Verdict: stick
It’s not that the reviewer didn’t appreciate what Veronica Cecil had to say in her memoir, it’s that it simply wasn’t very compelling:
The title comes from a long-ago song that conjures up a naïve view of paradisal life in the colonies. But there is little that is upbeat about Veronica Cecil’s memoir of her family’s brief stint in the newly independent Congo.
She finds herself, the young wife of a company man sent to gain experience in darkest Africa, caught in the turmoil of a country trying to free itself from its past while fighting for its identity in a cold-war powerplay that eventually dragged it into an abyss from which it has still not managed to emerge.
Memoirs offer up the little stories that tend to get drowned out by the rage of history, and there have been some brilliant ones from Africa’s colonial past. Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, about growing up in Rhodesia, was a moving insight into the ambiguities and emotional costs of privilege, oppression and civil conflict.
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