Before the Knife: Memories of an African Childhood Hardcover - 2002

From the publisher

"What happened to me affected all of us--my mother, my father, my sisters, and me: we all fell apart under the horror of it, and we all tried to pretend that there was no horror."
"Before the Knife" is an unforgettable story--a transcendent memoir--of the beauty and brutality in a young girl's African childhood and of the ways she found to survive it. When Carolyn Slaughter was nearly four, she and her family moved from England to a remote outpost in the Kalahari Desert. There she was surrounded by a landscape of incomparable splendor and violence. Majestic rivers formed overnight; flocks of flamingos and herds of game gathered with equal speed to partake of the sudden waters. Termite mounds grew to the height of trees. A crocodile could drag a child from the riverbank in a second. And the author herself became the victim of an unspeakable crime.
Slaughter takes us deep into her experience of Africa and of herself at a time of anguish, but also of recovery. As she has said, "I couldn't take my eyes off Africa. And what I saw was so beautiful that it enabled me not merely to survive, but also to find a way to save my soul." "Before the Knife" is the deeply moving story of a girl who endured and transcended her family's violence to emerge an impassioned observer and explicator of her world.