Muzungu

Muzungu is a vivid memoir of growing up in a time and place it has become taboo to speak of - Rhodesia in the twilight of empire. An elegy upon a vanished life and people, it is a reflection upon a childhood mainly spent deep in the backcountry of what is now Zambia as the son of an adventurous British official and his enigmatic wife. It is a story of being raised by and among black Africans, the best of whom are the people you admire most in the world, only to be shipped off to boarding school in England. Muzungu, slang for a white person across swathes of Africa, is said to mean 'a wanderer' who strays over the land without purpose, or one who 'spins around' as if bewildered. This poetic memoir charts a struggle to transcend that condition and find one's own way at last through writing.