Cape Town — The writer Alexandra Fuller is best known in southern Africa for two books which portray with vivid and – for one who grew up in the same milieu – discomforting accuracy the sad, often sordid world of white Rhodesia.
In "Don’t Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight," she recounts her childhood on the wrong side of the struggle for Zimbabwe. In "Scribbling the Cat," she joins a man she calls "K", one of Ian Smith’s war vets, in re-visiting his fields of battle, both in the mind and on the ground. Fuller, who married an American, now lives in Wyoming in the United States. She recently published a new book, "The Legend of Colton H. Bryant," in which she turns her focus on her new home. AllAfrica asked her why:
I had lived in Wyoming for 10 years and I think as a writer you're probably always looking for themes rather than places. I'm attached to land – I grew up in Africa, it's hard to find someone who isn't deeply attached to land who did grow up here - [and] …what astonished me in 2004 was the discovery that between a fifth and a quarter of Wyoming's land surface was in the process of being leased out to oil and gas companies. There was this tremendous takeover of public land by a corporate entity.
I think coming from this [southern African] culture I'm incredibly sensitive to the issue of land, to the fact that when you take away someone's land you take away basically their voice. For me that felt true and universal and so probably the biggest connection for me coming from Africa was an early recognition of the injustice that was happening, whereas Americans maybe didn't see it that way.
The country is big, they don't really see corporations as invasive, individually they may object as environmentalists or as ranchers or as some sort of splinter group, but they would not object on human rights grounds – which I most certainly would. Then, over the course of years [I was] watching obituaries clock up, the complete disregard for life and the way that oil companies were literally getting away with murder, that they were exempt from lawsuits if they maimed or killed someone out on the rigs.
It reminded me awfully of elitist African governments, that a handful of people literally get away with murder and the majority suffer in mute, perhaps slightly confused silence. So certainly [I caught] the whiff of injustice, I think. One of the great gifts of growing up here is you certainly know what that smells like – and corruption and my complete hatred of it.
How is land being appropriated from someone else in Wyoming?
[It goes back to]… when land in the west was initially parcelled out – this is ignoring the initial genocide of the First Nations, so we're talking about the wave of settlers that came in the 1800s. Water is a huge, huge issue in the American west. It’s extremely dry, not very arable land and so the [land allocated to the first settlers was] inadequate to make a living. So much bigger parcels of land were given out, but in order that the ranchers didn't end up having a stranglehold on mineral resources, the Federal Government maintained the right to the mineral resources sub-surface. So you may own the surface of the land, but you don't own the sub-surface.
The Federal Government under George Bush and Dick Cheney were leasing out this land and saying to ranchers, "Well, we need to go through the surface to reach the sub-surface," taking over ranches and enormous tracts of public land… Millions and millions of acres – 27 million acres – has been drilled just in the Rocky Mountain west. The public land is supposed to be for wildlife, wild horses, water, clean air, recreation – all the values that count for the people of the United States. Instead, in the last eight years during the Bush-Cheney administration, it went over to a single value, which was mineral extraction.
What are the parallels, historically and currently, between that and denial of access to land in Africa?
I think the same thing, that a tiny minority of elite people assume ownership of all the resources and deny the majority of people a kind of equality, and it seems always to lead to bloodshed.
You say that Americans didn't see that in the way you saw it? Why not?
Well, first of all it’s hard to see yourself from the inside. I also think that it’s an issue-driven place, so if your issue is environmentalism you put yourself in that box and you don't see this as a human rights issue. Or if you’re a rancher you see it from the point of view of where your cattle are going to graze, but it doesn't occur to you that perhaps this is an environmental issue. Maybe coming from the outside I was able to see it as all those things.
I think America is a very divided place in part because it has such a strong attachment to capitalism, which is such a winner-take-all society. Its people are very much caught up in this mad dash to the finish line and… the celebration of the individual means that the concern for society or concern for a community is very much left behind. Everyone is after their own interest, people aren't looking out for the interests of wholes and I think in general land suffers because of that.
Are there ways in which your sensibilities as an African writer give you insights that an American writer might not have?
I don't know about that… but I think coming from Africa you can see already the run on finite resources, that there is going to be a fight over water and it will be sooner rather than later.… This battle that we are fighting over oil and gas is going to be a picnic compared to what's coming down the pipe. As a southern African you've already lived through drought, you've already seen what that does to community, you've already lived through war and you know what that’s done to community. You don't hop up and down with a flag when someone declares war and say, "Oh yippie! This is going to be fabulous." You hold your head in your hands and weep because you know that you will be living with soldiers who will forever be unmade by what they have seen and done.
And so for me you can’t dissociate the question of energy from climate change, from war, from drug addiction, from methaphatamine addiction, which displacement from land causes – all kinds of problems, from domestic abuse to drug addiction. Wyoming has one of the highest suicide rates in the nation. The most likely way that you are to die as a married woman in Wyoming is to be shot by your own husband. It causes this great kind of internal violence and I think that that's true of Africa too.
You look at Congo, you look at Sudan, or you look at Rwanda, or you look at Somalia, all these are examples of places where there has been a fight over resources and minerals and it’s an all-out bloodbath. It’s on a smaller scale in Wyoming certainly but it is no less tragic.
Referring in your book to people in the west watching bull-riding in a rodeo, you talk about America in that setting being born again in "all its sentimental, painful bravado." What are they sentimental about?
I think they are sentimental about the myth of themselves; this myth of individualism, the myth of the open spaces, the myth of the home of the free and the brave, the myth of freedom of speech, the myth of equality, because none of those things are true in real life, in the States.
And the pain? The pain is their lives?
Yeah, and sending their kids onto oil rigs and battlefields. And the way that you train those boys to do that is to put them on a bucking bull at the tender age of 15. There's a high cost to masculinity in the United States and some of it is an insistence that you leave your discernment and your empathy behind.
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And I think there's a material spiritualism, the very obvious prayer, but it has to do with the betterment of me, myself and the person who looks like me. If you don't look like me, this prayer isn’t for you and I think that's really a part of that… Some of the pain isn't acknowledged, some is, but you can't deny that communities hurt as a result of that kind of closed-mindedness.
Are there parallels between that expression of masculinity and that you wrote about during the Rhodesian war, in "Scribbling the Cat"?
Of course, of course, it’s exactly the same thing. That’s why it was so amazing getting out on to the oil patch and spending time with all these roughnecks and cowboys. Everyone said, "How did you get into it so quickly, how did you drop straight into that world?" I said I really didn't have to, these were the people that raised me, I knew these boys. It’s a different accent, slightly different landscape, but in every other way, I mean you go to a rodeo in Pinedale, Wyoming, you could jolly well be in Mazabuka, Zambia…
The same… very conservative politics, closed-minded to the point of self destruction, self-reliant, very hospitable as long as you are not gay or of a different skin colour, capable, intolerant of whiners and whingers, big-hearted, and very used by their governments.
I think the same way that K was used by the Rhodesian government to be an instrument of violence against 11 million people, those sort of good-hearted boys were used in the same way by the Bush administration to go to war and drill in their own backyards and destroy the very environment that they celebrate – the hunting, fishing, shooting lifestyle.
More details of Alexandra Fuller’s three books are on her website.
