It would require some luck to peg the trim, thoughtfully bearded 50-year-old man sitting in the fading afternoon light as a foreign correspondent. Indeed, dressed in a sweater and jeans, wearing pink argyle socks that flash as he crosses a leg, Peter Godwin seems about as far from a war zone as one can get in a room of floor-to-ceiling bookcases and an elegant symmetry of lamps and decor. In its lush, ordered calm this salon is a world apart.
And then Godwin begins to speak about Zimbabwe. “Its very painful,” he starts out, trying to describe how it felt to watch his native country dissolve from Africa’s success story into abject poverty and corruption. Godwin was born there in 1957, when it was the colonial state of Southern Rhodesia, a period he described in his vivid memoir, “Mukiwa.” He left to attend university, then watched as the wild dreams of the country’s newfound independence were squandered and then turned into a way to enrich its leaders. His sister and her fiance were murdered in the country’s birth pangs of independence.
In the years since, Zimbabwe has spiraled ever further downward as President Robert Mugabe has begun to resemble a dictator, enacting land reform in a way that pitted angry war veterans against landed white farmers. “I worry when you get to see the country through the lens of this contrived crisis,” Godwin says, remembering that Mugabe toured the same farms in the 1980s and told white owners, “We need you.” “These farms were looted and then given away, and now they are doing the same to industry. It all helps to create a smokescreen behind which Mugabe can operate.”
Zimbabwe was heading toward this crisis a dozen years ago when Godwin learned that his father had suffered a heart attack. This rupture forms the heart of his latest memoir, “When a Crocodile Eats the Sun,” another engrossing journey back to Zimbabwe, this time examined through the twin lenses of his father’s declining health and the country’s staggering, stage-managed decline, which Godwin reports on with the style and urgency of a combat-zone veteran.
“It’s more or less irreparable,” Godwin says, about the way Zimbabwe’s state has affected him emotionally. “It’s your cultural history … the loss does make you kind of wobble.”
But he kept taking notes the whole time. Traveling around Zimbabwe to the farms of friends and acquaintances as they are occupied by angry, often drunken and menacing war veterans, he keeps a keen eye trained on the restraint at the heart of the whole ugly situation. “The bizarre thing is that the government gave them free rein,” Godwin says of the war veterans, who were promised reparation. “They said, do whatever you want. Just go for it. There will be no consequences and in the whole thing, 15 whites got killed. That’s never looked at. … There was a huge hesitation to commit violence.”
That Godwin is a white Zimbabwean is at once utterly irrelevant and entirely the crux of “When a Crocodile Eats the Sun.” He was, as he remembered in “Mukiwa,” schooled in an era when white children were taught to practice putting down a black rebellion. He could leave, and did, traveling to England for university, and then abroad to America, where he has lived on and off for many years. But he also comes from a family with deep roots to the black community, his mother a physician whose patients were often black Zimbabweans suffering from the ravages of AIDS.
Flying in and out of this situation in the late 1990s, his father’s health failing, the country growing ever worse, Godwin tried not to belabor his guilt but was struck by it over and again. “I am fascinated by that juxtaposition,” he says, looking around himself, at the walls of hardback books, the accouterments of the life he lives with his wife, Joanna Coles, editor of the U.S. edition of Marie Claire. There were times during that period, he says, when his life in Manhattan seemed a little surreal. “That idea that you can insulate yourself,” he says.
One of the most striking things revealed in “When a Crocodile Eats the Sun” is the degree to which Godwin is not alone with this feeling — that it was in fact, his heritage. In the course of coming home, Godwin discovers that his father had made up an entirely new identity. That George Godwin, this Anglo-African in a safari suit and desert boots, was born Kazio Goldfarb, a Polish Jew from Warsaw. As George reveals in a memoir he writes and mails to his son, his mother and sister vanished during the Holocaust. He changed his name and relocated to Zimbabwe after marrying a woman in the Royal Navy.
In researching his father’s true background, he couldn’t help but find some terrifying similarities between the growth of anti-Semitism in Poland and the way Mugabe used anti-white sentiment to bolster his popularity in Zimbabwe.
Godwin is careful not to say that “When a Crocodile Eats the Sun” is a book about his own victimhood as a white African. Nor does he believe it’s a report on black Zimbabwe. It is rather the story of his family and his country, as he sees it, from his experience. “In an autobiography, you care implicitly about what happens,” he says, making a rather neat definition. “In a memoir, to use a film term, the camera is on your shoulder, as a writer, and it turns when you turn.”
John Freeman is president of the National Critics Circle.
