Word: rhodesias
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...Laureate Doris Lessing refuses to play the role of Britain's elder literary stateswoman. "As you get older, you don't get wiser," she says. "You get irritable." Her latest book, Alfred and Emily (out in the U.S. on August 5), recounts her childhood on a farm in Southern Rhodesia, and examines the profound effects of World War I on her father, a former soldier and amputee, and her mother, a nurse whose true love drowned in the English Channel. On the eve of the book's publication in the U.K., Lessing spoke with TIME's William Lee Adams...
...1920s Rhodesia, leopards and snakes roamed the bush. Yet for 6-year-old Doris Lessing, this inhospitable environment offered a welcome refuge from her parents: Alfred, a soldier whose leg had been shattered by shrapnel in World War I, and Emily, a wartime nurse who helped to amputate it. Crouched in a patch of brush, Lessing would cover her ears and shout, "I won't listen," in an effort to drown out her parents' incessant talk of tanks, howitzers and death. "The trenches were as present to me as anything I actually saw around me," Lessing recalls in her riveting...
...parents' horrific memories, is an unusual work in two parts. The first half, a novella, imagines the lives her parents could have lived in England had the war never occurred; the second half, a memoir, recounts how their lives actually unfolded in their mud-brick farmhouse in Rhodesia. Together, they form a painful meditation on family and war, one in which the distance between dreams and reality is measured with disappointment. Lessing's life, we discover, falls in the chasm between them...
...even long-suffering Zimbabweans know that no regime is forever. Back in 1965 the country's white ruler Ian Smith - who declared unilateral independence from Britain of what was then called Rhodesia - vowed that "not in one thousand years, not in my lifetime" would black majority rule come to the country. Fifteen years later he retired to his farm, after being ousted from power - by a liberation movement led by Robert Mugabe...
...wasn't long ago that Mugabe was considered one of Africa's brightest postcolonial hopes. As recently as in 1994, Britain awarded him a knighthood. Mugabe was imprisoned from 1964 to 1975 for opposing white rule in the former British colony of Southern Rhodesia and later led its independence movement, becoming Prime Minister of the newly named Zimbabwe in 1980. In his first two years, he built schools, clinics and roads and promoted peace. "Yesterday I fought you as an enemy, today you have become a friend and ally," he said then...