Robyn Scott's Twenty Chickens for a Saddle also recalls a girlhood in Africa, from the viewpoint of a woman in her twenties. By contrast with Lessing's book, it is not about colonial, but post-colonial Africa – in this case, Botswana, which borders Zimbabwe. But Botswana, shows Scott, is a country of hope. Her grandfather yells, "Land of opportunity... If you've got vision, you can do anything here. Democratic! Peaceful! Untapped!"

The book records Scott's 15 years in Africa, starting with her family's arrival from New Zealand in the late 1980s, when she was six. Her father Keith is a private doctor working in busy clinics, coping with the ravages of Aids; her mother Linda is a scientist, her career interrupted by children. They live in a converted cowshed in a small village, where Linda throws her energies into holistic medicine and home-schooling. The title refers to a project Scott is given by her parents, as a way of learning self-reliance: "Their jolly-well-do-it-yourself approach to life – the sell-eggs-to-buy-a-saddle philosophy."

Twenty Chickens for a Saddle is a fresh and enjoyable read, although there is a surfeit of crocodiles, snakes and witch doctors, as in many other memoirs of white childhoods in Africa. Scott does more than simply record her African adventures. She tackles the difficult issue of race, revealing a shift in white attitudes across the generations. Her grandmother, who grew up in Zambia when it was a British colony, opposes Linda's plan to educate her gardener: "he's your garden boy". Linda rejects this set of values and insists: '"GardenER, Mum'."

Botswana is largely "colour-blind", writes Scott. But she is suddenly exposed to white racism when the family move to a farm near the South African border. Here, in a community dominated by Afrikaans farmers, mixed-race dancing provokes disapproval. Scott's education in racism continues at a boarding school in Zimbabwe. In many adult white Zimbabweans, she discovers a racism lurking "just beneath the surface", bubbling up in bitterness: "Ruining their own country... happens every time in Africa". At Heroes' Acre, a monument to those who fell in the liberation struggle, Scott is appalled by "the years of white repression and brutality". For the first time, she feels "really white" and resents the weight of history: "I longed, silently, for Botswana."