Product Description

Hailed by reviewers as "powerful,""haunting" and "a tour de force of personal journalism,"When A Crocodile Eats the Sun is the unforgettable story of one man's struggle to discover his past and come to terms with his present. Award winning author and journalist Peter Godwin writes with pathos and intimacy about Zimbabwe's spiral into chaos and, along with it, his family's steady collapse. This dramatic memoir is a searing portrait of unspeakable tragedy and exile, but it is also vivid proof of the profound strength of the human spirit and the enduring power of love.

"In the tradition of Rian Malan and Philip Gourevitch, a deeply moving book about the unknowability of an Africa at once thrilling and grotesque. In elegant, elegiac prose, Godwin describes his father's illness and death in Zimbabwe against the backdrop of Mugabe's descent into tyranny. His parent's waning and the country's deterioration are entwined so that personal and political tragedy become inseparable, each more profound for the presence of the other" -- Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon

"A fascinating, heartbreaking, deeply illuminating memoir that has the shape and feel of a superb novel." -Kurt Anderson, author of Heydey

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3486 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred 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.)
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From The New Yorker
Godwin, the author of a previous memoir about growing up during Zimbabwe’s war of independence, has written a sequel of sorts, tracing the collapse of his country in the course of the past decade (the violently destructive Robert Mugabe is the "crocodile" of the title) in tandem with the decline of his father. The memoir’s central drama comes from the dying father’s revelation that he is not British at all, as his son had always believed, but a Polish Jew, born Kazimierz Jerzy Goldfarb, whose mother and sister were killed in Treblinka. Occasionally, Godwin’s attempts to knit the various story lines together seem a bit pat—"A white in Africa is like a Jew everywhere . . . waiting for the next great tidal swell of hostility"—but he ultimately delivers a powerful narrative of grief and desperation, both personal and national.
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From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Reviewed by Wendy Kann

In 2000, Robert Mugabe, president of Zimbabwe, held a referendum to perpetuate his decades-long rule. He lost. Incensed, he annulled the results and set about destroying his suspected opposition. The economy imploded, and Zimbabwe fell into chaos. In When a Crocodile Eats the Sun -- a reference to solar eclipses, the most apocalyptic of African omens -- Peter Godwin, an acclaimed Zimbabwean journalist now living in Manhattan, masterfully weaves the political and the highly personal. An eyewitness account of that cataclysmic time, When a Crocodile Eats the Sun is also a tribute to Godwin's aging parents and a searing exploration of the author's own soul.

The Godwins had immigrated from England to Africa in the early 1950s, where Peter's father, George -- nearly broken from the traumas of World War II -- reinvented himself, managing copper mines, timber estates and government transport. He was a fierce believer in fairness and integrity, sending letters decrying the political corruption of Mugabe's government to the state-owned Zimbabwe Herald under the pseudonym "Rustic Realist." His wife, Helen, an adored doctor at a cash-strapped government hospital, began work before dawn and treated more than 80 patients daily. The couple had three children. Jain, their eldest, was killed on the eve of her wedding in a tragic car accident; Peter was exiled in 1983 for breaking the story of Mugabe's massacre of thousands. Georgina became a Zimbabwean media darling, lately banished for her independent coverage, who now beams hard-to-hear news to her homeland from a lonely London studio.

Mugabe's violent reclamation of mostly white-owned commercial farmland destroyed Zimbabwe's food supply, fostered lawlessness, and shattered the country's economy. Increasingly isolated as their friends flee the repression and hyperinflation, and barely surviving on now worthless Zimbabwean pensions, the elderly Godwins pointedly avoid buying much needed gasoline and medical supplies on a growing black market that they feel benefits only the privileged few. They would rather walk to polling stations and wait in long lines for hours in the hot sun to participate in ultimately farcical local elections. They eat mainly bread and cabbage but consider Peter's attempts to replenish their pantry using American dollars as vulgarly extravagant in light of the extreme poverty suffered by most of the country's inhabitants. As hundreds of the starving and unemployed spill into Harare's suburbs, a swelling camp of the indigent lingers just beyond the Godwins' hedge. Belligerent officials shoulder into their modest yard, claiming bogus infractions and demanding bribes. George is hijacked at his gate by men who beat him to the ground and then toy with killing him.

As his parents' health quickly deteriorates -- George has heart trouble and gangrene, Helen has sciatica -- the frantic author risks slipping into Zimbabwe on frequent magazine assignments despite his exile status. He finds himself on the front line as Mugabe's murderous, pillaging mobs invade farms and smash agricultural infrastructure. An interview with an opposition candidate evolves into a nightlong ordeal fending off goons. Incognito at a political rally, Peter watches farm workers get selected for "re-education" while sullen armed teenagers prowl the remaining crowd, prodding people to raise fists higher, to cheer louder.

And yet much of the book is wryly comic as Godwin describes the absurdities endured by Zimbabwe's white middle class. George's battered Mazda 323 is jerry-rigged with locks and alarms and practically roped to the side of their house. Peter, entertaining his parents with an outing to gawk at McMansions being built by political favorites, takes a wrong turn and finds himself on the prohibited dead end street leading to Robert Mugabe's new palace:

"As we round the bend . . . we see that the soldiers have been reinforced by a dozen more. These new ones carry machine guns, and the brass bullets in their bandoliers shimmer with menace as they catch the sun. At least ten weapons are now pointed directly at us.

" 'Oh, God!' mutters Mum. 'We're all going to be shot. I told you we should have gotten a new atlas, Dad.' "

As Godwin faces both his parents' mortality and his country's collapse, he is tormented by the devastating loss of his own identity. One evening, while still mourning George's recent death, Peter stumbles across a roadblock. When he refuses to offer the expected bribe, an armed and angry policeman forces him to pull over and wait, possibly all night, as punishment. Minutes later, a bus rattles up and as sacks are hurled out for the police to plunder, an old woman pleads for her meager bag of maize. Godwin, fully aware he could be killed for interfering, cannot bear the injustice of the woman's predicament and offers money on her behalf. He is viciously ordered off, but we are left with no doubt at all that Peter Godwin has inherited George and Helen's fortitude.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

Heart-breaking and deeply moving
Peter Godwin was born in Rhodesia, and in 1996 he published 'Makiwa', a gripping account of how he grew up in that country. He was conscripted into the Rhodesian army to fight against the independence movement, by which time he felt that he was fighting in an unjust cause. He eventually got to England, became a journalist, and in 1981, now based in the United States, he returned to what in 1980 had become independent Zimbabwe, partly because his parents were still living there and partly because he loved the country and its people. But he now had to record that the new government of Robert Mugabe was more savage than the white government had been and was carrying out bloody suppression in Matabeleland - a sign of things to come. Godwin's reporting at that time made him persona non grata and he had to leave Zimbabwe again, though he was able to return after Mugabe had `stabilized' the country with the so-called Unity Accord in 1987.

This second volume, first published in 2006, is an account of several later visits, beginning with one in 1996. In the chapters relating to 1996, 1997 and 1998, Mugabe's dictatorship is not central to his account, though of course he is aware of it; but he is more concerned with the quite non-political aspects of his family's life. At this time Mugabe had not yet whipped up anti-white agitation. Indeed he had for years encouraged white people to stay and help the Zimbabwean economy. In fact, in the year 2000, "78% of white farmers were on property they had purchased after independence, only when that land had first been offered to -and turned down by - the government, as was required by law" (p.56).

Godwin's next visit was in 2000. That year Mugabe wanted to change the constitution to allow him another 12 years in power; and this change had to be ratified by a referendum. To get the new constitution accepted, he inserted in it a law allowing the seizure of white-owned farm land for redistribution to black peasants (though in fact most of it went to his cronies). His instrument for this were the so-called war veterans, and violence against whites now took off, under such thugs as those calling themselves `Hitler' Hunzvi and `Stalin Mau Mau'. When Mugabe lost the referendum, he unleashed violence also against Tsvangirai's newly created Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).

In 2001 there was a total eclipse of the sun over Zimbabwe, and, unusually, there was another one in 2002. The folklore expression for this is that `a crocodile eats the sun', and it is considered the worst of omens. Godwin now chronicles in the most graphic manner the increasing horror of Mugabe's appalling regime and the descent of Zimbabwe into chaos and lawlessness: the ruin of agriculture; the displacement of millions of black farm workers; famine; the government's deliberate withholding of food supplies from areas where the opposition is strong; hyper-inflation; casual murders and robberies, with the police either unwilling to intervene or actually participating in them. Among the many grotesque vignettes: cemeteries plundered, patches of maize planted between the graves, and befouled with excrement; the RSPCA being given permission to evacuate tortured animals from farms - when their white owners are not allowed to leave their besieged homes. Godwin is there during the General Strike of 2003 and its brutal suppression.

But this is not only a journalist's book about Zimbabwe. It is also a touching story of a loving family. The scenes with his gallant and now impoverished, sick and aged parents - who, beleaguered as they are, refuse to leave Zimbabwe - are deeply moving. And there is an unexpected dimension. On a visit in 2001, when he is in his forties, Peter Godwin learns that his father, George, now 77, was not in fact the reserved Anglo-African he had always taken him to be, but was born a Polish Jew. Only now can George bring himself to talk and write about it. The revelation has an immense impact on his son, who inserts a couple of chapters to tell the story of George's Warsaw childhood, how, just before the war, he came to leave Poland as a teenager, without his family. George's mother and sister later perished in Treblinka. Peter Godwin had heard of Auschwitz and Belsen, but (somewhat surprisingly for a journalist) he had never heard of the other extermination camps, which he now researched and whose horrors he then describes.

This beautifully written book is a lament for Zimbabwe, but it is also a tribute to his parents, and it is dedicated to his father's memory.

When a Crocodile Eats the Sun
Peter Godwin's book, titled above, is a very worth while read. In plain dialogue he lets the rest of the world know what is really going on in Zimbabwe in the most sensitive way possible through his own families lives. The book is beautifully written, I couldn't put it down once I started reading it, more especially after following the last fiasco of an election in June 2008. Why the other African nations let Mugabwe get away with what he is doing to his own people, is beyond me. Farms that were productive have now grown wild and uncultivated, and a country that was the bread basket of Africa is now one of the worlds poorest countries, except of course for the government fat cats. Well worth buying and reading

Lived in Rhodesia and Zimbabwe for 26 years - left in 1976.
A good description of what is happening to "the man/woman in the street" in Zimbabwe by using the experiences of his aging mother and father.
However, the author fails to set important context as he did not live through the Rhodesia to Zimbabwe transitition. Also, by the time this book was published, Zimbabwe was already accelerating towards complete devastation for 99% of the population.
Ended up a "lightweight" editorial with no recriminations or recommendations.