Memoirs of African farms: Land, settlement, and belonging in white life writing from Southern Africa

ABSTRACT

Building on previous discussions of the plaasroman, or farm novel, this article establishes the autobiographical subgenre of the white, southern African farm memoir, drawing on texts and writers from the former Rhodesia and modern Zimbabwe (Daphne Anderson, Alexandra Fuller, Doris Lessing, and Muriel Spark). Anderson’s The Toe-Rags and Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight are read here as indicative of the differences and continuities between successive cohorts of white life writers in southern Africa. While Anderson’s autobiography is markedly anti-imperial, later memoirists like Fuller offer a more ambivalent response to white belonging and land ownership in postcolonial Zimbabwe. When Fuller’s generation inherit the white farm from their predecessors, they return to this location to elide the controversial histories of colonial settlement. Ultimately however, these farms become microcosms of the doomed settler state, offering neither a permanent home, nor a secure future after the end of colonial rule.

KEYWORDS:

• Farm memoir
• Rhodesia
• Zimbabwe
• Daphne Anderson
• Alexandra Fuller
• Doris Lessing

Introduction: “The stale patterns of white domination”

Reflecting on her early life as a farmer’s daughter in the former Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, Doris Lessing (1984) always insisted that “as soon as one sets foot in a white settler country, one becomes part of a mass disease” (17). Across her numerous memoirs and autobiographies Lessing struggles to balance her criticism of “the stale patterns of white domination” (18) with a profound attachment to her family’s farm. While she escaped her settler homeland in 1949, Lessing returned to the farm she called her “myth country” (1992, 35) in all of her subsequent autobiographical writing. Yet her anti-imperialist sentiments were not sustained by a later generation of memoirists (including Kathy Buckle (2001), Peter Godwin (1997, 2006), Alexandra Fuller (2002, 2015, 2019), Wendy Kann (2006), and Douglas Rogers (2009)) who nostalgically elegize the site of the white-owned farm after Zimbabwean independence in 1980. Critics such as Astrid Rasch (2018) have previously noted that these life narratives work to “romanticise the settler past” (151) and many of these texts do indeed describe landowners as “the last of a lost white tribe” (Rogers 2009, 139), disconnecting farmers from the imperial histories of theft, dispossession, and access to land in southern Africa. Even after independence, white farming families continued to own roughly 33 percent of Zimbabwe’s total land mass (McDermott Hughes 2010, 73) and the country’s post-2000 fast-track land reforms promised (though largely failed) to challenge an unequal distribution of agricultural resources. The subsequent expulsion of thousands of white farmers from their properties in the early 2000s gave rise to innumerable international news stories expressing anxiety “over the fate of Britain’s abandoned kith and kin” (Gilroy 2004, 105) in former colonies. The spectacular press coverage of evictions in turn fuelled a public “appetite for memoirs written by whites who grew up in Rhodesia” (Holman 2010, n.p.). Many of these texts were well received by, and continue to circulate widely amongst, a global anglophone readership; Fuller won the 2002 Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize for Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight while Godwin received an American Library Association Award for When a Crocodile Eats the Sun. These 21st-century accounts of African farms have been recognized as distinct from the autobiographical writing of earlier colonial authors such as Lessing and understood primarily as a response to events in the new millennium.

However, while this article acknowledges important differences between generations of memoirists, it establishes the white southern African farm memoir as a literary form which began to develop in the mid-20th century. The subgenre long predates Robert Mugabe’s fast-track land reforms and has been advanced by several successive generations of life writers. Although there have been numerous, productive considerations of white Zimbabwean memoirs in the post-2000 land reform era (Englund 2019; Harris 2005; Manase 2016; Rasch 2018), this discussion of the farm memoir positions texts by Fuller and her contemporaries within a longer literary tradition of white life writing in southern Africa. As Irikidzayi Manase (2016) reminds us, Mugabe’s attempts to redistribute farming resources resulted from a long, contested history surrounding “the national, social and political imaginary of land and belonging” (130) in the region. As a response to the colonial histories of southern Africa, the white African farm memoir stretches far beyond the national borders of modern Zimbabwe; in J.M. Coetzee’s (1997) memoir Boyhood the autobiographical subject acknowledges that, through his family’s South African farms, he “is rooted in the past; through the farms he has substance” (1997, 22). Critics from Jennifer Wenzel (2000) to Mathilde Rogez (2016) have subsequently positioned Boyhood in the context of the South African plaasroman or farm novel, which extends from Olive Schreiner’s (2003) descriptions of “dry karoo bushes that cracked beneath the tread like timber” (50) in Story of an African Farm (first published in 1883) to Damon Galgut’s (2021) beleaguered white farmhouse in The Promise, which sits in “the veld like a drunk wearing odd bits of clothing” (12). As Caroline Rooney (2005) notes, in the plaasroman the farm is the site “of European self-imprisonment, a claustrophobic place that cannot be escaped from” (435). The farm functions as a microcosm of the settler state, and later of the post-apartheid nation.

The southern African farm memoir is, then, a specifically autobiographical subgenre which remains closely related to the fictional plaasroman tradition. It exists in a further, tentative relation to what Gillian Whitlock (2015) and Bart Moore-Gilbert (2009) have termed “postcolonial life writing”, referring to autobiographical narratives (including memoirs) that record the impact of colonization on individuals and challenge imperialist ideas of the human. This article demonstrates that if the farm memoir clearly offers the former (a record of colonial life), critical readings might draw out the latter challenge by reading against the grain of imperial nostalgia. Initially, the farm promises to realize the settler dream of cultivating fertile land, of achieving ownership and belonging through productivity. Yet the farm memoir also frequently reveals the barren, terrifying realities of rural life. In their descriptions of faltering, even failing farms, white memoirists offer an opportunity to rebuff pervasive myths of colonial development in southern Africa, exposing the precarious, unsustainable foundations on which they rest.

By making the white-owned farm a focal point in their life narratives, memoirists who lived across South Africa, the former Rhodesia/modern Zimbabwe, and, in Fuller’s case, Zambia, describe a foundational site marked by contradictory impulses of escape and return. They document how the properties of early settlers – made “from what grew in the bush” (Lessing 1994, 54) – were later transformed into “dusty, fly-beleaguered farmhouse[s]” (Kann 2006, 22), crouching behind barbed wire and electrified fences. In this sense, the farm memoir bears witness to formal decolonization as an intensifying of settler life, rather than a dismantlement of its foundational belief in racial segregation. In Zimbabwe, Rogers describes how an embattled and “privileged [white] minority” remained, after independence, both secured and imprisoned “behind the high walls of their sprawling homes and sports clubs” (2009, 38). Yet like many of his contemporaries, he remains deeply invested in a narrative of progress through farming, insisting that “the history of development in Africa is one of clearing bush” (72). As a still-popular subgenre, the farm memoir exposes the inconsistencies of collective colonial memory in the 21st century, simultaneously bearing witness to empire’s formal end and yet remaining unable to explicitly dismantle the fundamental tenets of white supremacy.

By extending previous discussions of white Zimbabwean life writing, this article establishes the southern Africa farm memoir as subgenre which was used, during the colonial period, as a means to challenge the ideologies of settler rule. Several decades after Zimbabwean independence it developed into a more ambiguous expression of attachment to the now-dismantled apartheid state. Memoirists who lived in Southern Rhodesia between the 1920s and 1940s – including Lessing and her contemporaries Daphne Anderson (1989) and Muriel Spark (1992) – recorded their memories of farm life to interrogate a Lockean justification for settlement: that “those deserve to inherit the earth who make the most use of it” (Coetzee 1988, 3). For this cohort, the farm may promise to realize the dream of imperial progress, but it is ultimately the location where the assurances of empire are undone. However, for white Zimbabweans who witnessed later land reforms, the farm becomes an even more contested location, one which simultaneously underscores its owners’ fraught connection to southern Africa, and which contradicts the Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) government’s official narratives regarding land and belonging in postcolonial Zimbabwe. Contemporary life writers such as Fuller should be read alongside and through an earlier cohort of memoirists – including Lessing, Spark, and Anderson – who offered sharply critical accounts of settler life. If we return to Anderson’s neglected memoir The Toe-Rags as an anti-imperial life narrative, this account of a white-owned Rhodesian farm during the 1930s both contrasts with and complicates the fraught nostalgia of Fuller’s first memoir, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight. Half a century after Anderson, Fuller paradoxically attempts to critique and reinstate the troubled project of white belonging through land ownership in southern Africa. But Don’t Let’s Go is linked to its autobiographical predecessors by being ultimately unable to imagine the farm as anything but a symbol of failed settlement (all of Fuller’s subsequent memoirs return to this theme). Don’t Let’s Go might try to mediate a new relationship with her family’s land in southern Africa, but Fuller eventually, even reluctantly, reaches the conclusion of an earlier generation: that the farm can only ever be an emblem of imperial decline.

Anderson and Fuller share numerous biographical coordinates, as the daughters of struggling English farmers who could never – despite their varying efforts and skills – make the land profitable. Both experienced transient Rhodesian childhoods in comparative poverty, with restricted access to education and notable experiences of parental neglect (which in Anderson’s case resulted in actual abandonment). Reading their life narratives side by side suggests how the southern African farm memoir’s core location is defined by unsettling narratives of white belonging. The farm reveals minority rule as an unrealizable fantasy; it can offer neither woman a permanent habitation, nor provide her with a romantic rooting to the soil. These memoirs challenge the settler ideal of the farm as a national allegory, unpicking the connections drawn in former Rhodesian prime minister Ian Smith’s (1997) autobiography, which begins by describing his creation of a property on “a piece of rough, undeveloped land” previously inhabited by “squatters” (29). Smith presents himself as a farmer-custodian capable of “arrest[ing] further deterioration of the land” (29) while making, of course, no mention of the Black labour which facilitated this endeavour. Despite their differences, Anderson’s and Fuller’s first-person accounts of impoverished white childhoods trouble the imperial patriarch’s account of the farm-as-nation and dismantle the secure origin myths of the settler state. As representatives of two distinct generations, they offer an opportunity to trace how life writers imagined and re-imagined the white farm as an ideologically charged arena, a microcosm which exposes the contradictions of settler identity both during and after empire.

Abandoned on the farm: Daphne Anderson’s The Toe-Rags

The Toe-Rags narrates Anderson’s impoverished childhood as the neglected offspring of “poor-whites” in 1920s and 1930s Southern Rhodesia. Although she was the child of an English father and a Portuguese mother, Anderson’s dark skin – in contrast with her siblings’ pale complexions – was a source of anxiety throughout her childhood. Having been initially raised by both parents on a smallholding, the children were eventually abandoned and were begrudgingly taken in by paternal relatives who were suspicious of Anderson’s ability to speak Shona. In the family’s eyes, this came perilously close to the taboo of a mixed-race identity and Anderson knew that “to be white [in Rhodesia] was, of course, to be unassailable, but to be in between was considered by everyone to be a living death” (1989, 328). Despite Anderson’s and her siblings’ pitiable appearances in “thin khaki dresses and veldshoens” with “dirty legs covered in scabs and scratches” (16), as poor Rhodesian whites they were exempt from “the lifetime of servitude” experienced by the Black population (11). Because they “wore clothes and owned the farm”, they were distinguished always as “the masters” (11). By contrast, labourers who died working on the family’s land were deemed “to be of no significance at all”, and their deaths were largely ignored by Anderson’s relatives (106). As a detailed account of white poverty and the fear of miscegenation on a colonial frontier, The Toe-Rags foregrounds land ownership and agricultural production as the means for maintaining racial divides. The farm is both a real setting and an unattainable ideal in this life narrative, indicative of a white settler identity that was always in crisis.

The family’s inability to successfully work the land emerges as an irredeemable or primal sin in The Toe-Rags, one from which all their other misfortunes emanate. When Anderson’s father Bill arrives on the South African Cape (travelling outwards from Tilbury Docks) he treks to the interior of Rhodesia, only to find himself hating “Africa with all his heart, the vastness of it, the ever changing pattern of the country” (Anderson 1989, 35). The unease shared by Bill and his English relatives is the antithesis of pastoral, white belonging that characterizes later memoirs from southern Africa – for example, Fuller and her contemporaries revere their connection to the “tillable [ … ] fertile, worm-smelling soil” (2002, 153). Anderson records how her father’s antagonism towards the continent predates her own birth, connecting this to his later inability to farm, and his catastrophic financial investments which jeopardized the family’s future.

After her parents met and married in Rhodesia, they initially brought up three children in a ramshackle property consisting “of two round rondavels [traditional, circular huts] joined together by a long living room” (1989, 20). Anderson grew up beneath a thatched roof that was home to tarantulas and scorpions, and through which water dripped throughout the rainy season. The mud walls and earth floor of this porous dwelling barely distinguished the homestead from both the servants’ kia (living quarters), and the uncultivated bush beyond their property. These insecure boundary lines left them unable to maintain the social and spatial divides which underpinned colonial rule. The nearby “pile of bricks which were to build the house [her] father had promised [her] mother a long time ago” (21), confirm the rondavels as a provisional dwelling, and raise the spectral structure of an unrealized home. All of this would have been familiar to Lessing, whose own childhood “house built of earth and grass” was also supposed to be temporary (1992, 55). In such early white farm memoirs, dilapidated farmhouses epitomize not only individual misfortune, but also the structural failures of settlement. The idealized home constructed from bricks and mortar was designed to be the domestic and symbolic epicentre of any farm, supplying a fantasy of imperial power which allowed settlers in southern Africa to “propagate the [core] conviction that they belong[ed] on the land” (McDermott Hughes 2010, 1). Bill’s horror of the landscape, his inability to work the soil, and his provision of an unstable dwelling which barely shelters his family are personal failures which imperil the broader project of settler belonging.

The refusal to build a lasting family home is the first of a litany of paternal failures in The Toe-Rags as, rather than tending vegetables which could sustain his own children, Bill embarks on a series of disastrous “get-rich-quick” schemes which cannot become commercial enterprises. These include the velvet beans demolished by army worms, the sweet potatoes that wither in the fierce heat, and the maize cobs consumed by locusts (Anderson 1989, 28–30). Anderson and her mother know that African families in nearby kraals quietly “grew their own crops” (46) and practise subsistence farming, even utilizing a plague of locusts as an opportunity to feast on roasted insects. Faced with near-constant hunger, the siblings retreat into the rondavels where they create a miniature fantasy farm from clay, including “newly dried cattle, the donkey and [even] the little pig my father had modelled for us [ … ] coloured with black shoe polish” (33). There is an explicit irony to Bill stocking a model farm with clay pigs while failing to save his own children from prolonged malnutrition. If the rondavels are temporary substitutes for a farmhouse, all of their inhabitants imagine agricultural production – through play, or get-rich-quick schemes – while being unable to produce actual crops or profit. As Anderson describes the literal detritus of colonial life, her family’s depleted farmhouse and ailing crops only emphasize the hubris of their failed pioneer settlement.

During this prolonged period of failure, Bill temporarily leaves the family home, and Charlotte, Anderson’s mother, abandons her three hungry children (including Daphne) on the farm, never to return. In their double escape from the homestead, Anderson’s parents risk the deaths of their children, ending a family tree that cannot find root in the untended soil. Anderson refuses to narrate “the dreadful scene” (1989, 67) of her mother’s departure. Instead, these events are revealed through reported speech and the third-person narration of a local police officer who witnesses the scene. As he enters the farm the confused officer scans “the few pieces of furniture” inside the huts, surveying the meagre sweet potatoes dug up by the desperate, starving children in the garden (62). He also notes a crumbling bread oven which Anderson calls “my father’s supreme folly” and which failed to produce any edible or financial benefits (63). Through this traumatic recitation, Anderson inventories the catastrophe which ends both her childhood and her family’s attempt to permanently settle in southern Africa.

Jim, a Black employee who alerts the police to the children’s predicament, saves them from starvation and in so doing reverses a typical colonial hierarchy where the white farmhouse sustains the local kia or kraal. As Rory Pilossof (2012) notes, memoirs by former Rhodesians often imagine that their lands had been “barren [and] ‘empty’” before their arrival, supplying a defence “of ownership, place and belonging that has a long tradition in Zimbabwe/Rhodesia” (164). By contrast, Anderson refuses to enact the colonial myth of “terra nullius”, repeatedly describing the kraal as supporting a community with the knowledge to persist and endure in this landscape. The Toe-Rags challenges the “silence about the place of black labour” that Coetzee (1988, 74) identifies as indicative of the plaasroman, while also dismantling “the fences and gates [which traditionally] act as frontiers on a small scale” in this fictional subgenre (Rogez 2016, 84). In Anderson’s farm memoir, the barren, abandoned property – with its withered crops and starving children – is saved by Jim, whose role as saviour punctures any inflated narratives of empty land and imperial progress. She writes against a pastoral Rhodesian literary tradition which imagined the veld “as an emptiness waiting for the creativity of the coloniser” (Chennells 2007, 22) by indexing the failures of colonial settlement and then seeking to escape from its enclosures.

Although these descriptions of parental abandonment are unusual, The Toe-Rags can and should be situated within a wider autobiographical context; Anderson was one of many female memoirists who recorded white rural life in southern Africa during the first half of the 20th century. Spark’s autobiography Curriculum Vitae draws an idealized distinction between the “rough, frontier-type atmosphere” of Salisbury (now Harare) during World War Two and the isolated settings of white-owned farms, which offered “a more relaxed, democratic atmosphere on the land” (1992, 127). For Spark, inhabiting the latter meant “living in the real Rhodesia of the pioneers” (130), facilitating her dubious attempt at settler authenticity. Despite Spark’s descriptions of southern Africa in short stories like “The Go-Away Bird” (Spark [1958] 1978) and in Curriculum Vitae’s memories of Rhodesia, she remains broadly overlooked in discussions of white settler literature. While her autobiography offers a distinctly nostalgic account of rural life, Spark nevertheless comprehends the importance of the farm to the settler nation’s founding mythologies (this pastoral setting is the only real Rhodesia). Lessing also recognized the symbolic importance of the farm as a personal and national “myth country” (1992, 35), even as she remembered that her own family’s debts to the Land Bank left them unable to realize their dream of “getting-off-the-farm” (Lessing 2008, 193). The Toe-Rags belongs to this wider autobiographical context because it depicts the failed farm as the natural home to a “defeated, ashamed army of poor whites” (Anderson 1989, 16). Anderson’s understanding of this site as synonymous with death, starvation, and maternal abandonment highlights an important distinction between her memoir and later memoirs published by white Zimbabweans in the early 2000s. Following the turn of the new millennium, a subsequent generation of life writers viewed the failing farm as indicative of loss, a site for lamenting the irreversible changes of decolonization rather than revealing the untenability of settlement itself. In Fuller’s contemporary realization of the farm memoir, Don’t Let’s Go, this location offers an ambivalent, focal point for her contradictory attempts to escape and return to her memories of settler life, long after the end of colonial rule.

Don’t Let’s Go: Settler roots and fluid origins in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe

Fuller’s first memoir records her family’s emigration to Rhodesia during the 1960s, as the country descended into a bloody civil war, and her subsequent childhood in Zimbabwe and Zambia. She has since published (to date) five further memoirs which refer to her upbringing in “a pariah nation, an illegal republic unrecognised by the rest of the world” (Fuller 2015, 65). Where Anderson had fled the settler state following Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) in 1964, Fuller’s family arrived in 1966, having previously lived in both England and Kenya. Liberal Rhodesians like Lessing and Anderson left in the mid-20th century because they were unable to live within a society which championed white supremacism. By contrast, the Fullers were drawn to UDI because it signalled a renewed commitment to racial segregation. Drinking heavily on the veranda of the family home, Fuller’s mother would regularly announce that the family moved to southern Africa because they were “prepared to die you see [ … ] to keep one country white-run” (Fuller 2002, 17). For Fuller’s family, witnessing decolonization in Kenya before observing Rhodesia’s transformation into Zimbabwe meant that “we lost twice” (17), the plural pronoun announcing their affiliation with a white colonial community during a period of imperial decline. The Fullers view their own personal tragedies in Don’t Let’s Go (which include the deaths of three children and the loss of several homes) through the prism of a waning white supremacy.

If imagined in spatial terms, Fuller’s memoir is an autobiographical act of retreat, charting her parents’ erratic movements across the frontlines of the second Chimurenga (the guerrilla war in Rhodesia which eventually overthrew white-minority rule in 1979) and into Zambia following Zimbabwean independence. While they lived on numerous commercial farms across southern Africa, the only land Fuller’s family owned outright was in Rhodesia’s Burma Valley. The eventual loss of this property contradicted the foundational relationship between colonial rule and land ownership. By the late 1970s, Fuller had begun to see connections between the “soothing oasis of trees and a sweep of lawn” (2002, 105) that led to white farms, and the blasted Tribal Trust Lands (TTL). These reservations of arid, low-lying land – deemed unsuitable for farming – were the only sections of the country allocated to Black Rhodesians. From the back seat of her parents’ car the young Fuller uneasily regarded their “red, raw soil” and emaciated cattle (105). Her burgeoning awareness of colonialism’s impact on land distribution contains echoes of Edward Said’s (1993) argument that imperialism is “an act of geographical violence through which virtually every space in the world is explored, charted, and brought under control” (271). Yet if earlier Rhodesian memoirs – including Lessing’s ([1957] 1984) Going Home and Anderson’s The Toe-Rags – criticized white rule through retrospective narratives, Don’t Let’s Go forges a far more ambivalent relationship with the colonial past through a first-person child narrator. Even as she notes the disparity between white-owned farms and the TTL, Fuller reports her seven-year-old self’s announcement that “when I grow up, I’ll be in charge of [racist term for Black Africans] and show them how to farm properly” (105). This sentiment cannot be comfortably confined by the grammatical marks of reported speech; instead it seeps out into the wider memoir, threatening to subsume her adult attempts to critique colonial land ownership and cultivation.

For Ranka Primorac (2010), Don’t Let’s Go combines elements of both imperial romance and Rhodesian pastoral literature, developing the latter’s “sense of belonging in white settlers’ hard work, resilience, solidarity and a sense of humour” (211). Yet Fuller’s first memoir marks a specific development in white Rhodesian and Zimbabwean memoir writing through its depiction of the family farm, charting the collapse of a white fantasy of belonging to the land. For Murenga Joseph Chikowero (2014), despite the limitations of Don’t Let’s Go, the text poses significant questions “about the legitimacy of the colonial state [ … ] chipping away at notions of racial superiority that formed the centrepeice of Rhodesian colonial ideology” (116). In this sense it highlights the possibilities of critically reading contemporary, southern African farm memoirs, with Fuller offering a conceptual understanding of farming as “a deadly, secret kind of war” where individuals fight “for land in which they have put their seed, their sweat, their hopes” (2002, 27). In these moments of critical nuance, this “secret war” is read through centuries of land seizure in Rhodesia and Zimbabwe, indicating that farms reflect the failures of colonial settlement even after decolonization.

In 1974, shortly after Fuller’s fifth birthday, her parents purchased Robandi Farm in Burma Valley “because they loved the view” (Fuller 2002, 46) from the farmhouse, apparently unconcerned to have moved into “the epicentre of the civil war in Rhodesia” (53). When Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party came to power six years later, Robandi was put up for mandatory auction under the new government’s land distribution programme. The loss of their house and farm prompts Fuller to reflect more broadly on her own connection with the land:

In Rhodesia, we are born and then the umbilical cord of each child is sown straight from the mother onto the ground, where it takes root and grows. Pulling away from the ground cause [sic] death by suffocation, starvation. That’s what the people of this land believe. Deprive us of the land and you are depriving us of air, water, food, and sex. (153–154)

Fuller’s desire for rooting in the landscape encompasses a full life span (from birth to death), that is nevertheless permanently tethered to the earth, with the umbilical connection remaining intact. But while the “us” in this passage tries to position her within the collective “people of this land”, this inclusion is a misdirection; her suggestion of planted, southern African roots is a fantasy. In reality the collective pronoun belongs to the “we” of the Fuller family, who were “willing to die” (2002, 17) in order to preserve white supremacy. Indeed, as we are later told, Fuller was not born in Rhodesia, and her origins do not automatically position her in the “us” of the land. While this passage purports to offer a grounded identity, Don’t Let’s Go largely refuses to offer a coherent vision of white belonging in southern Africa. Instead, as Fuller attempts to address the colonial politics of her upbringing, she pursues a more unstable origin story which traces her roots to series of transitory locations.

Fuller’s natal origins are often subject to curious interrogation by strangers, her self-declared identity as “White. African. White-African” offering a hyphenated self in answer to the question “where are you from originally?” (2002, 8; emphasis in original). It is important to note that “White-African” appears to be a geographical location – an attempt to answer the “where” – but Fuller’s vision of whiteness exceeds the limits of national borders (there is no mention of “Rhodesia”, “Zimbabwe”, or “Zambia” in her reply). She instead answers with an origin story: “I began, then, embarking from a hot, dry boat”, describing her first landfall on the African continent, aged two (8). These beginnings then necessitate an even earlier tale of how “I am born into the tame, drizzling English town of Glossop”, where her family renovated a crumbling farmhouse (33). Her parents’ brief attempt to farm in Derbyshire, England, failed in just over a year and they “rolled up the entire farm and sold it as turf to a gardening company”, to be later unrolled “as [a] lawn in suburban Manchester” (37). The brief account of their years in the northern hemisphere focuses on images of surface-level cultivation; the Fullers could lay neither literal nor metaphorical roots in the Peak District. Instead the rolled turf is transplanted like a carpet and supplied to the northern city’s suburbs (the aesthetic antithesis of a southern African farm), confirming Fuller’s disdain for her English origins. Her first memoir yearns for a deep-rooted connection to the African, rather than Derbyshire, soil that it can never wholly achieve.

In consolation for her unsatisfactory official place of birth, Fuller reaches further back to the moment of her conception, which she imagines taking place during her parents’ brief stopover in the grand Victoria Falls hotel, en route to England: “I am conceived [ … ] next to the thundering roar of the place where the Zambezi River plunges a hundred metres into the black-sided gorge” (2002, 33). Glossop’s rainfall is only a pale imitation of her real beginnings where the roaring force of the Zambezi rang “in my ears” (33). The juxtaposition between roaring/tame, river/drizzle, and African/English establishes Fuller’s English birth as taking place “by mistake”, insisting that her true origins lie in southern Africa (8). It is a truism that the memoirs of settlers and their descendants often express a desire to be rooted in the soil; as I have discussed elsewhere (Parker 2024, 116–120), Lessing records her parents’ wish to be buried “beneath the old [m]uwanga tree” that marked the edge of their Rhodesian farm and which was eventually destroyed by lightning long before their deaths (2008, 232). Recording events that took place almost a century later, Fuller’s fourth memoir describes the family’s grief-stricken imperative that her father “be laid to rest sooner rather than later, on the farm [ … ] under a baobab tree” (2019, 194) in Zambia. Settler families like Lessing’s and Fuller’s negotiate their connection to the land through claims that Coetzee associates with the plaasroman; ownership of the farm is assured through “evidences of labour and with bones in the earth” (1988, 106). Yet Don’t Let’s Go reveals how the farm memoir might subtly challenge this by refusing to offer neither a stable nor a terrestrial connection to the landscape. The Victoria Falls is a dynamic, shifting site which cuts across the borders of several countries; as a churning body of water which moves between nations it is hardly a stable set of coordinates for Fuller’s “white-African” identity. Instead, it issues a fluid challenge to any attempt to pinpoint her origins. Her literal, English birth represents a missed opportunity to be umbilically tethered “straight [ … ] onto the ground” (Fuller 2002, 153). In the end, these alternative, watery beginnings articulate a desire for soil-based belonging as futile as Lessing’s parents’ wish to be buried under the muwanga tree.

Unlike Bill in The Toe-Rags, the Fullers are devoted to the “fertile, worm-smelling soil” (Fuller 2002, 153) and primed to fight for “their” land on Robandi Farm, competing against other communities who are also looking for “land on which to grow tobacco, cotton, soybeans, sheep, women, children” (153). The act of cultivation, growing crops, is synonymous with the futurity of a family tree (growing wives and children). However, woven into these pastoral visions are old, calcified arguments that work to justify colonial land theft: like her parents, the young Alexandra argues that “Africans are not practicing good soil conservation, farming practices, water management” (105). In reality, Rhodesia’s Land Apportionment Act (1930) resulted in the TTLs, creating generations of dispossession by taking “away land from the Africans and [giving] it to the Europeans” (Lessing 1984, 302). According to the Fuller family’s settler logic, only they can conserve, farm, and manage the soil. While Fuller insists that the farm in Burma Valley “never belonged to us and it doesn’t belong to the new Zimbabwean farmer”, she criticizes “the mortgage company” (2002, 165) which stakes an enduring claim to the property. Wenzel reminds us that the plaasroman historically sought to characterize “the land market as an illegitimate means of negotiating land ownership”, preferring instead to honour “the rights established by generations of [white] family labour” (2000, 94). In this context even Fuller’s attempt to offer a neutral response to the question of who owns the farm draws on historical justifications for colonial settlement, articulated through images of labour, white genealogies, and imperial progress.

The return to the dilapidated, haunted site of a former home is a mainstay of life writing in southern Africa, appearing in Lessing’s African Laughter and Alfred and Emily, Godwin’s When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, and Rogers’s The Last Resort. As a set piece, returning to a lost family farm reflects the real mass abandonment and forced evictions of white homes after Zimbabwean independence. Symbolically this site both epitomized and justified colonial rule in southern Africa (as a location supposedly defined by cultivation and productivity). In Burma Valley, Fuller’s neighbours deserted their coffee plantations after being attacked by guerrilla forces from nearby Mozambique. The few inhabited properties that remained lay “behind razor-gleaming fences”, barricaded and “bristling with their defense” (Fuller 2002, 105). Fuller remembers the empty farms as ghostly properties marked by “quick-growing bougainvillea and Mauritius thorn” hanging across the verandas, where broken windows revealed interior walls stained with bat droppings (129). The Mauritius thorn “with its forward-backward hooking thorns” would have been planted initially as part of the farm’s home security, employed alongside barbed-wire fences and “a host of huge dogs” (54). This marker of habitation now acts as a visual reminder of abandonment. Similar accounts of “bougainvillea battlements” (Godwin 2006, 279) appear in various Rhodesian life narratives, as the flowering bush – originally indigenous to South America – was distributed across Britain’s empire and acted as a visual “mark[er] of white domesticity” in settler colonies (Rasch 2018, 163). Yet the repeated scenes of unsettling returns in the southern African farm memoir suggests that these farmhouses were always wrought with ambivalence and instability, haunted by the false promise of colonial prosperity.

Fuller highlights the unstable boundaries between the white farm and the wilderness beyond its borders by describing plants that breached the external boundaries of nearby farmhouses. Inside the abandoned dwellings are “whitewashed sitting rooms where dinner parties (with proper place settings and flowers on the table and servants in white uniforms, stiff with desperate civilisation) are green with mould” (Fuller 2002, 129). The imagined past which takes place in parenthesis suggests how the veneer of colonial life worked to obscure the labour required by settlers to “tame” and “civilize” their unfamiliar environs. The sitting rooms and the uniforms are part of a literal and ideological attempt at whitewashing, a process of domestication that was nevertheless foiled by Burma Valley’s humid, subtropical environment. Here Don’t Let’s Go palpably suggests that the lives of white farmers were always destined to re-enact, on a miniature level, the global contractions of imperial decline. Like the pile of bricks which lay strewn around Anderson’s childhood home, the rotting properties near Robandi Farm are haunting reminders that colonial progress has failed to arrive. In these memoirs no white future can be built from the ruins of empire. Despite the Fullers’ growing agricultural expertise, Robandi farm is as doomed as their original venture in Derbyshire.

These descriptions of empty farmhouses, overrun by the imported plants which once distinguished them from the surrounding landscape, emphasizes how Fuller avoids recovering or wholly recuperating her memories of Rhodesia in her first memoir. In its nightmarish visions of grief, poverty, and failure, Don’t Let’s Go refuses to imagine the colonial past as pastoral idyll. But unlike previous generations who fled their lives as “poor whites” (Anderson 1989, 16) and plotted escape routes for “getting-off-the-farm” (Lessing 2008, 193), Fuller’s unstable, fluid origin stories pursue an unrealizable dream of belonging to, but not owning, the land on which she was raised. If earlier, anti-colonial white memoirists sought ambivalent forms of escape, Fuller reveals how their successors were consumed with returning – imaginatively or literally – to this lost home. Although the enclosed and increasingly embattled parameters of Robandi suggests a violent, untenable future, Fuller and her contemporaries are nevertheless drawn back to their memories of colonial life, paradoxically attempting to lay roots in these ruined dwellings.

Conclusion: Remembering Rhodesia in the new millennium

Once described by Smith as “more British than the British” (1997, 3), Rhodesia was a retreat for white supremacy at the end of empire and, in the 16 years following UDI, it became a brief, colonial outpost resisting an era of global decolonization. As Daniel Geary, Camilla Schofield, and Jennifer Sutton (2020) suggest, white nationalist groups across the globe claimed Rhodesia, throughout these years, “as a critical front, or the last line of defence, in an imagined, globalised race for white self-government” (11). Following the inauguration of Mugabe in 1980, many white farmers (including, initially, the Fullers) believed that they could resist the wind of change which Harold Macmillan had imagined as blowing across the African continent. Although many of these landowners had hoped to maintain their properties in the new Zimbabwe, their efforts often resulted in disastrous expulsions from their former homes. In 2020 the Zimbabwean government announced its intention to return land to foreign nationals whose farms had been seized during the early 2000s (Nyoka 2020), but post-2000 memoirs by Godwin, Kann, and Rogers anticipate how few white families are willing or able to return.

This sense of protracted, impossible homecoming has had a profound impact on the role that Rhodesia now plays in white nationalist cultural imaginaries. Indeed, it is now – more than ever – vital to acknowledge this context while discussing white, southern African farm memoirs that continue to circulate amongst an international anglophone readership. In the 21st century, Rhodesia remains a symbol of nostalgia “not only for a white-ruled state, but specifically as a site of modern combat for white rule” (Geary, Schofield, and Sutton 2020, 15). In the past decade, deadly attacks by white supremacists wearing the Rhodesian flag have repeatedly taken place in the United States, fuelled partly by the glorified, false promise of Rhodesia’s racial purity which calcify in online forums and social media feeds (Brownwell 2020, 179; Doble, Liburd, and Parker 2023, 2). Given the continuing symbolic power of this mythologized, defunct settler state, there are significant risks in discussing any texts (including memoirs) which might memorialize or celebrate the violent realities of colonial life.

Despite this, many life writers – of whom Fuller remains the most successfully prolific – continue to explore their sense of being “the murderous, murdered Orphans of Empire” whose “rootlessness had brought with it a longing for belonging” (Fuller 2019, 182). In her later memoir Travel Light, Move Fast, Fuller acknowledges that, in an ideal world, “I’d never have left the farm” (173) which her parents eventually acquired in Zambia, where they lived within sight and earshot of her beloved Zambezi River. Still working back to these fluid, natal origins Fuller continues to discuss fraught questions of land ownership and settlement:

In my ideal world, the farm would pass down from one bunch of people to the next, from Mr. Chrissford and Mrs. Tembo and Comrade Connie [the Fullers’ Black employees] to their children, and their children’s children; all of us meeting under the Tree of Forgetfulness next to the outdoor kitchen for meals. (173)

As Fuller considers the practical complications of inheriting her parents’ property, she explicitly works to disrupt the genealogies of settlerdom by proposing land as a collective inheritance. Yet the question of who would cook the meals, and carry out the majority of manual labour, hangs unanswered in this vision of meeting and forgiveness beneath the sheltering branches. In her ongoing life writing project, Fuller continues to oscillate between moving back to, and trying to look beyond, the site of a white-owned farm.

As Whitlock rightly notes in Postcolonial Life Narratives, autobiographical writing can “reproduce the dynamics of colonisation and dispossession” which characterized both empire and its afterlives (2015, 9). But tracking the development of the southern African farm memoir over several generations might still offer the means to counteract continuing and deadly narratives of colonial nostalgia which evoke the former Rhodesia. If read critically, farm memoirs offer a chance to disrupt rather than propagate these ongoing dynamics. When writers from Lessing to Fuller work to both escape from and return to the settler farmstead, this emblematic location stubbornly reveals empire’s frailties and fracture lines. Whether in Anderson’s explicit anti-imperialism, or Fuller’s more ambiguous expressions of belonging, these southern African farms are notable failures. Their owners are either impoverished, or hungry, or struggling to outlast the next rainy season beneath a leaking thatched roof. Contrary to imperialist visions of a thriving property separated from its strange and hostile environs, texts like The Toe-Rags affirm the intricate connections that bound white settlers to their surroundings (exposing linkages between the farmhouse and the kraal that families like Anderson’s depended on for survival). Meanwhile Fuller has shown how the subgenre of the white farm memoir develops after formal decolonization, exploring the contradictory forms of belonging expressed by settler families who witnessed both the fall of South African apartheid and the dismantlement of the Rhodesian settler state. Important distinctions emerge when we read these generations of life writers together; early anti-imperialist accounts of white-owned farms by writers like Lessing and Anderson demonstrably gave way to later, more ambiguous memoirs which paradoxically look back towards the confines of colonial life. Yet all of these texts, whether by design or happenstance, offer important opportunities to understand and critique the paradoxes of the settler-colonial project in southern Africa.

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Emma Parker

Emma Parker is lecturer in literature and gender at the University of Bristol. She is the author of Life Writing and the End of Empire (Bloomsbury, 2024), co-editor of British Culture After Empire (Manchester University Press, 2023), and has published articles in Critical Quarterly, Auto/Biography Studies, Wasafiri, Life Writing, and others. Between 2024 and 2025 she is the Ann Ball Bodley Fellow in Women’s History at the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, where she is developing a project about exiled South African women writers in Britain.