Barking at Dogs

Leon Lazarus grew up on the edge of white suburbia in apartheid South Africa, where the anthills stood taller than he did and the wild bunnies had the run of the veld. He failed exams, started bands, dodged the military police, and stumbled through the absurdities of a country at war with itself.

Barking at Dogs is a riotous, tender, and oh-so-South African collection of true and true-ish tales from the backrooms of a family shop and the wild edges of late-apartheid South Africa.

These stories move like a bakkie over corrugations: clattering, hilarious, then suddenly, unexpectedly gentle. There is the delivery room, where a newborn Leon already has opinions about the 1960s he has been born into. There is Warmbaths, and a family road trip that teaches him more about apartheid than any classroom ever could. There is a shaky start at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, now Makhanda, where he meets his best friend Block and falls in with a crowd that rattles cages, forms a racially mixed band, and gets chased, questioned, and rusticated for his trouble. There is a night in Rhini township that could have gone very differently. There is Matjiesfontein, and a ghost story that turns out to be about something else entirely. There are small-town characters, and the kind of dry humour that gets a family through hard times.

Threaded through all of it is the ache and absurdity of a country coming apart at the seams, and the slower, quieter reckoning of a young white South African learning what his comfort actually cost, and who paid for it.

Leon Lazarus writes with the intuitive accuracy of a mechanic and the timing of a comic: memory as spanner, humour as solvent, truth as the one bolt he finally loosens. He does not claim to have stood on the front lines of the struggle against apartheid. By his own account he was somewhere behind the restrooms, three miles back from the line of contact, most of the time. But he was there for enough of it, and he tells it straight, funny side up, without pretending the funny side was the whole story.

If you love great storytelling that leaves grease under your nails and a lump in your throat, you will devour Barking at Dogs.

This is a memoir for anyone who grew up South African, married someone who did, or has ever wondered what it actually felt like to be young, restless, and quietly complicit in a system you were only beginning to see clearly. It will land hardest with the South African expat community and the wider diaspora, but the coming-of-age story underneath, first love, first band, first real trouble with the law, travels well beyond any one country's borders. A glossary of South African and Afrikaans terms is included at the back for readers further from home, along with a candid note on which names have been changed and why.

Some of these stories are entirely true. Some are true-ish. A few are complete bull piled onto a gossamer fabric of truth. See if you can guess which.