Scribbling the Cat : Travels with an African Soldier

"A few years ago, on her parents' farm on the humid banks of a swollen African river, Alexandra Fuller met the man whom she comes to call "K. " Neither of them will be the same again. In spite of being warned off by her father - "Curiosity scribbled the cat" - Fuller is intrigued by K, and comes to befriend him. He is, seemingly, a man of contradictions: weathered by farm work, K is a lion of a man, feral and bullet proof. A survivor of the land whose contours he has helped shape, K is also a product of the land which has shaped him. With the same disarmingly unguarded prose that won her acclaim for Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Fuller here recounts her strange, compelling, and troubled friendship with K. " "Fuller is drawn to K by the hope that, in understanding this man, she may come close to answering questions about her own chaotic and violent history in this part of the world. For Fuller grew up during the Rhodesian War and has found herself cracked and chronically restless as a result of the experience. Most of the ex-combatants she knows won't talk about the war. There is a complicity of silence surrounding the subject. But K - a white African and a veteran of the all-white Rhodesian Light Infantry Commando Unit - is almost alarmingly willing to share his demons with Fuller. The demons are legion; for K's war, like all wars, was a brutal one, marked by racial strife, jungle battle, torture, and the murdering of innocent civilians - and K, like all the veterans of the war, has blood on his hands. " "Driven by their memories, Fuller and K decide to journey into the lands that hold the scars of their war, by traveling from Zambia through Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) and into Mozambique. As they venture deeper into the countries' remote bush, they encounter other veterans: Mapenga, an ex-special branch officer who now lives with his half-tamed lion on a little island in the middle of a lake, and St. Medard who yells at the spooks of his war in his sleep. "--BOOK JACKET.