SOURCE: Newson, Adele S. Review of African Laughter, by Doris Lessing. World Literature Today 68, no. 1 (winter 1994): 139-41.

In the following review, Newson explores the parallels between African Laughter and Lessing's experiences in Africa.

African Laughter is an alchemy of memoir, travelogue, revisionist history, and political treatise. While Lessing manages some of these elements better than others, the book is worth reading for its personal and global asides, wry wit, and autobiographical impulses. In sum, the work paints a portrait of a woman who desires to come to terms with “the web of sensations, memories, experience that binds” her to Zimbabwe.

Lessing had lived in colonial Rhodesia for some twenty-five years before becoming an exile in 1956 because of her opposition to white rule. African Laughter records her impressions of the young country of Zimbabwe during four visits (1982, 1988, 1989, 1922); the first visit commences two years after independence. Lessing's regard for the...