In his latest of many books, the expatriate Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o tells of an episode from the colonial era in which he grew up. Kamawe Musunge, the “houseboy” of the British-born Peter Poole, was riding a bicycle when Poole’s dogs attacked him. The African tried to defend himself with a rock, and the settler shot him dead. So far, so routine; British East Africa was perhaps the most arrogantly run of Britain’s overseas possessions, and this was 1959, during the extra-repressive late stage of the Mau Mau rebellion. But for the first and only time in the country’s history, a white person was hanged (albeit to hysterical white protest) for the murder of a black one. “Two men died. Two dogs survived,” Ngugi remarks.
At this point in the book, my uneasiness broke out into exasperation. No, not even dogs come out okay in the long run in Africa. In the early years of this century, the most pitiful of reports reaching South Africa from Zimbabwe were about dogs — not only the enormous, often vicious guard dogs, but ordinary pets left to farm invaders when the white owners fled for their lives. Cross-border rescue initiatives would offer for adoption a hound who was adjusting well after his blinding, or a terrier who was of course never going to be the same after every bone in his body had been broken but who needed a kind home for just that reason.
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