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Summary
Summary
After his father's heart attack in 1984, Peter Godwin began a series of pilgrimages back to Zimbabwe, the land of his birth, from Manhattan, where he now lives. On these frequent visits to check on his elderly parents, he bore witness to Zimbabwe's dramatic spiral downwards into the jaws of violent chaos, presided over by an increasingly enraged dictator. And yet long after their comfortable lifestyle had been shattered and millions were fleeing, his parents refuse to leave, steadfast in their allegiance to the failed state that has been their adopted home for 50 years. Then Godwin discovered a shocking family secret that helped explain their loyalty. Africa was his father's sanctuary from another identity, another world. WHEN A CROCODILE EATS THE SUN is a stirring memoir of the disintegration of a family set against the collapse of a country. But it is also a vivid portrait of the profound strength of the human spirit and the enduring power of love.
Author Notes
Peter Godwin is an award winning author and journalist. Born and raised in Zimbabwe, he studied law and international relations at Cambridge and Oxford. He worked as a foreign correspondent in Africa and Eastern Europe for The Sunday Times of London. He was founding presenter and writer of Assignment/Correspondent, BBC TV's premier foreign affairs program. He now lives in Manhattan and contributes regularly to National Geographic, New York Times magazine, and BBC Radio, among others.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this exquisitely written, deeply moving account of the death of a father played out against the backdrop of the collapse of the southern African nation of Zimbabwe, seasoned journalist Godwin has produced a memoir that effortlessly manages to be almost unbearably personal while simultaneously laying bare the cruel regime of longstanding president Robert Mugabe. In 1996 when his father suffers a heart attack, Godwin returns to Africa and sparks the central revelation of the book-the father is Jewish and has hidden it from Godwin and his siblings. As his father's health deteriorates, so does Zimbabwe. Mugabe, self-proclaimed president for life, institutes a series of ill-conceived land reforms that throw the white farmers off the land they've cultivated for generations and consequently throws the country's economy into free fall. There's sadness throughout-for the death of the father, for the suffering of everyone in Zimbabwe (black and white alike) and for the way that human beings invariably treat each other with casual disregard. Godwin's narrative flows seamlessly across the decades, creating a searing portrait of a family and a nation collectively coming to terms with death. This is a tour de force of personal journalism and not to be missed. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
When journalist Godwin, author of the memoir Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa (1996), learns that his father is gravely ill, he flies home to Zimbabwe. Against the odds, his father makes a full recovery, and Godwin seizes the opportunity to get to know both his father and his country better. He finds Zimbabwe in a sad state in the late 1990s. Disgruntled veterans of the Rhodesian war and mobs of young men are terrorizing and sometimes killing white farmers and seizing their land with the tacit approval of Robert Mugabe's government. Political opposition to the violence only brings more bloodshed as politicians from the opposition party are subject to similar attacks. On the personal front, Godwin's mother reveals a surprising secret: his father's real name is Jerzy Goldfarb, and he is actually a Jew born in Poland before World War II. Godwin is as enraptured by his father's history--and its effect on his own sense of identity--as he is by tumultuous Zimbabwean politics. Godwin seamlessly blends a journalistic quest to get at the heart of the problems plaguing his home country with a family memoir in this absorbing, powerful book. --Kristine Huntley Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IF Peter Godwin's new book about Zimbabwe is part family memoir and part bulletin from the barricades, then these two streams converge at a portent so ominous it takes your breath away: "A white in Africa is like a Jew everywhere - on sufferance, watching warily, waiting for the next great tidal swell of hostility." The book is hinged on this notion, which presents itself through the revelation of a family secret. As Godwin's aging parents find themselves dispossessed by the deranged kleptocracy of Robert Mugabe, the author discovers that his father, the upright Anglo-colonial George Godwin, is actually Kazimierz Goldfarb, a Polish Jew whose family was exterminated at Treblinka. When asked by his son why he reinvented himself, the father explains that he did it "for you," because anti-Semitism "will never really go away. ... It goes underground for a generation or two but always re-emerges." Like race hate in Africa. This is Godwin's message, and what is so troubling about it is that the author is no apartheid-era supremacist. Far from it: he is a worldly and respected journalist who believed fervently in the post-independence Zimbabwe - a place where race seemed finally to be "losing its headlock on our identities." Since the emergence of a viable political opposition in 2000, however, Mugabe's jackboot has stomped the life out of such possibility. As many as four million Zimbabweans - out of a total of only 13 million - have fled the county as it has descended into darkness. But Godwin's own parents, liberals who dedicated their lives to public service, will not countenance it, not least because they have fled "mayhem and genocide" once before. Now, in the ember-time of their own lives, they find themselves the victims of a brutal car hijacking and barricade themselves into their suburban bungalow, turning their swimming pool into a fish farm because they can no longer afford the chemicals, making occassional forays out armed with bricks of useless Zim dollars to shop like poor folk, and growing old miserably: a condition only exacerbated by their country's collapse. The emotional heart of this book is Godwin's description of his relationship with his taciturn father and doughty mother, a renowned doctor who worked in a public hospital well into her 70s. He draws them with love and wit, but does not shy away from complexity. His description of the damaged paternal relationship is particularly acute, as is his understanding of the effects of his father's concealment. He also captures, with terrible poignancy, that inevitable moment when the child becomes the parent. I have read this book twice, and wept twice, through the final chapters documenting George Godwin's decline and death. Weeping, himself, at his father's funeral, the author surveys the church and observes how "we've all been battered by our history, by eight years of war followed by 23 years in thrall to a violent and vengeful ruler." Contained in this sum is the book's power - and its problem. Why does Godwin's timeline begin only in the early 1970s? What about the prior decades of colonial depredation? The very thing that makes Godwin so powerful as a memoirist compromises his authority as a reporter: his proximity to the pain. And so the dispossessed farmers he meets are decent folk who provided work for the locals and made Zimbabwe boom. In many cases this is true. But they were also racial overlords, beneficiaries of the brutal dispossession of a sophisticated rural peasant civilization who went to war to keep their Rhodesia and whose very recalcitrance about land reform helped precipitate the reaction against them. This is not to suggest that Mugabe's land restitution policy is justified, or that dispossessed white farmers deserve their fate. But Godwin does the story of his country - not to mention the legacy of his murdered Polish family - a disservice by succumbing to a victimology that renders white Zimbabweans "the Jews of Africa" and by failing to see the part they played in their country's bloody history. Obviously deeply affected by his parents' decline and his father's revelation, Godwin accepts too easily his father's assertion that "being a white here is starting to feel like being a Jew in Poland ... the target of ethnic cleansing." An estimated 15 white farmers have been killed in the land invasions. This is 15 too many, but it is not a genocide. Far worse off are poor black people, who had nothing to begin with, less now, and no way out of the nightmare either. The very nature of Godwin's project means that his empathy with whites cannot be matched by an empathy with blacks, who become increasingly unknowable and threatening. Certainly, he has an easy familiarity with black professionals; certainly, too, he understands that blacks are the victims of the Mugabe regime. But he cannot get close to them. It begins with the thugs who invade white farms, and who claim to be "war vets." The way they say it sounds like "wovits," so this is what some white Zimbabweans disparagingly call them, and how Godwin chooses to identify them. The effect is to render them beastly, and given the inebriated thuggery Godwin observes, this is not inappropriate. Abuse, unquestionably, dehumanizes its perpetrators. But slowly, inexorably, Godwin's empathy with his parents' encroaching sense of doom means that the book crackles with Mau Mau anxiety: the overlord's fear that the servants are going to slit his throat. One by one, faithful servants betray their masters, including the Godwins' own trusty retainers. "This is what this vile president has done to us," Godwin writes, "reduced us all to desperadoes and thieves, made us small and bleak and old and tired." Well yes, of course: not least by wrecking the country's economy. But even the most faithful servant carries, somewhere, the pain of servitude, and Godwin has no access to this, and to what it must feel like to be, still, a servant two decades after liberation. And so when he visits his sister's grave - she was a casualty of the independence war - and finds it covered in the fresh feces of shack-dwellers who have comandeered the cemetery to grow their corn, he cannot but find the perpetrators to be callously inhuman. These women are not "wovits" at all, and one wants him to go over and talk to them, to hear their stories, rather than shout obscenities. But how could he do otherwise? How could you possibly empathize with someone who has just desecrated your sister's grave? Likewise, he is quite understandably disturbed by the advent of hawkers just on the other side of the bougainvillea hedge at the end of his parents' garden. One day, the hawkers' fire burns the hedge down, tearing away the Godwins' last screen of dignity and exposing their impoverished humiliation to the "huddled masses." A few evenings later, Godwin returns to his parents' home after hearing about how the practice of witchcraft turns peasants on their own grandmothers, whom they cut with razors and force to jump around like baboons. In a fitful night, his unconscious finishes the job of othering begun centuries ago by the narratives of colonialism: he dreams that the hawkers are actually baboons, "whooping and barking and waiting." JUST like the workers who "try to keep Africa at bay" by trimming the roadside, Zimbabwe's white farmers are redoubts of civilization and order. Godwin writes habitually about "Africa" rather than "Zimbabwe" or "Harare" and the effect is to blur specificity. "Africa" becomes, indeed, a place of the mind, of possibility or of fear, rather than the real set of coordinates the expatriated author once knew. In "Africa," "the illusion of control ... is almost impossible to maintain"; in "Africa," one lives "more vividly" because of the proximity of death; "people love harder." When Godwin and his parents realize that a mob of supposed hijackers is actually a neighborhood patrol saluting them, "I feel like weeping ... at the way Africa does this to you." One minute, you're scared to death, "the next you're choked with affection." Of course, Africa has done nothing at all. It is an inanimate landmass. The work is the author's, and he has done it beautifully, even if not always with a full enough awareness of his own people's agency. Slowly, inexorably, Godwin's empathy for his parents' sense of doom makes the book crackle with Mau Mau anxiety. Mark Gevisser's biography of Thabo Mbeki, "The Dream Deferred," will be published in South Africa this fall.
Guardian Review
"I am not used to being pitied. I am the one who pities others." So notes Godwin of his position as the son of a white landowner in Zimbabwe in 2002. No longer the idyll where he grew up, it's a disfigured country, where 40% are living with Aids and life expectancy is 34. Made notorious by Mugabe and by the persecution of whites by "war vets" who, drunk and stoned, rape and kill for fun as they live parasitically off the farms they attack, it has become a symbol, writes Godwin, for "every colonial prejudice about the chaos and hopelessness of Africa". Yet, it is home. It's where his parents spent their lives and where they're choosing to grow old. Thus it is where Godwin must return from his life in New York as his father grows infirm. This look at a country in turmoil is made heartbreaking by the story of Godwin's parents, and by his and their ongoing tussle with identity. It's a remarkable book, made more poignant by the underlying theme that, across generations and all over the world, living with persecution and conflict is always the same. Caption: article-fsdsf.1 I am not used to being pitied. I am the one who pities others." So notes Godwin of his position as the son of a white landowner in Zimbabwe in 2002. No longer the idyll where he grew up, it's a disfigured country, where 40% are living with Aids and life expectancy is 34. - Nicola Barr.
Kirkus Review
Zimbabwe's disintegration in the hands of ruthless dictator Robert Mugabe, recounted in careful, beautifully crafted prose by a journalist born and raised there. Godwin's powerful story combines vivid travelogue, heart-wrenching family saga and harrowing political intrigue. Mugabe's pillaging of Zimbabwe is a crime still grossly underreported by the international press and largely ignored by the world community. It is all the more harrowing when seen through the lens of its impact on the lives of Godwin's intrepid parents, an engineer and physician who came to Rhodesia as newlyweds. Hardly the stereotypical colonial exploiters, George and Helen Godwin helped build and nurture the country; they even applauded many of the changes that overthrew white rule and saw Zimbabwe's transformation in 1980 into a black-governed land. But in February 2000, barbaric forces were set loose by Mugabe, a mass-murderer still viewed by many Africans as a liberator. Gangs of gun-toting looters, encouraged by Mugabe and his henchmen, plunged the country into anarchy. White-owned farms were "repossessed" by thugs who cared little about growing crops. Businesses were ransacked, often by the corrupt police force. The fragile economy was destroyed while millions starved. Hundreds of white families and black members of the political opposition were murdered in their homes. Like many of his compatriots, the author left Zimbabwe, becoming a journalist and documentary filmmaker first in England and later in America. But he returned home regularly to visit his aging, increasingly isolated and anxious parents, whose friends were steadily being killed or forced to flee. Despite Africa's numbing violence and despair, Godwin (Mukiwa, 1996, etc.) never loses sight of the natural beauty and native spirit that drew his parents there in the first place. A haunting story. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
