Title: Cocktail Hour under the Tree of Forgetfulness
Author: Alexandra Fuller
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 9780857201287
Price: R139.95
Click here to buy Cocktail Hour under the Tree of Forgetfulness on Kalahari.com.
In her latest memoir, Alexandra Fuller regales us with what is largely the story of her mother, Nicola Fuller – or as she likes to be introduced, “Nicola Fuller of Central Africa”.
In the first few lines she conveys that her mother, “has wanted a writer in the family as long as either of us can remember, not only because she loves books and has therefore always wanted to appear in them (the way she likes large, expensive hats, and likes to appear in them), but also because she has always wanted to live a fabulously romantic life for which she needed a reasonably pliable witness as scribe.’’
This introduction could not be more fitting as we come to learn of Nicola Fuller and her charmed childhood in Kenya, attending fancy-dress parties, playing with the neighbour’s pet chimpanzee, riding her beloved horse, Violet; attending glittering parties and meeting Fuller’s father; their marriage and their travels around the continent; possessed by a lifelong desire to make Africa their home. Alexandra Fuller recounts these stories in vivid and thought-provoking prose that manages at once to not only portray her family with great love and compassion, but also express the devastating effects of colonialism. It is this feat and the deftness with which Fuller handles it that makes this book something special beyond the realms of a deeply personal account of her family.
Nicola Fuller of Central Africa is a larger than life romantic heroine – who speaks of Africa as if she is “speaking of a make-believe place forever trapped in the celluloid of another time, as if she were a third-person participant in a movie starring herself, a perfect horse and flawless equatorial light. The violence and the injustices that came with colonialism seem – in my mother’s version of events – to have happened in some other unwatched movie, to some other unwatched people.” However, the dream is soon destroyed, as Fuller’s mother faces the unthinkable loss of three of her children: Adrian, who contracts meningitis and is left undiagnosed until it is too late; her youngest daughter, Olivia, a beauty with dark curls and violet eyes, who somehow managed to survive the perils of war-torn Rhodesia only to drown in a neighbour’s duck pond; and her second son, who survived only a few days, because the device needed to fix his palate did not arrive on time. All this against the backdrop of Kenya’s Mau Mau and the Rhodesian war. From her first appearance as the glittering party girl, the author’s mother grows into a woman of substance and mettle – who by the end of the Rhodesian war in 1979 can run a farm and operate an Uzi machine gun, while turning out meals for her family, prepared in her beloved Le Creuset pots.
In the final chapters of the book the Fullers – now in their 60s – have settled in Zambia, where they have built their own farm. Fuller recounts how, together with her father’s cattle manager, Mr Zulu, her mother chose where the house was to be built: beside a “tree of modest height, with a rounded spreading crown of leathery dark leaves and drooping branches”. Mr Zulu explains that “This is the Tree of Forgetfulness” and goes on to say, “If there is some sickness or if you are troubled by spirits, then you sit under the Tree of Forgetfulness and your ancestors will assist you with whatever is wrong.” Nicola Fuller considers this and responds by saying, “I believe it’s true, I believe it two million percent.”
Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness is a moving and often funny account of the Fuller family’s desire to belong to Africa and their determination to make a life for themselves despite the odds. It is highly recommended.