When a Crocodile Eats the Sun by Peter Godwin

Despite everything, Godwin's parents refuse to leave Africa. Like Mukiwa, When A Crocodile Eats The Sun is beautifully written and tugs at your heartstrings. It's the ultimate irony for Godwin's father to end his life under siege in his home, viewed by a mad dictator as an interloper, not a man who supported and worked for equal rights and democracy all his life. In fact, he is a Polish Jew, one of the few who escaped from Poland before the Nazis rolled in. This distant, if loving, figure with his clipped upper class British accent isn't British at all. AIDS affects 40% of the population.Īgainst this backdrop, Godwin finally discovers the reason for his father's lifelong reticence. Life expectancy falls from the 60s to the 30s, among the continent's lowest.

Starvation becomes an issue in a country once known as the bread basket of Africa. Godwin's parents see their friends murdered by thugs who have no intention of running commercial farms and who are supported by a sometimes frightened, sometimes corrupt police force. The British refuse to continue underwriting it (not one of Clare Short's finest moments) and it all disintegrates from a planned transition to a mess of sieges and murders.

Land redistribution, off the agenda for some years while South Africa made its transition to majority rule, is horribly handled. Seeing the disintegration of a country through the prism of Godwin's increasingly frail and embattled parents brings the sorrow of it all into such sharp focus. His father recovers and Godwin chronicles the last eight years of his life as its decline follows Zimbabwe's decline - a country once deemed a post-colonial success story. The book opens with a phone call to Godwin from his mother, announcing that his father's heart is failing and he is lying in hospital, close to death.

Still worse, the crocodile is the sign of Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe's dictator. This second volume of memoirs from Peter Godwin covers the years from 1996 to 2004, when there were two such portentous occurrences. It is a terrible omen, demonstrating great celestial displeasure at man's behaviour. When A Crocodile Eats The Sun is the name given to a solar eclipse by Zimbabwean tribespeople. Wonderful writing with a clear and lucid analysis that doesn't lose its grip on your heart for even an instant. Summary: Peter Godwin chronicles the collapse of Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe by holding it up as a mirror to the last years of his father's life.

When a Crocodile Eats the Sun by Peter Godwin