[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 new black government decreases significantly with each visit, countered by her desire to find the familiar in both landscape and people.

Lessing is at her best when she describes her remembrances of how the country had been and what it had meant to her in her youth. These recollections take the form of personal myth, and myth, she explains, is “a concentration of truth.” She often reconstructs/revises history, adding personal asides to demonstrate the folly of modern society, the absurdity of white Rhodesians, and the limitations or selective nature of human memory. By way of explanation for her revisioning tendencies, she explains: “When I was very young … someone must have said to me, ‘I'm telling you, it's like this. But I knew that ‘it’ was like that. … Someone trying to talk me out of what I knew was true, must have been the important thing that happened to me in my childhood, for I was continually holding fast to moments, when I said to myself … ‘Don't let yourself be talked out of what really happened.’” She manages to create in the work both a personal history of a country and something of an autobiography, the veracity of which may strike some readers as dubious but nonetheless engaging.

African Laughter is at its weakest when Lessing attempts to speak for the multitudes of black Zimbabweans (and often in casual observations of black motivation.) She reveals early in the work that she is “impatient to talk to Africans, any African, to find out what lay behind the rhetoric of war.” Her attempt to counter “The Monologue” on the inequities of black Zimbabweans is admirable yet inept at best. At worst, she romanticizes Africans in a way suggestive of the noble savage. She (or some other source) often scorns the New African generation for its imitation of European manners and traditions while she exposes as superior traditional African ways of being in the world.

Still, apart from the often painful romanticism in Lessing's depictions of the “traditional” Africans and African landscapes, her book offers familiar and vivid images of a developing and struggling Zimbabwe which parallels (to an extent) Jamaica Kincaid's efforts in A Small Place. Whereas Kincaid's extended essay explores the postindependence island nation of Antigua, Lessing's work explores the postindependence nation of Zimbabwe. Though more expansive than A Small Place, African Laughter explores the ignorance of the “colonials” and exposes the corruption of the new government; most notably, Lessing's “chefs” are almost interchangeable with Kincaid's “ministers.”