 Book Reviews
with Robin Osborne
Scribbling the Cat
By Alexandra Fuller
Picador, $30
 The author's first book, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, recounted her youth in the former Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, at the fag end of white rule. Born in England but raised in Africa, she now lives in Wyoming, USA, and is married with two children.
She decided to pen a follow-up after revisiting her parents in Zambia and meeting a reclusive neighbour, the unnervingly attractive former Rhodesian soldier whom she simply calls 'K'.
"I could hunt gooks better than anyone because I could think like one," the 60-year-old tough fighter-turned farmer-said, recalling how the cattle-herding boys "showed me how to think like a munt [black] and how to track... just little things, like mice and rabbits. If you can track a rat, you can sure as shit track a person. So I joined the Rhodesian Light Infantry."
K was recognised for his grit: "They gave me a bazooka and said 'Go forth and scribble' [kill]."
The phrase gets good usage throughout the book, as when K is grilled about his military life. He advises Fuller to back off - "curiosity scribbled the cat".
He reminisces grimly about leading white quasi-mercenaries through the bush to launch attacks on forces hostile to the government, ignoring national borders and most rules of human decency.
One tale involves the torture of a young woman from a village suspected of harbouring black guerillas. Beaten and sexually humiliated, she reveals the whereabouts of the enemy, who were soon after killed.
"I had wanted to take her to hospital and get her fixed up, but I forgot," says K, now a born-again Christian. "She died two weeks after from her injuries.... I didn't need to do that to her. I was an animal. An absolute f****** savage."
He was sent back to barracks for six months: "They made me a training officer. I trained boys to be soldiers."
Together they embarked on a journey through former battlezones in Zimbabwe and Mozambique, visiting former comrades who were just as hard-bitten and loopy as K.
"The war hadn't created K," Fuller concludes. "K was what happened when you grew a child from the African soil, taught him an attitude of superiority, persecution and paranoia, and then gave him a gun and sent him to war in a world he thought of as his own to defend.
"And when the ceasefire was called and suddenly K was remaindered, there was no way to undo him."
- Books reviewed are available at Book Warehouse, Keen Street, Lismore.
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