Customer Reviews
Sad, poignant, heartrending. - By: Mr. D. Turner, 31 Dec 2008 
A lessonin what comes to pass when a megalomaniac is left to his own devices. Sad that a once beautiful country is now being laid to waste by a common thug masquerading as a president. Peter Godwin's & his parents' stoicism both amazes & shames those who have turned a blind eye to the suffering of zimbabweans. I guess one could put it all down to a love for their country...something obviously alien to the murderous thug who has systematically dismantled the country & brought it to its knees. Keep up the good work Peter & long live SWRadio!
Intensely moving - a jolly good read! - By: Gitau Githinji, 02 Dec 2008 
Upon finishing this magnificent piece of work, my mind was curiously turned to another book by an African writer which I also read this year & which has the word "sun"in its title. I remembered the haunting novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie "Half of a Yellow Sun". While the latter is a fictionalised account of events taking placein her native Nigeria well before she was old enough to know about them (the Biafra war), "When a Crocodile Eats the Sun" is a harrowing personal journey through Zimbabwe, a country sliding, nay, hurtling down an abyss of a dictator's own making. Both books have the same powerful message: glittering hope can so easily be extinguished & replaced by utter despair.
Godwin, who has made a life for himself & his familyin New York, observes the increasingly harrowing death of a much beloved country through the eyes of his loving parents & friends. Each time he returns to Zimbabwe is more painful than the last. He watches the implosion of his country while coming to terms with an irretrievably altered New York after 9/11. Through Godwin's vivid imagery, the beauty of Zimbabwe leaps off the page at you & yet you hold yourself back from wanting to go there. You know it will be too painful to see.
You watch the author's heart slowly break as his parents drift from prosperity & security to penury & hopelessness as they become old & frail. Your heart bleeds for him as he has to witness the agonies of his parents as his mother struggles to cope with heavy surgery & his father's legs literally rot beneath him. All the while he is having to come to terms with newly discovered certainties about who & what he really is.
As if their daily battles with insecurity & hyperinflation are not bad enough, you suffer with Godwin as his elderly parents are regularly fleeced by their own staff; people whom they have literally raised through life.
Godwin will probably never write a more personal account than this. I cannot see how that would be possible for any human being.
I loved this book & it is after a great deal of thought that I have denied Godwin his full compliment of five stars. Irrespective of who his ultimate audience is, there is never an excuse for generalising about a continent as large & varied as Africa. Why repeatedly write about "returning to Africa" or "spending another nightin Africa" when you really are talking about Zimbabwe?
Godwin never writes about his plane landingin "Europe" when it touches downin London or even "the United States of America" when speaking about his homein New York. For a person who calls himself a white Zimbabwean, this is unforgivable behaviour. This is what causes suspicion about white immigrantsin the minds of indigenous Africans. To paraphrase, it is the reason that the white man livesin "Africa" with his bags packed. He sees a continent of more than fifty countriesin ridiculous & offensive monochrome. If a highly educated person born & raisedin Zimbabwe can wilfully do this, why should Sarah Palin be vilified for not knowing that Africa is a continent?
Is Zimbabwe exactly the same as its neighbour Botswana? Is beingin Zimbabwe exactly the same as beingin Mali? I am sure the answer a seasoned global journalist like Godwin would give to both of these questions is "certainly not". Why spoil your masterpiecein such a lazy & irresponsible manner then, Mr Godwin? Contrast this with "Half of a Yellow Sun". Ngozi Adichie does not resort to this ridiculous shorthand: she writes about Biafra specifically because that is the country her book is about.
Notwithstanding this, I cannot recommend this book highly enough for anyone who would like to know more about the mess Robert Mugabe has made of a country he once professed himself to love.
Better still, read "When a Crocodile Eats the Sun" because of that best & most old fashioned of reasons: it is a jolly good read!
Heart-breaking and deeply moving - By: Ralph Blumenau, 07 Aug 2008 Peter Godwin was bornin Rhodesia, &in 1996 he published 'Makiwa', a gripping account of how he grew upin that country. He was conscripted into the Rhodesian army to fight against the independence movement, by which time he felt that he was fightingin an unjust cause. He eventually got to England, became a journalist, &in 1981, now basedin the United States, he returned to whatin 1980 had become independent Zimbabwe, partly because his parents were still living there & partly because he loved the country & its people. But he now had to record that the new government of Robert Mugabe was more savage than the white government had been & was carrying out bloody suppressionin Matabeleland - a sign of things to come. Godwin's reporting at that time made him persona non grata & he had to leave Zimbabwe again, though he was able to return after Mugabe had `stabilized' the country with the so-called Unity Accordin 1987.
This second volume, first publishedin 2006, is an account of several later visits, beginning with onein 1996. In the chapters relating to 1996, 1997 & 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 & 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 wasin 2000. That year Mugabe wanted to change the constitution to allow him another 12 yearsin power; & this change had to be ratified by a referendum. To get the new constitution accepted, he insertedin it a law allowing the seizure of white-owned farm land for redistribution to black peasants (thoughin fact most of it went to his cronies). His instrument for this were the so-called war veterans, & violence against whites now took off, under such thugs as those calling themselves `Hitler' Hunzvi & `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 onein 2002. The folklore expression for this is that `a crocodile eats the sun', & it is considered the worst of omens. Godwin now chroniclesin the most graphic manner the increasing horror of Mugabe's appalling regime & the descent of Zimbabwe into chaos & 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 & robberies, with the police either unwilling to intervene or actually participatingin them. Among the many grotesque vignettes: cemeteries plundered, patches of maize planted between the graves, & 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 & 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 & now impoverished, sick & aged parents - who, beleaguered as they are, refuse to leave Zimbabwe - are deeply moving. And there is an unexpected dimension. On a visitin 2001, when he isin his forties, Peter Godwin learns that his father, George, now 77, was notin 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 & 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 & sister later perishedin Treblinka. Peter Godwin had heard of Auschwitz & Belsen, but (somewhat surprisingly for a journalist) he had never heard of the other extermination camps, which he now researched & whose horrors he then describes.
This beautifully written book is a lament for Zimbabwe, but it is also a tribute to his parents, & it is dedicated to his father's memory.
Well worth reading - By: JillT, 07 Jul 2008 I received this book last week & haven't put it down until I finished it yesterday morning. The last few chapters had mein a flood of tears...not only because of the deathin the author's family but because of the sadness of the whole Zimbabwe situation & the effect it has had on millions of people's lives. Well worth reading.
Better Understand Africa with this Sensitive Masterpiece - By: I. A. C. Brown, 29 Jun 2008 This is the second of Peter Godwin's two books on his family's experience of Rhodesia-into-Zimbabwe. You would do well to read themin the reverse order; the Crocodile followed by Mukiwa. Mukiwa on its own or read first is but an interesting account of Godwin's earlier lifein the white-haven of Rhodesia & of his growing awareness that change was inevitable & deserved. There are many such accounts. However if read as an epilogue, Mukiwa, confirms the right of Godwin to be the author of Crocodile & explains his perceptive insight. Crocodile is a must, a disturbing must-read. Identity, you will learn, applies not just to the person but to a nation,in this case to the African nation. I have bought & given away three copies & have now to buy a third because none is being returned.
