Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe, formerly known as Southern Rhodesia, is the country in which Doris Lessing is raised. Several anecdotes she tells and other examples she gives in the book are drawn from events in her youth that occur in Rhodesia, or when she returns as an adult to visit Zimbabwe. The country undergoes a violent war for independence from Great Britain in the 1970s, and when Lessing is young in the post-World War II years, she belongs to a small white minority that dominates the black majority. Over time, the country sees much bigotry and violence, upon which Lessing frequently draws to make points about group behavior in this book.

Britain

Britain is the site of a major miners' strike in the 1980s that Lessing uses as a central example of her thesis that adherents to the cause of a political or religious group will, especially in times of...