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

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.