When a Crocodile Eats the Sun - A Memoir of Africa
by Peter Godwin
Picador, HK$148
White Africans are a little like the Jews of Poland in 1939, says Peter Godwin's father, who turns out not to have been an 'Englishman' but a Pole who lost his family to the Holocaust. It's as if the circle is closing on him in Harare, where racism determines who is African and the colonial sins of the past are visited upon the children. Godwin, a lawyer turned journalist who grew up in what is now Zimbabwe, wrote of his childhood and the civil war of Ian Smith's apartheid autocracy, Rhodesia, in his first memoir, Mukiwa. In this volume he lives in New York and returns when he can to check on his parents who have refused, unlike millions of other whites and middle-class blacks, to abandon Zimbabwe as the predations of dictator Robert Mugabe worsen. Godwin's is not a big-picture story, but a deeply moving tale of two old people, afraid, bewildered and alone, living in a country they had thought they were part of. After a faltering beginning it becomes a beautiful book about what it means to be African - black or white.
