Before the Knife: Memories of an African Childhood

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.