I enjoyed the descriptions of the land, the people, and the detail in her stories. There were some really raw and intense descriptions as well, but through it all you could feel her love for Africa.
Here are some quotes that resonated with me:
- "Camilla had found it difficult to come to terms with the realization that an entire family, bonded tightly by love and memories, could be devastated at the speed of a bullet."
- "I used a Magic Marker to write the name of my country decoratively on my school books, beside the pictures of horses and hearts containing pop stars' initials. Charm, Donny Osmond, and Rhodesia, my first loves."
- quote from Beryl Markham - "if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesterdays are buried deep, leave it in any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can."
- "...the strutting cheerfulness of the fat red hens was that of chubby, big-bottomed African women who not only rejoice in the build nature has given them but celebrate it with impromptu bouts of tribal dancing."
- regarding the crash of the Viscount Hunyani during the war - "One listens, and the silence is deafening. One listens for loud condemnation by the President of the United States, himself a man from the Bible-Baptist belt, and once again the silence is deafening. One listens for condemnation by the Pope, by the Archbishop of Canterbury, by all who love the name of God. Again, the silence is deafening."
- "But these measures were psychological more than anything. The reassured us that, if nothing else, we were delaying the inevitable, and they told the terrorists that there were a few more barriers in place than there had been on the night when they were able to walk unchallenged up to the house and change its history."
- "Whereas in the city my parents might have closeted me and fretted about my safety, here in the place of greatest danger, they handed me my freedom and trusted me to use it wisely."
- "More often that not a rainbow would arch over the game park or the river: God's promise. Those were the times I felt most fully alive, most part of the rhythms and cycles of Africa and our new home. I felt like we belonged to the land and the land belonged to us."
- "The war of my experience was more like the battleground of the Old West, where lone ranchers defended themselves against shadowy but well-armed assassins who came in deadly bands of three or six or ten."
- "Or there'd be a Monkey's Wedding, a teasing sprinkle of rain from an incongruously sunny sky, followed by an out-of-context rainbow."
- "Dad never took war personally. As far as he was concerned, they tried to shoot you and you tried to shoot them: end of story. But he had an old-fashioned perspective on the morality of it. He would lose his temper, even with senior officers, if he felt that prisoners of war or the dying from either side were not accorded the proper respect."
- quote from Neville Chamberlain - "Failure only begins when you leave off trying."
- "The part about war that nobody mentions is how quickly it assimilates into everyday life. After a while it seemed as if there'd never been a time when we didn't scour the farm roads for land mines or steel ourselves for bullets through the windshield as we drove into town. As if there had never been an evening when my father didn't strip and clean his guns after dinner or count his ammunition. As if there had always been people waiting in the darkness to kill us."
- "All my life I'd been taught to value and hold sacred the name of Rhodesia and the history and blood ties that bonded me to it. I'd been raised on the belief that ours was the very best country on earth...and that because these things were so special, they were worth fighting for and worth dying for...and because we were told these things so often and saw all of this beauty and courage and magnificence with our own eyes, our land became our life, our nationality our identity. Now my identity was gone, and the shock was overwhelming."
- "But it was the euphoria that told me that the war of freedom, which in my childish innocence I had believed we were fighting against Communism, had turned out to be someone else's war of freedom. We were the terrorists. Our heroes were not heroes at all, they were evil racists. Only black people were allowed to be heroes. The sense of disillusionment I felt was total. The country I had loved so much that at times I almost wished I could die for it was not the country I had thought it was. We had repressed people, oppressed people, tortured people, and murdered people for the worst of possible reasons: the color of their skin. Twenty thousand people had died in our war, apparently for nothing."
- "...concluded that my whole life was a lie. I'd been brainwashed politically and blind in almost every other way, and I had to reprocess everything from that position. The trouble with having your eyes forcibly opened is that there's no way of closing them again. I felt I'd been snapped from a happy dream, from a beautiful illusion, as if a crevasse had opened up underfoot. I began to take stock of my life, and I didn't like what I saw."
- "So where did this leave me? Was my love of the land any less valid because of the actions of my forefathers, my government, my father, or even, in my ignorance, myself? In Britain and the United States, people were accepted as British or American from the moment of their birth or the day they were granted citizenship; yet in Zimbabwe black people were Africans, Indians were Indians, adn whites were regularly labeled Europeans. My family had been in Africa for four generations. Why wasn't I African? Why?
- about her father - "...because the thing I'd never doubted was how proud he was of me, even though almost everything he'd ever watched me do had been a disaster; how he had always been there for me in all the ways that mattered; and how, in one way or another, he was always saving us, Lisa and me."
