Before The Knife

Before the Knife: Memories of an African Childhood is Carolyn Slaughter’s account of growing up in Botswana during the 1950s, in the closing years of British colonial rule. From the outside, hers was the sort of expatriate childhood that could be arranged into a handsome album: district postings, long journeys, servants, government houses, rivers, desert skies and English children standing stiffly beside large motorcars. Unfortunately, family photographs are excellent at recording clothes and scenery, but notoriously poor at mentioning terror.

Slaughter’s father was a British colonial official, a man entrusted with exercising authority over a distant territory despite being spectacularly unfit to exercise it over himself. Violent, bullying and sexually abusive, he ruled his household through fear. Her mother, anxious and emotionally unavailable, maintained the brittle conventions of English respectability, because if there is one thing the Empire taught particularly well, it was how to put on a clean dress and behave as though nothing unspeakable had happened.

Slaughter states plainly that her father began raping her when she was six. She does not turn this revelation into a lurid mystery or an approaching theatrical climax; it is the terrible fact beneath the childhood she reconstructs. Much of the memoir concerns the ways in which a child lives around what cannot be understood or safely spoken: through nightmares, accidents, fury, silence and an increasingly desperate desire to resist the man whom every adult institution appears willing to regard as respectable.

Yet Before the Knife is not solely a record of cruelty. Beyond the house lay the Kalahari and the Okavango country: thorn trees, water lilies, flamingos, crocodiles, immense skies and the intoxicating freedom of disappearing into the bush. Africa became Slaughter’s refuge, offering beauty without pretence and danger without hypocrisy. A crocodile, at least, did not require anyone to call it Father or compliment it at dinner.

The book is therefore poised between two childhoods occupying the same landscape. One is filled with violence, secrecy and colonial repression; the other with rivers, animals, light and an intense imaginative freedom. Slaughter writes as an adult returning to the memories she had been forced to bury, trying to understand how the girl she was survived long enough to become the woman able to tell her story. The knife of the title belongs to a moment of contemplated retaliation, but it also suggests the cutting edge of memory: the point at which silence can no longer protect anyone except the guilty.

Painful, candid and vividly atmospheric, Before the Knife is both a memoir of abuse and an elegy for an African landscape that gave its author somewhere to breathe. It exposes the ugly domestic reality concealed behind the orderly machinery of colonial life while preserving the wonder of a place that offered solace when the adults conspicuously failed to do so.

This 2003 Black Swan edition is in As New condition—a notably fresh copy of a book concerned with memories that are anything but. A powerful read for those interested in literary memoir, African childhood, colonial society and the difficult business of giving language to experiences a family spent years pretending had never occurred.

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