By KARI MUTU

More by this Author

Alexander Fuller’s memoir Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight was a New York Times bestseller about growing up in pre-independence Zimbabwe.

Her second memoir, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, is a prequel of the lives of her colourful parents and grandparents.

The key person in this book is Alexander’s mother, a woman who introduces herself as Nicola Fuller of Central Africa.

Descended from a Scottish family and brought up in colonial Kenya, Nicola is a fun-loving, whimsical character and a brilliant horse-rider who always wanted to appear in a book. She is also “highly strung with a genetic predisposition to funny moods and depression.”

There is something of a fireside chat appeal in the book as Fuller, who now lives in the US, recalls family events and anecdotes told by her parents while they are at the beach or sipping sundowner drinks on their farmhouse veranda.

As a historic account, Tree of Forgetfulness gives us an authentic insider view of European settler mentality, their romantic fascination with African landscapes, the ‘equatorial light’ or how the air in Kenya smelled ‘so fresh so fragrant’.

The working-class Fuller family considered themselves pukka sahib (proper gentry) and not, as Nicola was at pains to point out, like the hedonistic Happy Valley settlers.

Yet they were largely oblivious to the oppressive conditions of the locals. Theirs was a world of horse racing, Catholic missionary schools, pet chimpanzees and misgivings about South African Boer settlers in East Africa.

When Kenya gained Independence, the family moved south in search of a new home and, admits Fuller, white-ruled Africa.

For all their prejudices, the resilience and fighting spirit of this minority community is noteworthy. Eking out a living on difficult land, at times unable to afford rent, enduring illness, snakebite, loss and death.

During the fight for Independence in Kenya and Zimbabwe, the Fullers strapped on guns and stayed on while many other colonialists fled.

A few local people are mentioned. Mostly the domestic staff, like their constantly inebriated housemaid and the farmhand, Mr Zulu, who identified the indigenous “tree of forgetfulness” where the Fullers built their home. It is the tree where “the ancestors assist you with whatever is wrong.”

Over the years various incidents precipitate Nicola’s bouts of depression, periods that her daughters call “a wobbly.” The death of her third baby sends her over the edge — into a mental hospital in Zimbabwe for a year and close to irretrievable insanity. At last they find a permanent home in Zambia and start a fish and banana farm in the Zambezi Valley, hard-won after 18 visits by Mr Fuller to the local chief, bearing gifts.

Readers of Fuller’s first memoir (which her mother calls “that awful book”) may find this one less less dramatic.

Sometimes the narrative slows down with chronicles of the various eccentric Fuller ancestors.

Like Nicola’s Irish linens and orange cooking pots, we are taken from the highlands of Scotland to the white highlands of Kenya and to farms in Zimbabwe, Malawi and Zambia.

Throughout the book there is witty dialogue, wonderful turns of phrase and endless family theatrics that keep you wanting more.

The story focuses mostly on the maternal side of the family. It would have been nice to hear more views from her father, the reticent, pipe-smoking and partly deaf Mr Fuller.

He is the stolidly calm presence in the background, coaxing crops out of the land and fussing lovingly around his wobbly wife, “the number one lady in all of Africa.”