When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa

by Peter Godwin

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.

Genres: Africa, Nonfiction, Memoir, History, Zimbabwe, Biography, Book Club

344 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

"Peter Godwin was born and raised in Africa. He studied law at Cambridge University, and international relations at Oxford. He is an award winning foreign correspondent, author, documentary-maker and screenwriter.

After practicing human rights law in Zimbabwe, he became a foreign and war correspondent, and has reported from over 60 countries, including wars in: Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Somalia, Congo, Ivory Coast, Sudan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Kashmir and the last years of apartheid South Africa. He served as East European correspondent and Diplomatic correspondent for the London Sunday Times, and chief correspondent for BBC television's flagship foreign affairs program, Assignment, making documentaries from such places as: Cuba, Panama, Indonesia, Pakistan, Spain, Northern Ireland, the Philippines, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, the Baltics, and the Balkans as it descended into war. His film, The Industry of Death, about the sex trade in Thailand, won the gold medal for investigative film at the New York Film Festival.

He also wrote and co-presented a three part series 'Africa Unmasked' for Britain's Channel Four. He has written for a wide array of magazines and newspapers including Vanity Fair, (for which he was a 2009 finalist for the Michael Kelly award) National Geographic, New York Times magazine and Men’s Journal.

He is the author of five non fiction books: 'Rhodesians Never Die' - The Impact of war and Political Change on White Rhodesia c.1970 - 1980 (with Ian Hancock), Wild at Heart: Man and Beast in Southern Africa (with photos by Chris Johns and foreword by Nelson Mandela), The Three of Us - a New Life in New York (with Joanna Coles) and Mukiwa, which received the George Orwell prize and the Esquire-Apple-Waterstones award. When a Crocodile Eats the Sun - a Memoir of Africa, won the Borders Original Voices Award, and was selected by American Libraries Association as a Notable Book winner for 2008.

He has taught writing at: the New School, Princeton and Columbia. And he is a 2010 Guggenheim Fellow."

http://petergodwin.com/about/

Reviews

[Orsodimondo · Rating 4 out of 5]

PUNTO DI VISTA


Le cascate Vittoria nel nordovest dello Zimbabwe, al confine con lo Zambia. Si trovano lungo il corso del fiume Zambesi, sono lunghe un chilometro e mezzo, e alte mediamente 128 metri.

Robert Mugabe, eroe della liberazione coloniale, col tempo è diventato uno dei dittatori più crudeli d’Africa, e certo non solo perché soffriva il successo planetario del suo vicino Nelson Mandela. Preferisce distruggere il suo paese piuttosto che lasciare il potere. Ha 93 anni e comanda il paese ininterrottamente da trentasette anni, a partire dal 1980.



Secondo l’Happiness Index lo Zimbabwe è la più infelice nazione del pianeta: povertà e malattie, un popolo in fuga per sopravvivere.
Ma tutto questo non riesce a far sentire il mondo responsabile, ad agire per fermare lo scempio. Tanto lo Zibabwe non esporta né petrolio né terrorismo, quindi perché intervenire, perché occuparse?
Quando si cita lo Zimbabwe lo si fa perché, insieme a Haiti (e all’Italia), la sua economia non cresce o per paragonare il primo ministro delle leggi ad personam al leader a vita inamovibile nonostante i suoi 87 anni. Così si esprime la rivista Marie Claire, e in effetti condivido, papibanana ricorda in qualche modo il macabro folklore di certi dittatori africani.


Harare, la capitale dello Zimbabwe.

In queste pagine il racconto della storia di famiglia di Peter Godwin s’intreccia con quello della discesa all’inferno dello Zimbabwe, il suo paese di nascita, guidato (spinto) sempre più giù da Mugabe, coccodrillo vorace. Il titolo si riferisce a un detto popolare, il coccodrillo che mangia il sole è il tramonto. Godwin invece identifica il coccodrillo in Mugabe, che sta mangiando il su paese.
Un bel pezzo di storia poco nota in un paese che ancora non ho visto e un punto di vista originale e interessante (quello di un bianco nato in Africa, terra che ama oltre misura): mi sembra un buon mix e un buon risultato.

[Caroline · Rating 4 out of 5]

.

For me, personally, I think this is the saddest book I have ever read.

Written by a superbly evocative writer - Africa commentator and renowned journalist,Peter Godwin - it details the trials of people living in Zimbabwe between 1996 and 2003. Parallel to this it is also a memoir of his family at this time, particularly his parents, who lived and worked in Zimbabwe for most of their adult lives. They dedicated their lives to this country. His mother was a doctor, who worked in a local hospital until she was 75, because there was no-one to replace her. Both his parents were utterly committed to Zimbabwe, and refused to leave, even when life there got incredibly tough and threatening.

With masterful finesse, Godwin peels back the veneer of civilization that so many of us take for granted, and exposes the brutal realities of life in a failed state. Most of all he discusses the lives of those who were once the leaders of that society - the white ex pats...now being persecuted and often savagely beaten up. The mind boggles as to what life must be like for those at the bottom of the pecking order. Those most vulnerable seem to be the Zimbabweans who worked on white farms, and often remained loyal to their employers. Except what price loyalty when life is brutalizing and threatening, and survival is tenuous? Godwin shows several people who turned upon their employers simply because life was untenable if they did not do so. In August 2002 alone, there were 80,000 displaced farm workers.

He shows us a government absolutely rife with corruption, nepotism and lies. Mugabe is letting his people starve, yet denies these realities in order to keep face. He refuses to let foreign food aid through to those parts of Zimbabwe where his political rivals have support. The average lifespan of a Zimbabwe man has dropped from 60 years at Independence, to 34 years today. Mugabe himself lives in extreme luxury. Yet the myth of the man as Zimbabwe's liberator lives on. When "New African" magazine surveys its readers to find the top African leaders 'of all time', they rate Mugabe third (behind Nelson Mandela and Kwame Nkrumah, First President of Ghana.)

He also discusses what it is like to be an ex-colonial, and the guilt, perplexities, and ruminations that this involves. "It is sometimes said that the worst thing to happen to Africa was the arrival of the white man. And the second worst thing was his departure. Colonialism lasted just long enough to destroy much of Africa's indigenous culture and traditions but not long enough to leave behind a durable replacement." (I would add also that we - yes I too am an ex-colonial white South African - we did virtually nothing to help educate people in the new culture and technology we brought with us, and that was a terrible curse that we placed upon them. In fact we did all we could to keep them uneducated in these matters.) Godwin's bitterness surfaces most of all when he discusses his feelings about Cape Town.

"I always wanted to love Cape Town....I tried to live there, but after six months I gagged on its isolation from the rest of the continent... It doesn't feel like the rest of Africa. It sometimes feels to me as though Cape Town might also serve as the white man's last redoubt, where our vanguards will hold back the onslaught...the black peril...while our women and children board lifeboats out to the tall ships in False Bay, ships that will take us back to England and Holland and France and Germany, or to ex-colonies where we have conveniently decimated the indigenous inhabitants, to North America and the Antipodes."

This book doesn't only discuss the tragedies of Zimbabwe.... Godwin also learns during these years that he is half Jewish, and his research about his father's family take him back to the horrendous practices at Treblinka, the Nazi extermination camp in Poland. These too are described in the book.

I think this is one of the most unsettling books I have ever read, and I still feel quite distressed thinking about it. It is however a book that I think everyone with a colonial history ought to read.

[Ian · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don’t know about other countries, but in the UK, political news tends to be a never-ending sequence of financial or sexual scandals, or others where politicians have been found to be less than truthful about their pasts. It’s tempting to fall prey to thinking “they’re all the same”. If you read this book, you will be reminded that not all politicians are the same, and that the worst of them are capable of utterly ruining their own countries.

This is the second of Peter Godwin’s four books about Zimbabwe, the country in which he was born and grew up. This book covers events in Zimbabwe between 1997 and 2004, and mixes Godwin’s personal family story with the collapse of the country’s economy and the horrendous brutality of the Mugabe regime towards its opponents. I listened to the audiobook version.

This is one of the saddest books I’ve read. Godwin describes trying to care for his elderly parents, who were in failing health, whilst living in New York. His younger sister was living in exile in London and would have been arrested had she attempted to return home. The author’s own status in Zimbabwe was somewhat hazy. Meanwhile Zimbabwe had become a country experiencing hyper-inflation, with virtually nothing in the way of food, electricity, running water, fuel, medicines or anything else that we would regard as necessary for modern life. The author also deals with a revelation from his father, who it turns out had hidden a secret for almost 50 years.

The wider aspects of the book cover Mugabe’s suppression of the opposition MDC movement. Part of Mugabe’s strategy was to seize the land owned by Zimbabwe’s white farmers and give it to his supporters. The author describes the brutal beatings and murders perpetrated by Mugabe’s henchmen as part of this programme. Although Godwin tends to focus on these cases, he also covers the equally vile repression of the MDC in general, and makes it clear that black Zimbabweans were Mugabe’s main victims. Corruption and crime were rampant, with a tiny minority living in ostentatious luxury, their lives being entirely parasitical. It’s reasonable to describe the Mugabe regime as a kleptocracy. Godwin also describes how the repression and extreme poverty of the country led to the moral debasement of the population. It’s depressing to read of how dictators get away with it.

Very downbeat, but powerful and well-written.

[Margitte · Rating 5 out of 5]

Peter Goodwin writes a detailed memoir of his life in Zimbabwe, his father's history as a Jew in disguise, and the turmoil of his Zimbabwean heritage as a white member of a minority group. The story is comprehensive in that it touches on all the aspects, although not in tedious details, defining Africa as it is today and how it came about. He includes a lot of details of various aspects of the madness happening in Zimbabwe which he derived from various articles he wrote for different media outlets. But then he includes his family's personal history to remain true to the memoir-format of the book. He also draws a comparison to the holocaust events of what is happening to whites in Zimbabwe.

I was constantly aware that the events were treated as journalistic exercises. However, it is a sad report on how quickly a country turned from a food basket to a dust bowl when things went wrong.

"When I am back in New York, Africa immediately seems fantastical - a wildly plumaged bird, as exotic as it is nlikely."

"Most of us struggle in life to maintain the illusion of control, but in Africa that illusion is almost impossible to maintain. I always have the sense there that there is no equilibrium, that everything perpetually teeters on the brink of some dramatic change, that society constantly stands poised in some spasm, some tsunami in which you can do nothing but hope to bob up to the surface and not be sucked out into a dark and hungry sea. The origin of my permanent sense of unease, my general foreboding, is probably the fact that I have lived through just such change, such as sudden and violent upending of value systems."

Different readers obviously focus on different aspect of the story. There are many reviews on Goodreads, providing other insights into the story. I don't want to add yet another comment on the actual content of the book, but would rather prefer to look at the underlying message in the book about human rights and how selectively it is applied to different situations in the world.

Africa is a place where calculated acts of cultural and racial genocide, combined with xenophobia, take on totally different colors than the officially defined.

Let's summarize the actual, official definition of human rights first and then look at the story from different perspectives:
HUMAN RIGHTS

In the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Preamble, the following statements are made: (Source: United Nations Department of Public Information, NY)

Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,

Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,

Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and ppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law,

Whereas it is essential to promote the development of friendly relations between nations,

Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,

Whereas Member States have pledged themselves to achieve, in cooperation with the United Nations, the promotion of universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms,

Whereas a common understanding of these rights and freedoms is of the greatest importance for the full realization of this pledge,...
READ MORE..

Who really has the teeth to address this issue? Not the UN, where Russia and China sanction any actions against their 'friends'. The two countries whose human rights records stink up the universe, have the veto right on it.

FROM A COMMUNIST PERSPECTIVE
Comparing the events in Zimbabe, actually everywhere in Africa, where landowners of different colors have been expropriated in different ways(mostly violent murders), to the events in all countries where Communism took over - the absolutely shocking horror and atrocities used in executing the decision, the evidence of similar patrons is spread all over the place. In the case of Zimbabwe, and South Africa as well, although more subtle, the modus operandi is more Maoistic than Stalanistic with all the cruelties included of Mao's believes and conduct.

But Wole Soyinka, the Nobel prize-winning Nigerian writer, (P.266) "compares the Zimbabwean land-reform program with Stalin's land collectivization in Soviet Russia, designed to get rid of the kulaks, the pre-revolutionary commercial farmers whom he saw as a political threat."

A much more accurate comparison, in my opinion, can be drawn with Máo's land reform in which landgrabbers were instructed to kill and take whatever they wanted. It is very well illustrated in the book ' Wild Swans - three daughters of China' by Jung Chang.

I can add, for shock value, the photos of the genocidal slaughtering, because that is what it is, of the white farmers and their families in both countries, but the reader can find thousands of it on the internet. There are hundreds of organizations trying to create awareness and attract attention to these senseless, barbaric murders. But the world is officially turning a blind eye. Unofficially little more is done. For instance, white refugees are not handled the same way as other refugee under international law. As soon as a white person apply for refugee status, an uproar is stage and the sympathy is shifted to the offended black regime who claim to be victims of prejudice as well as colonization and hidden racist agendas. They are quick to add that they cannot be held responsible for some citizens who want to take revenge. And so some people back down. But countries such as China are not interested in what happens inside the walls of the house being plundered for their hungry economy. They simply subsidize Zimbabwe's government expenses and keep Mugabe in power for their own ends. And this way many eyes from countries that need Africa's wealth turn many blind eyes. After all, who wants to be accused of being fascist thugs?

FROM A WORLD PERSPECTIVE
With just about the entire world dependent on Africa's wealth of resources, the outcome of Africa's history is determined by corporations and political big wigs with their hands in the cookie jars. In order of importance, Human Rights are so irrelevant, it is considered to be like a small asthmatic fish dying on dry land, no matter how noble the intentions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights have been. There are much bigger fish to catch in this vast ocean of African wealth which demands much more attention and promises much more profits.

FROM AN AFRICAN PERSPECTIVE
What started out as a noble idea of liberating Africa from thousands of years of oppression, ended up in a cesspool of a carefully selected cleptrocratic, nepotistic group of despots raping the continent's wealth and keeping themselves in power with barbaric clamp-downs on the inhabitants. For every white person being murdered, another five Africans are killed by their own governments for opposing these mafiosos in power.

I found the Goodwin book a true version of events - accurate, insightful, and well executed. Being a memoir, it discusses a family's situation in which their basic human rights have been severely compromised. The hardships they had to face, emotionally as well as physically, are heart-wrenching.

Godwin also touches on colonialism as a contributing factor to the current violence on whites:
P. 153: "It is sometimes said that the worst thing to happen to Africa was the arrival of the white man. And the second worst was his departure. Colonialism lasted just long enough to destroy much of Africa's indigenous cultures and traditions, but not long enough to leave behind a durable replacement."

P. 155:"When the first Europeans arrive in Africa, they bring their territorial imperative with them. And once the dust settles from the "Scramble for Africa", the continent finds itself sliced up into bizarre and arbitrary shapes. Kilimanjaro, for instance, is given by Queen Victoria as a birthday present to her cousin, the Kaiser, because she has two snow-capped African peaks, and he has none. Many of these new states lump together ancient antagonists, cut across cultural and economic hinterlands. Europeans take Africa by the scruff of its neck and shake the bejesus into it, knocking it clear of its cultural fulcrum by doing good things and bad on so many frons: religion, trade, infrastructure, health. Societies that are built on the mathematical fundamentals of women giving birth to twelve in order to bring two or three to maturity suddenly find themselves with five, seven, nine children and all the attendant cultural chaos. Europeans entice them to want stuff - soap, clothes, bicycles, radios, stoves; turn then into impoverished consumers; co-opt their chiefs, tax them and compel them to leave home, to labour for wages."

Human rights and equality for all was one of the major ideals of Nelson Mandela. But his love for people became the main reason why he was shunted onto a sideline by the members of his party who craved a ride on the gravy train and pushed everything and anyone out of the way that apposed their greed. Modern Africa was never a haven for human rights, although it was suppose to be. If it was, there would not have been so many millions of Africans fleeing their own countries to particularly Europe and America as well as South Africa! So much so, that it is currently creating huge challenges for the host countries. The black-on-black violence is much worse in scope and numbers as well compared to the white genocide.

So if you are interested in basic Human Rights and what it really should mean, you can read this book. If you want to read more about the African story, this is one true version of the events. And after you have read it, you will have to decided where you stand on the Human Rights issue, how selectively you are in your own application of it.  Should it only apply to groups you have sanctioned? But, just as a human-interest story, This book is a beautiful book written in eloquent prose. I am not so impressed with the choice of title though. It might allow an exotic touch to the story, it is an eye-catcher, but for me, does not apply really to the situation. The reason being that these atrocities are happening on a daily basis and have been doing so for centuries. It is not a once-off occurrence.

Five stars for the guts it took to write this detailed version of an African love story gone wrong. In my opinion, it is the basic human right of everyone to tell his/her story. It is the only way a complete version of history can be recorded. It is another way of demonstrating greed in all its different disguises. This book made a valuable contribution. The most important message, to me personally, in this book, lies in the proof it provides that throughout human history, cruelty has not been limited to one creed or color. There simply are no saints in the saga of human existence.

I wanted to read this book for months now. It was lying here waiting. I was expecting it to be a good counter-balance for "African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe by Doris Lessing. It was. What Lessing failed to acknowledge (was it deliberate omission perhaps of the horrendous atrocities?) in her book as a result of the revolt, fueled by communism (which she promoted in Zimbabwe in her earlier involvement in the country's politics), Godwin has added in clinical detail. It was needed.

[Spudsie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book will haunt you. It haunts me.

I was in a hotel room in Chicago trying to get ready for an early morning conference session. I was watching “Morning Joe” on MSNBC when Peter Godwin came on. I was not familiar with him, but listening to him talk about Zimbabwe intrigued me. Despite purloining 8 million vendor pens at the vendor hall the previous day, I could not quickly locate a pen and paper to write down the title of his book. Thanks goodness for technology! I grabbed my Blackberry and sent myself an e-mail with the book title and author’s name. Once home I ordered the book and sat it on my “to read” pile for about a month.

I started reading “Crocodile” mid week. I read a few pages and had to put it down. I just didn’t have the time to keep reading. Friday afternoon I picked it up again-- and promptly cancelled my plans for the evening. I could not bear to stop reading. Peter’s story (as well as his father’s story) has so many twists and turns I almost forgot I was reading non-fiction. I felt as though he pulled me into his life.

His story made me laugh at times, say “aha!” at times, but mainly it made me weep.
Some books make me tear-up—tears form in the corners of my eyes and usually fall down my face at some point, but it’s just a tear or two.

Some books make me cry—mutiple tears falling simultaneously while my nose runs to the point I have to either put the book down and get a tissue, or (and please don’t tell anyone I do this!!) keep reading the book and use my sleeve.

Very few books make we weep—cry to the point I have no choice but to set the book aside, find a box of tissues, and weep nearly uncontrollably.

This book made we weep. Multiple times. I wept for the people of Zimbabwe and their struggles. I wept for the inhumanity of the leaders and “wovits.” I wept for the personal losses suffered by the Godwins. Sometimes I wept because I was simply overwhelmed by all of it.

Though Godwin writes this book in a fairly detached manner, it evoked a very strong emotional reaction in me. I still can’t wrap my brain around “Crocodiles” because it is living in my heart.

[Cheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Some of Prince Biyela's people, the Zulus, and the Vendas too, believe that a solar eclipse occurs when a crocodile eats the sun. This celestial crocodile, they say, briefly consumes our life-giving star as a warning that he is much displeased with the behavior of man below. It is the very worst of omens."

The title of this memoir foreshadows the uproot of life for the Godwin family, during Zimbabwe's upheaval. Peter Godwin has written for many major publications like New York Times Magazine and National Geographic. I don't know personally about his reporting, but I enjoyed his writing in this memoir. There are many books that emerged from the former Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, that I've personally had difficulty reading because of the tone. Godwin has a great blend of subjectivity and objectivity, even at those moments when it gets deeply personal for him.

Land ownership was once something sacred in Zimbabwe. Farmers communally prepared the land and when the land became exhausted, they moved to the next patch. Buying land was foreign and akin to buying "the wind or the water or the trees." When the first white pioneer struck a deal with an African elder to get gold, the confusion began because the elder did not think he was giving up rights to the land. Even though whites made up only 1 percent of the population, they soon owned more than half of Zimbabwe's agricultural land. This problem formed the foundation for Zimbabwe's Civil War.

Godwin's parents, white, African, immigrants, were caught in the middle of the storm that followed. Zimbabwe went from white rule to black rule under Prime Minister, Mugabe. Later, Mugabe's political greed and narcissism would take him on a spin of unfair elections and unfair treatment to farmers. Mugabe ignited the nationalists and "war vets" or "wovits" who wanted to take their country back by any means necessary. The destruction that followed is heartrending, and is unfortunately one of many tales of Africa's struggle after colonialism. Godwin's story of his father is one that reinforces empathy through each section, as the deepening of this relationship becomes a life lesson for both reader and writer.

There is also something deeply universal that should resonate with any immigrant or exile, any survivor of war or victim of displacement; anyone who has experienced the loss of homeland and family, one who knows what it is to dream in native language and not hear it daily; anyone who has resolved that he or she will never fully feel at home anywhere, but may make home everywhere. When an African has lived through the loss of a country's values, the lens out of which to view sometimes becomes blurred:

"Most of us struggle in life to maintain the illusion of control, but in Africa that illusion is almost impossible to maintain. I always have the sense there that there is no equilibrium, that everything perpetually teeters on the brink of some dramatic change, that society constantly stands poised for some spasm, some tsunami in which you can do nothing but hope to bob up to the surface and not be sucked out into a dark and hungry sea. The origin of my permanent sense of unease, my general foreboding, is probably the fact that I have lived through just such change, such a sudden and violent upending of value systems."

Some fiction on Zimbabwe that I have also enjoyed are:
Maraire's Zenzele: A Letter for My Daughter (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) and
Vera's Without a Name and Under the Tongue (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...)

[Tania · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favourite read of 2024 was Exit Wounds: A Story of Love, Loss and Occasional Wars by Peter Godwin, and since I’m having a bit of a meh reading year so far, I thought I’d try another one of his books. I’m really glad I did. When a Crocodile Eats the Sun is just as beautifully written—thoughtful, intelligent, moving—but this one felt much more personal to me.

As a South African, the Zimbabwe he describes felt uncomfortably familiar. So much of what he writes could easily happen here too. And like him, I absolutely love this country and its warm, resourceful, and friendly people. This is all I’ve ever known—my family has been here for generations—so I truly feel African to my core. I just hope our leaders don’t repeat the same mistakes Mugabe made, and that somehow, we can all pull together to fix what’s broken and protect what’s still good.

The book isn’t just about politics or a country falling apart, though. It’s also about family—about what it feels like to be far away while your ageing parents are stuck in a dangerous, crumbling place. That guilt, that constant worry—he captures it so well.

What really stuck with me, though, was his deep love for Africa. He just gets it:
“I feel like weeping. Weeping at the way Africa does this to you. Just as you’re about to dismiss it and walk away, it delivers something so unexpected, so tender. One minute you’re scared shitless, the next you’re choked with affection.”

This book made me feel seen, and it stirred up so many emotions. If you’re from this part of the world, or even if you’re not, it’s well worth the read.

[Pamela · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author, Peter Godwin, grew up as a white Zimbabwean, just like Alexandra Fuller, author of Don't Lets Go to the Dogs tonight. He brilliantly shares his experience living under Robert Mugabe, who has been the country's dicator since the 1970's.

My problem, however, is how he portrays his parents, and their near-saintliness. They are/were clearly warm people with an impressive degree of moral courage.

But he never addresses the fact that Zimbabwe -- formerly Rhodesia, was a European colony before Mugabe, and suffered accordingly under white rule. He never seems to question why there was so much opposition to the white settlers, who had the best farmland, and (his own parents included), black servants.

While I thouroughly enjoyed Godwin's gorgeous writing, I was frequently frustrated with his reluctance to address the oppression of the blacks, which continues to haunt the country.

Godwin is the better writer, but I preferred Fuller's book. Her Zimbabwe is just as frightening, and beautiful. But she never withdraws judgement throughout her book. Her approach lends greater credibility.

Please note: I'm not arguing that Mugabe's monstrous behavior towards any of his subjects is justifiable. But Zimbabwean independence is a much more complex issue than Godwin acknowleges.

[Elie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Godwin tries too hard to tacitly excuse himself and other whites who stayed on in Zimbabwe after majority rule. He glosses over fighting on the wrong side of Zimbabwe's war for independence and never properly questions his privileged upbringing and the British status quo. Most of the examples he employs to gain our sympathy involve white farmers loosing their land and family photographs; the stories that include native Africans often end with them stealing something or running away. For someone who attempts to represent Africa to a western audience, this seems rather bad form.

Still, Godwin does a good job of chronicling Zimbabwe's demise under the increasingly autocratic rule of Robert Mugabe and the manifold challenges that everyday Zimbabweans face to survive.

Godwin even goes into detail about the repression and violence that Mugabe's regime uses to stay in power, but he's subtle -- too subtle -- about his criticism of it. Even his stories about the opposition usually include the appearances of white Zimbaweans. 'When a Crocodile East the Sun' is worth reading for the inside view it offers us of a nation's collapse, but not for the author's politics.

[GoldGato · Rating 4 out of 5]

Harrowing. That’s a quick one-word description of this book, which details the downward spiral of Zimbabwe along with Peter Godwin's parents’ change of fortune as citizens of that country. Written with a grace and a truthfulness one didn’t always see from the news outlet reports, this memoir makes for some very captivating reading.

The book unfolds in three ways, really. First is the focus upon the parents of Peter Godwin, emigrants from Europe who found new hope in Africa. His mother was a medical practitioner who always looked for better ways to enhance the lives of her patients while his father became completely devoted to his new country. But the country’s downward spiral along with aging and medical issues mean they ended up without any safety in a land where they became the enemy. Every time the author writes of having to make the long journey to visit them, I cringed as I know what it’s like to care for a parent from afar, where the generosity of neighbors is more important than people think, and isolation can take hold.

The second focus of the book is Zimbabwe itself. When the country won independence and became Zimbabwe, there was great hope for its future. But as we have all learned when it comes to power, corruption is never far behind. Mugabe and his cronies destroyed much of the land, not only for their own delight and advantages but to silence his enemies. By implementing violent takeovers of farms, Zimbabwe lost its main source of revenue. Its handling of AIDS was atrocious, accelerating an incredibly rapid decline of lifespan and turning the country into a third world nation. This makes for hard reading as people are murdered and tortured and animals themselves become victims. Hard to read and fathom, especially since most people were hoping the new nation would become the beacon of Africa.

The third focus of the book is the memoir portion, where the author has to live his own life and continue working even though his parents and remaining sibling live thousands of miles away on another continent. He also had a sister who died during the sectarian violence, a loss that permeates the pages. He never forgot her, and his devotion shows when her original burial plot gets violated and he has to find another plot for her. Fear is always there, for instance, every time he arrives at the airport or uses a car to complete errands for his parents. Will he make it home alive? Would most children actually do this or just give up on the stubborn wishes of their parents? There is also a twist along the way, as Godwin learns the truth about his father’s history and how his father became a refugee of WWII.

I was completely absorbed in this book even though the subject matter made me wince. Godwin writes so well, and his thoughts are so involving that I couldn’t stop turning the pages even though I feared what might happen next. We have seen what happens when despots try to hold on to power which really isn’t theirs, which they’re able to do by turning neighbor against neighbor. Since the publication of this book, Mugabe has since died but his destruction of his own land still reverberates today.

Book Season = Summer (emperor’s new clothes)

[Lisa (NY) · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars. Godwin does an excellent job of combining the personal and political in this gripping memoir. He writes about caring for his aging parents who live in Zimbabwe, mostly long distance, as their country collapses around them. On his visits, even a trip to the grocery store becomes treacherous. He writes about learning that his father is Polish and Jewish, not English as he was always told - and discovers that most of his father's family died in the Holocaust. He also vividly describes the destruction wrought by Mugabe's corrupt regime. And Godwin does all this so skillfully and naturally.

[Gillian Stokes]

I have just finished reading "When a Crocodile Eats the Sun" and am assuaging the tears with a good glass of Johnny Black and a CD of my favourite ballet classics ....guaranteed to calm me down. There are so many reasons why I cried. I cried for times past and in fear of times to come. I cried because of the similarities. I come from a pan African family, my brothers born in Zim, me in Malawi and my sister in Zambia ( Daddy was a soldier and a traveling man) I cried when you described your father's cremation. My brother Rod who was in the BSAP during the last years of the civil war died in Gaborone in 2000. He was cremated at the Hindu crematorium because it was the only operational one in Gabs then. He died ostensibly from complications from a botched appendicectomy but when I spoke to his surgeon a week after his death his words to me were "every time we took your brother to theatre to clean him , we removed a little more shrapnel, you might well say the war killed him but only 20 years later . I cried too for my Africa and the fact that as a 3rd / 4th generation "African" I am often both subtly and less subtly told in a myriad of ways daily that this continent is not my home and that I must go home ... to a land that is so foreign to me that the very thought scares me beyond belief.

[Chrissie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was debating on whether to read this book, When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa, or the author's book on his childhood growing up in Rhodesia Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africafirst. This one focuses upon his father's life in Zimbabwe, and how he ended up there. I believe I made the wrong choice.

It took me a very long time to care for the family. The first third focuses upon political turmoil and history of Rhodesia and how it became Zimbabwe. Every chapter is dated. The first being July 1996 and the last February 2004. The author grew up in Rhodesia. It is evident that he feels himself to be both "African" as well as an outsider. When he writes the book he is living in NYC and is a well paid and recognized journalist writing for magazines such as National Geographic. The book follows the author's visits to his homeland and specifically his elderly parents. His mother is a doctor and his father a farmer. It follows the events that were occurring in Zimbabwe on the given dates. The country's and the family's downward spiral are one and the same. It is devastating to watch what Robert Mugabe has done to this country. By the end I was in tears. When I read a book about the political events of a country I want to know how these events play out in people's lives. This is exactly what you are given in this book.I want to feel empathy for the people. By the end I certainly did, but it took a good 100 pages for this to begin.

There is little or no humor in the book. I found it extremely depressing. OK, this is the truth of what Mugabe has done to this land, but more family events that were amusing could have been thrown in. In addition, I felt that the author added gruesome details scarcely relevant to the story. He need not have shown us, step by horrible step, how Jews met their death at Treblinka.

Neither did I find the writing particularly outstanding, just ordinary.

Ironically, what has united the blacks and whites in Zimbabwe is a shared hatred of Mugabe.....

Along with this book one could read Alexandra Fuller's Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness and Don't Let's Go To The Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood. These two are less politically explicit and cover events further back in time. If you are interested more in Mugabe's rule, choose "When a Crocodile Eats the Sun" instead. The other two have a completely different tone. I could not help but smile as I read them. Both authors have shown us their family's secrets and how their lives as whites in Africa were shaped by political events.

[DoctorM · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very powerful and haunting and heartbreaking memoir, a story both about the collapse of Zimbabwe into dictatorship and chaos since the late 1990s and about identity and belonging.

Godwin writes as a white African, as a boy born in the old Rhodesia and raised during the Rhodesian Bush War--- what's now the Chimurenga War, the War of Liberation, in the new Zimbabwe. Godwin served briefly in the Rhodesian security forces before going off to Cambridge and returning to southern Africa first as a barrister and then as a journalist. He writes about how the optimism of the first decade of post-independence soured in the 1990s as the Mugabe regime degenerated into a violent kleptocracy and HIV ravaged the population, reducing African life expectancy in Zimbabwe from 57 in 1980 to 34 by the beginning of the 21st century.

Godwin discovers there as his much-admired father slips into old age and a final illness that George Godwin, safari-suited British engineer, was by birth a Polish Jew named Kasimir Goldfarb, a veteran of the wartime Free Polish forces, a man whose family died at Treblinka. The book counterpoints Godwin's discovery of his father's childhood with the destruction of white life in Zimbabwe, with the Mugabe dictatorship's chaotic and self-destructive program of inciting mobs to seize and partition white-owned farms. To be white in Zimbabwe in 2003, Godwin sees, is like being Jewish in Poland after the German occupation--- a life lived on suffrance.

Godwin writes about the end of a world--- not just white Rhodesia, but of the hopes raised at independence. "When a Crocodile Eats the Sun" ends with Godwin overseeing his late father's cremation, realising that he's an African no longer welcome in Africa.

This is an account I'll keep in my own memory for a long time--- tragic, spare, thoughtful, unutterably sad. Read it. Read it.

[Kristen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Godwin's "When a Crocodile Eats the Sun" is not only compelling and well-written, but more timely than ever. A memoir of his adult life after having left Zimbabwe, the place of his birth (he is a journalist for National Geographic and a slew of other top-notch publications), Godwin painfully portrays the experience of white Africans in Zimbabwe, and his own family's history in their journey to Africa. It gives an insider's view of Mugabe's reign of terror, and the utter chaos that has enveloped the country.

Perhaps the most compelling part of the story is that of his parents, elderly in the late 90s and early 2000s. Anyone who has cared for an aging loved one, and who feels the guilt of the child or grandchild who is no longer at home to care for them, is struck by this emotional theme in the story. Add to this feeling the fact that his aging parents are in a conflict torn country with few resources, wild inflation, and rampant crime and intimidation, and you get a sense of the emotional and moral dilemma Godwin goes through. His parents are rooted in their home country and won't leave, but their children cannot viably stay; indeed, one of Godwin's siblings is a casualty of random violence during the Civil War. Godwin and his remaining sister act as international voices on the crisis, she on the radio, he in print.

This is a heartbreaking and riveting book, which can be paired daily with the newspaper to show how so little has changed in Zimbabwe (the book ends in 2004), and how Mugabe's reign of terror last until this day.

[Cav · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am interested in accounts of life in Africa, so I put this one on my list when I found it.
Peter Godwin is an author, journalist, screenwriter, documentary filmmaker, and former human rights lawyer. He grew up in Rhodesia, according to his Wikipedia page.

Peter Godwin:


When a Crocodile Eats the Sun is the memoir of Godwin's family and their lives in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe. The story of the fall of Rhodesia to socialism/communism under the brutal dictator Robert Mugabe is also told here, against the backdrop of continental decolonization, and the perpetual SNAFU that is everyday African life.
Godwin also writes about the civil war, AKA - the "Bush War" of ~1965-1979, and the resulting seizure of land and murder of many of its white farmers.

The reading can be pretty tough at times here, as the book details many of the horrors of life in a post-Bush War Rhodesia; including the previously-mentioned stories of white farmers who were slaughtered in racially-motivated hate-crimes by the majority black population.
Rhodesian land expropriation was driven in part to appease the increasingly violent black veterans (and other violent militants) of the Bush War: Godwin refers to them here as "wovits", a play on their jumbled pronunciation of the term "war vets".
A catastrophically short-sighted move of incredible stupidity - the land reclamation project sealed the economic fate of what was now-called Zimbabwe. The productive white-owned farms that provided the country's food supply were seized by the wovits, and then later handed out to Mugabe insiders and cronies. Most were ultimately fated to become unproductive, and would later sit abandoned; their walls and roofs being stripped of metal for scrap.
What was once considered the "breadbasket of Africa" quickly became "the dustbin of Africa"...

The Mugabe regime presided over the worst economy in the world; that saw widespread misery and destruction. Hyperinflation and corruption completely destroyed the country's once-thriving economy.
In 2008, Zimbabwe had the honour of having the World's worst inflation rate: "...At its peak - inflation was estimated at 79.6 billion percent month-on-month, 89.7 sextillion percent year-on-year in mid-November 2008..."
The life-expectancy of Zimbabweans also drastically decreased during this time: From 57 years in 1980, to only 34 years in 2006.

The book also describes the author's discovery of his father's Jewish origins, including some background family history, and details of their lives in WW2 Europe. Godwin's father was not a British national, but rather an escaped Polish Jew, who lost many members of his family in the Treblinka Concentration Camp, including his sister, and her daughter (his niece.) In an extremely touching quote, detailing an exchange between father and son, Godwin writes:

" When he speaks again, my father’s voice has changed; it is softer, less angry. “What did you manage to find out about my mother and my sister?” he says. “How was it for them? At the end?” Of course, I have been expecting this conversation, rehearsing different ways of telling him what I’ve found out. I can’t possibly tell him the real details of how people died at Treblinka.
“From all the research I’ve done, the books I’ve read, it would have been quick, Dad. They wouldn’t have suffered much.”
He closes his eyes and nods. “Well, that’s something, at least,” he says.
“I’m glad of that.” And he reaches across and pats my arm. “Thanks, Pete, for doing that.”
I can see, though, that he is just pretending to believe me. He knows that they probably did suffer terribly. But he wants me to believe that I have successfully reassured him. I am lying, and so is he. We are lying to each other..."

.
Godwin writes with an easy and engaging style, which makes the writing here interesting, as horrible as some of the stories he tells are... He also narrates the audiobook, which is always a nice touch.

Ultimately, the story told here is incredibly tragic and sad... Both the author's personal family saga, as well as the broader story of the outright destruction of the country that had the highest standard of living on the African continent.
Tragically, most news organizations, politicians, and others in the media and academic class didn't muster much sympathy for the plight of the massacred Boer farmers, because it goes against their Marxist narrative that simplistically paints whites as "oppressors", and blacks as "victims"... Which of course ignores the fact that many who suffered under the collapse of Ian Smith's government were themselves black Rhodesians, who at the time enjoyed the highest standards of living and best economic conditions in all of Sub-Saharan Africa...
Indeed you can read reviews here from the same types; people who would be horrified by accounts of an African immigrant being called the "N" word in Western societies, but paradoxically muster nothing more than an eye roll at accounts of white people being tortured, raped, and killed in Africa. I find these types of people to be reprehensible, to be quite honest...

There was an incredibly moving piece of writing, right near the end that choked me up a bit, as the son of an elderly father myself. The author was going through his father's bedroom:

"...I toil there for most of the day, and as it starts to get dark I have worked through all the files and come to one last locked drawer. Mum bustles around and finally finds the key. In this last cabinet there are thick albums, half a dozen of them, each dated, covering periods from the early eighties onward. They contain clippings of all the pieces I have ever written, carefully glued down and meticulously cross-referenced. Every review of my books and TV documentaries. Every ad for every book reading. Videos of all my programs. It is a master record of my entire career. My father has been minutely following it, the career he officially hoped I would abandon in favor of “a real job.” And the pages show signs of some serious wear and tear. Of having been well thumbed.
“He would come in here some nights and get them all out and just sit here on his own reading through it all,” says my mother, who has entered with a mug of chicory for me. “And he would rewatch your old documentaries too. It was almost as though he was seeing the world through your eyes.”
I struggle to hold back tears.
“He was very proud of you, really,” says my mother, putting her hand on my shoulder and squeezing it. “For some reason he found it so difficult to tell you...”

When a Crocodile Eats the Sun is an important historical account, and thoughtful memoir of a family. I would recommend it to those interested.
5 stars.

[Sonja Arlow · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s impossible to review this book without also adding context about South Africa.

We have very recently been hit with a new Expropriation Without Compensation Act granting Government the power to take private property at their own discretion. Any property.

In the same breath our utter cretin of a president publicly praises Zimbabwe’s “land reform” policies and Julius Malema is chanting Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer to stadium wide cheers.

All the while farmers are being killed (and brutally tortured) at disproportionate rates.

And now the ANC government is talking about citizen gun law reform.

Add all of this adds up and it paints a picture that looks a lot like a future Zimbabwe.

I love this author and the way he can weave facts and emotions into his stories. This book not only chronicles the impact of Mugabe’s vile reign on both black and white Zimbabweans but is a loving ode to his dying father. My heart went out to all the old people who were left completely destitute by the radical face of the “new” Zimbabwe trying to scrape by.

This was not an easy book to read but I could not put it down.

“I feel like weeping. Weeping at the way Africa does this to you. Just as you’re about to dismiss it and walk away, it delivers something so unexpected, so tender. One minute you’re scared shitless, the next you are chocked with affection”

[Valerie · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the early nineties I spent some time in Zimbabwe, and I have always wanted to go back. Although there were hints of instability, mostly having to do with currency exchange, the people were well fed, well educated, and the country was beautiful. I have been looking for an explanation, a reason for the death of that Zimbabwe. The dire news of cholera and economic collapse, the continued spread of political evil...I picked this book up because it covers the late nineties and early part of this millennium.

Peter Godwin tells a complex story about his family, set against the backdrop of Zimbabwe's ruin, and I truly began to understand how this horrible thing could have happened.

Even though I think this is a well written, poignant and fascinating book, a small part of me wanted to read or find a book that wasn't written by a "when-we" (those are the white farmers...called that because they start conversations, "When we had..." I don't know if there is more to the story, or another perspective, but there might be.

This book made me mourn again the fact that the Zimbabwe where I had some of the best experiences of my life, will never really exist again.

[Margie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extremely well-written story about family, identity, and what we owe each other, set against the backdrop of Zimbabwe and Mugabe's dictatorship.

[Doreen Petersen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was totally blown away and so moved by the book. It is so well worth reading!

[Polly March · Rating 4 out of 5]

“In my part of Africa, death is never far away. With most Zimbabweans dying in their early thirties now, mortality has a seat at every table. The urgent, tugging winds themselves seem to whisper the message, memento mori, you too shall die. In Africa, you do not view death from the auditorium of life, as a spectator, but from the edge of the stage, waiting only for your cue. You feel perishable, temporary, transient. You feel mortal.

Maybe that is why you seem to live more vividly in Africa. The drama of life there is amplified by its constant proximity to death. That’s what infuses it with tension. It is the essence of its tragedy too. People love harder there. Love is the way that life forgets that it is terminal. Love is life’s alibi in the face of death.”

Having read Peter Godwins first book, Mikuwa, detailing the formative years of his early life growing up in, what was then, white ruled Southern Rhodesia, up until the civil war that saw Zimbabwe’s independence and the ascent to power of its fateful dictator, Robert Mugabe, I was excited to pick up this second “instalment” if you will - detailing his father’s history and a closer look at his family’s life in a post-independent Africa.

We pick up where Godwin left off, as a journalist and reporter who has emigrated from Zimbabwe and has since moved from London to New York, where he returns home to the news that his father is dying. Set between the years of 1996 and 2003, against the backdrop of a continent in the throes of violent chaos and famine, and with the land reform act in full swing, Godwin explores his birthplace in perhaps the height of its descent. With his parents' steadfast refusal to leave a country they have built their entire lives around, he is presented with a fifty-five year hidden secret about his father’s past that he is forced to confront.

Without wanting to reveal any spoilers, the blurb of this book claims that his family secret: “changes everything about his place in the world.” I don’t find this to be particularly true. The family secret isn’t revealed until about 25% of the way through the book, and not really picked up again until the last quarter. Whilst this didn’t take away from my enjoyment of the story, it isn’t how I would sell this to a perspective reader as it may leave them feeling disappointed.

What is explored about his father is incredibly moving and fascinating nonetheless, as we are presented with a man who was from an incredibly unique generation - one who fought in a World War and was also part of this slither of history where white, colonial rule was at its peak. Here is a father who can’t escape a fate of war - one whose life story, experiences and perspectives could fill volumes of books, but who, like many of his era, lived silently with the grief and horror he would have been witness to. Although I would have liked more of his story to be told and shared, you come to understand that this is a man who, faced with his own imminent death, struggles to unearth and make sense of a personal history that has long remained buried and unspoken.

Godwin writes: ’It’s as though, confronted with the new wages of corruption, Dad realizes just how irreversible it is now, that the country he thought he knew, in which he has lived for over fifty years, has suddenly morphed into this quite separate place, one which he no longer recognizes, one which no longer has a place for him.’ There is a real sense of serendipity in the Godwin family history that I found quite profound, and only wish I could gather more from his family's private history.

However, whilst in my opinion this element of the novel may have been oversold, what Godwin deftly explores and presents to the reader is a fascinating short history of Zimbabwe, depicting its current turmoil and how it came to be this poverty stricken, corrupt country that we have known it to be in modern times. Honing in on his journalistic skills, I found the stories from the white farmers who were terrorised and often murdered by the Africans that were promised land, really interesting (and of course, heartbreaking). Seeing it through his parents' stoicism is something I haven’t often found in this canon of literature, and I really enjoyed this mix of both historical and personal references, with the political exploration written in a way that you could understand and empathise with.

I always find white-African narratives fascinating because of this sense of lost identity - the children of white colonialists being born into a land and history they played no part in, but have ultimately inherited after the spoils of war. Sometimes, I wondered if Godwin lacked some of the perspective we have come to have today, but I think this only added to the thought-provoking complexity of both Zimbabwe and Africa as a whole. I found this a really captivating read and would definitely recommend Godwin’s literature for those who are interested about this period of history.

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the follow up volume to Peter Godwin's earlier 'Mukiwa: a White boy in Africa' (he also written some other very fine books on Africa) and is about, aside from the obvious things which can be learnt from the publishers synopsis, about family, death, the past, the future, wife, children, etc. all the usual suspects you would expect in a memoir but more than anything it is about identity past, present and future. Mr. Godwin explores where he comes from, in particular where his father comes from, but also where he comes from and belongs in the past, present and future and what that means for him, his sister, and his wife and children.

It is examination done with incredibly subtlety, almost under the radar and for me, as someone who carries a passport and finds identity from a country I lived in between the ages of 11-18 and which I haven't been back to in forty years, men like Godwin who were born in a country that has ceased to exist (Rhodesia) and spent most of adolescence at boarding schools in England and later at University there before working abroad and eventually settling in America where most of his children were born are for me, in part mirrors, in which questions of identity can be examined. Godwin sees this, no matter how many years he lives abroad, he still feels 'African' but also he sees that if he is not to become nothing but an emigre living in memories of a lost world, he has to forge a new identity in the land his children have been born in and call home. It is within this context that he explores his parents background.

In case you had any doubts I am being deliberately obfuscatory because I don't believe in spoiler alerts but honestly I don't want to ruin what comes from reading this book without foreknowledge.

This is a lovely memoir, and a moving emotional one as well. I really can't recommend it highly enough.

[Kelly · Rating 3 out of 5]

After reading this book, I am actually unsure of where I stand on the issue of land redistribution. I recognize the value white farmers added to Zimbabwe's economy, but on the other hand I am suspicious of, you know, colonialism. As I was reading, I keep thinking, where's this guy's punchline? Has this guy really written a book completely bashing land redistribution even in the face of the fact that 70% of arable land in Zimbabwe was owned by whites who made up less than 1% of the population?

[Peter Godwin · Rating 5 out of 5]

author!

[Gerry · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book continues 10 years later where Mukiwa finished. It is a microcosm historical reference to the effects of what good white Zimbabweans wanted for their nation among all persons and yet as the story unfolds the scenes recalled, written, and accounted for show nothing but retribution by the Mugabe political machine against the white citizens who provided medicine, farming techniques, and educational institutions. A fully disclosed interview by Peter Godwin’s sister Georgina provides an additional insight to the devastating effects forced upon a people (black and white) when full power corrupts completely. The active voice in this memoir changes periodically from pride of family in a nostalgic form to a realistic and darkened sadness of what occurred in Zimbabwe following the years after the Civil War. Peter Godwin comes clean (in a manner of speaking) with familial issues of importance and discovery in a shocking sense. The reader only gets questionable hints in Mukiwa; however, the very personal matter becomes fully disclosed in this work. The author doesn’t really speak of his personal intimacies in an opened forum but the history that he reported upon within this memoir is telling of the political torment that Mugabe created for Zimbabwe. President Mugabe had a chance to make Zimbabwe a country of joining people together and failed miserably in my opinion. He gave the wovits the commercial farms owned by the white citizens and had his own political henchmen with Chimurenga political names such as “Hitler Huntzvi” or “Stalin Mau Mau.” This provided a window to what the poor black and all white community had to confront going forward. Whatever gains were made became lost very early on following the Civil War and the renaming of Rhodesia to Zimbabwe.

Peter’s Father, George Godwin never referenced his military service to his family on any form of detail until the near end of his life. Then, with a brief reference on page 142 as an afterthought Peter informs the reader that his Father’s Polish Regiment under the 1st Polish Armored Division led by General Stanislaw Maczek (which was assigned under the 1st Canadian Army) had been a part of the liberation of Ghent. The liberation of Ghent on 6 September 1944 would allow the 4th Canadian Armored Division to free wheel it to my own Father’s hometown where they would rescue the city from the grips of the Nazi henchmen some 8 days later on 14 September 1944. George considered himself to be a Jewish Pole as opposed to a Polish Jew in much the same way that Bernard Fall author Hell In A Very Small Place would consider himself to be French in his adopted country following his own family’s immigration to France in 1938 from Austria. In some form it was rather shocking to read of the disclosure of his Father’s well-kept secret over the years. George Godwin’s life was marked by what he did for his country of Zimbabwe and that of his family; not by his war record which by all accounts was in itself very distinguished. Later, George would comment to Peter that being white in Zimbabwe was like being Jewish in Poland in 1939 – an endangered minority and the target of ethnic cleansing. George’s sister and mother were killed in Treblinka concentration camp while George was a boy stuck in England studying when the war broke out. His father survives and later remarries, but he never sees him again when his Dad passes away in Poland after George has moved to Africa with his Doctor wife.

There is a very effective section on this book that tackles the problems of Historical Revisionism which I found to be compelling. Zimbabwe was once the second largest grower of Virginia Tobacco, it is apparent that the country is on the mend toward correcting this failure from President Mugabe. The opening pages to this book is a personal endearment to his own life thus far and the photos of his children and that of his niece in one inset photo provides an internal glimpse of hope for the future. The book ends as it began and the historical account is as important as any to history.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read Godwin’s earlier memoir 10 years ago so naturally wanted to read this one, though I wondered what a man younger than I by a decade or more could have to write two memoirs about. The answer is “plenty”. This one is focuses on the period between 1996 and 2004 when Robert Mugabe is encouraging the “wovits” (supposedly vets of the civil war but mostly thugs and opportunists) to confiscate land from white settlers. Mugabe seems to want to get rid of whites in Zimbabwe and to make what was a country genuinely successful at developing a multi-racial society into an all black country; ruining the country's economy in the process. Production is down, the economy is shrinking, inflation is off the wall. Not only whites but middle class blacks are immigrating in droves.
Godwin, a journalist, has lived in the UK and the US for years but loves his country and has made a specialty of getting jobs reporting from there. His parents remained there as did his sister, a TV journalist. What's compelling about this memoir, though, is the author's skill at simultaneously reporting on the beauty and promise and on the horrible political present of a part of the world most of us know little about and think of only as a place of abject poverty and ugliness. Godwin's love of Zimbabwe and its people, black and white, is infectious. But he's very talented also at weaving Zimbabwe's story in with that his own family. His older sister, killed by terrorists whose grave is vandalized. His physician mother who’s given and given again to the people of Zimbabwe. His younger sister whose journalism gets her banned to North London where she broadcasts back to Zimbabwe.
Godwin learns during the time frame of the book that his tight-lipped British father is actually a Polish Jew and holocaust survivor trapped in Britain in 1939 where he went on a course to learn English. His mother and sister ended their lives in Treblinka. His father was never allowed to learn Poland. Godwin’s telling of his father's story would seem totally irrelevant to present day Africa, as would Goodwin’s own experience of volunteering his time in the wake of 9/11 (his own neighborhood), but that's the beauty of a good memoirist who can make anything that happens to him "relevant”. In the end he feel compelled to compare his own need to leave Africa with his father’s to leave Poland: “Like Poland was to him, Africa is for me: a place in which I can never truly belong, a dangerous place that will, if I allow it to, reach into my life and hurt my family. A white in Africa is like a Jew anywhere—on sufferance, watching wearily, waiting for the next great tidal swell of hostility.”
I can’t recommend this book enough.

[Wendy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my type of book - an entertaining book in which I learn so much about places that I would like to know more about. This memoir about the author's home in Rhodesia, which is now Zimbabwae. The majority of the story takes place during the 1990's and 2000's during Robert Mugabe's presidency - which still continues today. Political fraud, beatings, slavery, killings, etc. were rampant, and we see how much damage was done to a once-thriving economy. Many white Africans lived on commercial farmland that was taken over by "war vets" (called wovits). As Mugabe rose to power, violence and thievery became the norm. Godwin's parents chose to stay in their adopted homeland and the story was told through a series of his visits back to visit them. Not only does Crocodile Eats the Sun provide the reader with a starting off point to begin to understand Zimbabwae's tumultuous past, but we also learn about the ex-pats who chose to live and work in parts of Africa - mostly war veterans after WWII.

The writing was so dramatically beautiful in many parts. For example:
"In Africa, you do not view death from the auditorium of life, as a spectator, but from the edge of the stage, waiting only for your cue. You feel perishable, temporary, transient. You feel mortal. Maybe that is why you seem to live more vividly in Africa. The drama of life there is amplified by its constant proximity to death. That's what infuses it with tension. It is the essence of its tragedy too. People love harder there. Love is the way that life forgets that it is terminal. Love is life's alibi in the face of death."

Also, "Most of us struggle in life to maintain the illusion of control, but in Africa that illusion is almost impossible to maintain. I always have the sense there that there is no equilibrium, that everything perpetually teeters on the brink of some dramatic change, that society constantly stands poised for some spasm, some tsunami in which you can do nothing but hope to bob up to the surface and not be sucked out into a dark and hungry sea."

Beautiful writing - such tragedy, but the author was able to keep me smiling through the tears with comical anecdotes. I highly recommend this one.

[Gary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Using his own experiences and that of his own family to illustrate the tragedy of how the ego of a vile old man and the poison of revolutionary totalitarian politics (wherever it exists in the world) has destroyed a nation once known as the bread basket of Africa.
The author covers the reign of terror begun by Robert Mugabe and his Stalinist ZANU PF since he lost a crucial referendum in 2000 and began to lose support to the social-democratic Movement for Democratic Change.

A shocking expose not only of the brutal attacks and murders of White farmers but also the terror and politicide perpetrated by Mugabe's Brown Shirts (the incorrectly named War Veterans)against Zimbabwe's masses.

One of Mugabe's top Cabinet ministers, Didymus Mutasa responded to reports of mass famine in Zimbabwe by In 2002, he stating that it would be a good thing if the population were halved: "We would be better off with only six million people, with our own people who supported the liberation struggle. We don't want all these extra people."
Not long after that South Africa's then Minister of Intelligence Stalinist hardliner Ronnie Kasrils appeared together in a press conference with Mutasa in South Africa where Kasrils referred to Mugabe's regime as 'our allies' and said that 'South Africa and Zimbabwe have a common world view and will march forward together step by step".
Much of South Africa's wealthy ruling party elite greatly support and admire Mugabe's ZANUPF regime as do ultra-left radicals around the world, as Zimbabwe's people are massacred and subjected to famine by this regime.

Grizzly evidence of the destruction and murder visited by the ZANU PF militia on Zimbabwe's people and animal life too.
Also interesting is the revelation that the authors father was not British as he thought he was but a Polish Jew whose family perished in Hitler's holocaust.
Mugabe and his regime are nothing new and we have seen similar brutal regimes with an iron grip on power existing today such as North Korea, Red China and Iran, as well as Saddam Hussein's genocidal regime in Iraq removed by the USA in 2003.

[Veronica · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a harrowing book. Reading it immediately after Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness made me feel Alexandra Fuller's family had got off quite lightly. The history of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe over the past century is like a showcase of the worst that human beings can be. It makes me almost despair of the human race. Godwin recounts the calamitous results of Robert Mugabe's dictatorship on a country that was once the breadbasket of Africa and is now one of the poorest in the world, and how it affected his own family.

Parts of this book made me feel sick with revulsion. It seems almost incredible that a Jew could escape from the Warsaw ghetto in 1939, reinvent himself as English, escape to Africa, and then find himself persecuted again, purely for being white -- something more difficult to disguise than Jewishness. For me, this book ranks with Bill Carter's Fools Rush in and even Primo Levi's If This Is a Man. And it is shameful that Robert Mugabe still has his foot on the necks of all Zimbabwe's people, black and white.

[Sorento62 · Rating 2 out of 5]

I listened to the audio CD narrated by the author. It started slow and boring. One would think narration by the author would be great, but it just reinforced how he wasn't being as open and personal as I would have liked. After the part where Mugabe lost an election and white farmers were in peril, the politics got interesting enough to make up for the less than compelling personal story toward the beginning. The personal story definitely becomes more interesting later in the book. Nonetheless, overall I found the book "just ok".
The family story and the story of the author's African homeland disintegrating were both of some true interest to me, but not enough to read/listen to an entire book. I would have liked this better as a magazine or journal article.
The book club discussion partly redeemed the book for me, however.