Alexandra Fuller was born in England but moved to Africa with her family when she was two. Having lived in Rhodesia, as it was then known, Malawi and Zambia, she left Africa in 1994 with her husband to move to Wyoming. Her debut book, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood, was a finalist for the Guardian's first book award and the winner of the 2002 Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize. Her 2004 Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier won the Ulysses Prize for Art of Reportage. Her latest book, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, continues her memoirs to focus on the life of her eccentric and charismatic mother.
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"The memoirs that have come out of Africa are sometimes startlingly beautiful, often urgent, and essentially life-affirming, but they are all performances of courage and honesty. Far from the tell-all confessionals more usual in western memoirs, the African memoir lays bare the bones of what it is to be a child, survivor, or perpetrator of oppression and conflict.
"What is often shocking, but very effective, is the humour evident in so many of these works, laughter being an essential survival technique for so many Africans (and of her writers). The act of writing is also a defiant way of asserting, "I was born. I am here. I will remain." In places of chronic instability, the memoir is an anchor of words to an experience and place and a way to bear witness; to expose and perhaps even explain the atrocities of war, racism, tribalism and cronyism. Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, and Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, my own memoirs of Africa, are written from a white African point of view, but explore the ways in which the land possesses all of us who love it – regardless of ethnicity – and the ways in which laughter can make palatable life's unendurable losses."
1. The Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter by Albie Sachs
Not everyone can be a Jewish-born, anti-apartheid, South African lawyer and self-proclaimed freedom fighter But that was Albie Sachs in the 1980s. And that in itself would be enough. But to be, in addition, a writer of gorgeous, uplifting sentences seems to be something heaven-sent. Sachs's remarkable memoir transcends its time and even its place with its universality and ultimately (and this sounds odd in the context of a man who was blown up by pro-apartheid forces in 1988 and lost an arm and an eye) its message is hopeful. A "re-membering" rather than a "dis-membering" is what Sachs would say, both about the act of violence which threatened to kill him and his life thereafter.
2. One Day I will Write About this Place by Binyavanga Wainaina
This wonderful memoir about Wainaina's journey from book-devouring east African boy to African Caine prize-winning author is brimming with virtuoso insouciance and it is utterly resolved. Wainaina has done all the soul-searching of a young-man-in-flux for us, and we are left in awe of his jazzy, fresh use of language and his gentle guidance. Wainaina's Africa is not all glamorous poverty and backlit giraffes. It's an Africa in which the lost are perpetually leading the blind, and yet still somehow find their way home.
3. The House at Sugar Beach by Helene Cooper
One of the most memorable memoirs of childhood written in the last decade. Honest, informative and very restrained, this is the story of one woman's journey from a child of Liberia's elite ruling class, to refugee from the war that saw her mother horribly attacked, her cousin (a member of the pre-coup government) shot, and her family torn apart. I read this book in one greedy helping and have held it up as an absolute must-read ever since.
4. This Child Will Be Great by Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
A true story of Sirleaf's ascent from ordinary Liberian child to leader that reads as much like an awful whodunnit on a catastrophically awesome scale, as it does like the memoirs of an ambitious and brave woman. This autobiography from the woman who is Africa's first (and, at present count, only) female head of state, is as inspiring as it is page-turning.
5. The Devil that Danced on Water by Aminatta Forna
This memoir manages to be at once one of the least sentimental books ever written about an African childhood (in this case, Sierra Leone) and yet so utterly moving that one finds oneself almost constantly welling up, not just with shock or sadness, but with awe at Forna's courageous telling of an incredibly difficult story. This is a story of war, loss and ultimately redemption, written with formidable grace and poise.
6. Boyhood by JM Coetzee
Here was a refreshing splash-in-the-face recounting of a white southern African childhood shorn utterly of any romance or excess emotion. Refreshingly cured of any diseased nostalgia for the good old days, Coetzee's memoir sears with an almost dry-iced precision.
7. Conversations with Myself by Nelson Mandela
This is a book you will find yourself going back to and thumbing through, not just for the historical perspective that this collection of essays, speeches and conversations that this memoir provides, but for the shot-to-the-heart wisdom of one of the greatest and most inspiring leaders of our time.
8. A Mouth Sweeter Than Salt by Toyin Falola
This Nigerian coming-of-age memoir is irreverent, poetic and filled with the kind of ordinary information that makes Nigeria feel oddly familiar, even in its loud, exuberant foreignness. It's easy to see the influences of both Chinua Achebe and Wole Solinkya in these pages, and yet Falola has a voice all his own too. Something modern and jazzy and shoulder-shrugging and altogether itself.
9. What Is the What by Dave Eggers
Eggers' biographical novel of Valentino Achak Dang's nightmarish flight from his country's civil war in the 1980s and 1990s, to refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya, and eventually (but far from safe-and-soundly) to America reads like a Victorian epic. Dang's courage and humanity shine through these pages in first-person brilliance and Eggers is nothing if not the master of language. It's a spine-straightening read, and ultimately something that lends a very human face, and a very human need for hope, to one of the most brutalised corners of our modern world.
10. Sometimes There Is a Void by Zakes Mda
Mda's electric honesty is a live current through his remarkably gorgeous, urgent, poetic, matter-of-fact memoir. But don't get lulled into thinking this is the book of one bravely truthful man's journey into self-expression. Mda has shaken off calcification, identity, ego and walked us all into sovereignty and selfhood. Read this, and be prepared to examine your own soul as never before
