters

From Hilary Mantel

Polly Hope (LRB, 8 August) does less than justice to Carolyn Slaughter's harrowing memoir, Before the Knife. Hope says that the book describes 'not so much an African childhood as a miserable childhood which happened to take place in Africa', but one could argue that Slaughter portrays an old-style expatriate mentality which allowed all kinds of moral squalor to flourish. Men who, back in Europe, had been perhaps less than adequate individuals, found themselves in positions of power, licensed to lord it over a whole section of society – the Africans. It is a short step to lording it over your dispirited, lonely and inevitably disappointed wife, and your deracinated offspring. Not all expatriates in Africa lived a 'Happy Valley' type existence. More common was day-to-day adversity, poor living conditions, bad health and the pervasive ill-ease that must exist when you don't understand your environment and are trying by force to control it. These conditions bred harsh values; unremarkable men became tin-pot dictators.

This is what seems to have happened in Slaughter's family. If Hope is correct, the 'can-do Rhodies' of Alexandra Fuller's memoir, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, were subject to sexual assaults from outside the family, but decided to get on with their lives, putting the incidents behind them in 'a few brisk paragraphs'. Slaughter was not able to do that because she was trapped in a situation of repeated abuse within her own family, from whom there was no escape. As she describes it, she was not only raped but beaten and so humiliated and ridiculed that she felt herself to be worthless. I agree that this situation can occur in all societies, but it is more likely to persist where there are few external limits on brutal behaviour, only a primitive code of loyalty and 'covering-up', based on skin colour. The man concerned liked to hurt animals and lash out at his servants, and there was nothing secret about this behaviour; he was living in a time and place where it hardly seemed abnormal. Hope describes the 'usual colonial ills' as 'boredom, drink, adultery', but the fundamental colonial ill was manifested in Slaughter's father – power employed without check, anxiety or remorse. Small wonder that there is no 'irony' in her account of her childhood. Where would the irony lie?

Hilary Mantel
Knaphill, Surrey