Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier

The author half dismisses this memoir as "a slither of a slither of a much greater story," but she is wrong. Scribbling the Cat is a haunting memoir about Africa and the borderlines of behavior. Fuller, who was born in England, was raised in Rhodesia, Malawi, and Zambia. Returning to Africa on a Christmas visit a few years ago, she met K., a white African who had fought in Rhodesia's brutal civil war. Ignoring her father's warning to steer clear of him, she befriends this former racist warrior, now a dour born-again Christian, and journeys with him from Zambia through Zimbabwe and into the killing fields of the Rhodesian War. Traveling, as it were, into the past, she comes to grips with K.'s personal demons and her own. A portrait in miniature of a scarred continent.