The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, the book I borrowed on a whim, has turned out to be better than I had dared hope. It's not great literature, but it is entertaining, well-written, and educational. It's set in Botswana, and part of the book's charm is the effectiveness with which it draws the world of southern Africa.

I've always been fascinated by Africa, but I've never pursued this fascination. I've never studied the continent, I've never obsessed over it, I've never collected anything about it. That seems odd for me, and this may be about to change.

I have an urge to read everything I can find about Africa.

It is a happy coincidence that the most recent issue of National Geographic is wholly about Africa; I started reading the articles last night. The lead article is by Alexandra Fuller, who recently published a childhood memoir entitled Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, which I read last winter.

Reading Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight is like traveling to another world. Fuller, who is roughly my age, describes growing up in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe (in southern Africa) during the 1970s, a period of conflict and strife. Her parents were farmers, trying to eke a living out of the African wilderness. The family's hard-scrabble life in some ways reminds me of my childhood, except my childhood wasn't filled with guns. Or scorpions.

The book begins:

Mum says, "Don't come creeping into our room at night."

They sleep with loaded guns beside them on the bedside rugs. She says, "Don't startle us when we're sleeping."

"Why not?"

"We might shoot you."

"Oh."

"By mistake."

"Okay." As it is, there seems a good enough chance of getting shot on purpose. "Okay, I won't."

So if I wake in the night and need Mum and Dad, I call Vanessa, because she isn't armed. "Van! Van, hey!" I hiss across the room until she wakes up. And then Van has to light a candle and escort me to the loo, where I pee sleepily into the flickering yellow light and Van keeps the candle high, looking for snakes and scorpions and baboon spiders. Mum won't kill snakes because she says they help to keep the rats down (but she rescued a nest of baby mice from the barns and left them to grow in my cupboard, where they ate holes in the family's winter jerseys). Mum won't kill scorpions either; she catches them and lets them go free in the pool and Vanessa and I have to rake the pool before we can swim. We fling the scorps as far as we can across the brown and withering lawn, chase the ducks and geese out, and then lower ourselves gingerly into the pool, whose sides wave green and long and soft and grasping with algae. And Mum won't kill spiders because she says it will bring bad luck.

For most of my childhood, we didn't have a television. We did have one when PBS aired a Masterpiece Theater production of The Flame Trees of Thika, another memoir of childhood in Africa. I remember being fascinated by this tale of Elspeth and her family as they attempted to forge a life in Kenya. Now I want to read the book, and to see the television production again.

I'd love to find other wonderful books about Africa. I've never read Out of Africa, for example. I'd especially like to find books on Africa by native Africans. I've read Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, but that's it.

I look forward to exploring the Dark Continent through books. (And maybe even film.)

On this day at foldedspace.org

2004 — Jesus, Bush!   From Mad Magazine...

2003 — Netflix   In which Netflix is better than I had anticipated.

2002 — Pieces of My Mind   There are some books that I'll pick up to read but, over and over, I'll only get ten, twenty, fifty pages into the book before giving up for whatever reason.