Siobhan West
Ms. Romano
4 AP English, Per. 5
24 May 2014
Lost Land, Lost World
Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs tonight, by Alexandra Fuller, is a memoir in which Fuller recounts the events of her childhood in Rhodesia during the country’s civil war of the 1960s and 70s. The story is told through her eyes as a young girl. She grows up experiencing the adverse effects of war while being ignorant of what the war was actually about. The war was a result of the white mans’ colonization and dominating power combined with the native’s extreme longing for their own independence. After this interference by western foreigners, the lives of those who lived in what was originally called Mashona Land could never be the same. The British had settled there in the late 1800s, and the effects of one hundred years of their influence simply could not be undone. The compulsory foreign power that comes with colonization disrupts and forever changes the lives of indigenous people.
When the settlers arrived in Mashona land, they were led by a man name Cecil Rhodes, an ambitious British businessman. The natives were forced to relocate, their land was stolen from them, and the settlers took power and compelled the natives to work for them. When they had arrived, they brought with them the ideology of innate British superiority, which they believed justified their discriminatory colonial policies. They believed that because they were more educated, more technologically advanced, much wealthier, and white, they deserved to rule the land. In their opinion, the natives could only benefit from the changes made to the territory, and they should be grateful.
Any chance that the settlers had of living peaceably with the natives was ruined because of their failure to ask for a share of the land, and for permission to introduce new ways of life. They took the country by force, and when they left it they took generations of native history and culture, never to be returned. Most settlers left the land because everything they’d had was taken by the new independent government after the war, and they were now the ones living in fear. The natives had finally defeated their oppressors, but could not go back to the world they’d had before colonization. They could not make their own decisions anymore because they were living under a leader that didn’t honor their way of life or include them in the benefits of the white lifestyle. They were, essentially, servants in their own home.
Alexandra Fuller saw this and grew to understand the things that most of the settlers had not because they were so blinded by white superiority. Fuller’s mother had run a small clinic in the beginning of the story, because she wanted to take care of the people who worked for her. But then, as the war progressed, she began to turn them away, uninterested in helping a people that were causing so much conflict. “Now she says, ‘Don’t you have your comrades at the hospital? We’re all lovely socialists together now, didn’t you know?’” (). There was so much misunderstanding on both the settlers side and the natives side that it not only ruined lifestyles but also ruined the chance of a compatible future.
As young Alexandra Fuller would make her way into the hills around her farm, she often saw what was called Ghost Camps, which were areas that held signs of Guerilla occupance (Guerillas were small groups of civilians using military tactics to fight strong, more traditional armies) They consisted of cold fires, empty tins, smashed bottles, and parts of broken abandoned shoes. “We see that they have watched us, that they must know where we go every day, our favorite walks, the way we ride” (105). As she left the farm, she saw only the women, the elderly, and the young children. “They shrink from our gaze, from our bristling guns. Some of the bigger children run after us and throw rocks at the car. Their mothers shout but their words are snatched away by dust, sucked up in the fury of our driving” (104). This is what the native’s lives had become as a result of British occupation. They had turned into the aggressors they had never been before, they were so desperate to get their land back.
The native warriors did not want Rhodesia, it was the land so bitterly fought over. They hated Rhodesia and what it stood for, which was white minority rule. It was the land, the Mashona Land, that they longed to have again. That land meant much more to them than just a place to grow crops. It represented the lives they’d had before the white settlers, at a time when they could stick to their simpler, comfortable, more traditional ways. They wanted to have that again, they wanted it so much that it started a rebellion. But in truth, they would never get it back. They won the territory; a patch of earth, but they would never win back Mashona Land.
Works Cited
http://peterbaxterafrica.com/index.php/2011/08/08/a-thumbnail-sketch-of-the-zimbabwerhodesia-bush-war/
http://www.historytoday.com/paul-moorcraft/rhodesias-war-independence
http://rhodesianforces.org/RhodesiaStudyinmilitaryincompetence.htm
http://www.popularsocialscience.com/2012/10/19/the-fall-of-rhodesia/
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