Caught Between Two Worlds

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday January 6, 2007

Reviewed by Helen Greenwood, Helen Greenwood is a Herald journalist.

The personal meets the political in Zimbabwe.

When a Crocodile Eats the Sun

By Peter Godwin

Picador, 342pp, $32.95

"A CROCODILE EATS the sun" is an African tribal explanation of a solar eclipse. A celestial crocodile shows his displeasure at man by briefly consuming our heat-giving star. The light is blotted out more than once in Peter Godwin's story about his family and Zimbabwe. But this memoir also sheds light on the notion of belonging and the disintegration of a country that was once the breadbasket of Africa.

Godwin is an internationally renowned journalist and the author of Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa. He has written for London's Sunday Times and made BBC documentaries about hot spots all over the world.

He was banned for several years from Zimbabwe because of his coverage of the 1983 Matabeleland massacres. But the ban was lifted and from 2000 to 2004 the New York-based writer used his assignments with National Geographic and Forbes magazines as a way of visiting his ageing parents in Harare.

George and Helen Godwin are stubbornly clinging to their right to stay in the former British colony. Chaos is around them and they've put in a protective hedge of thorny sisal and bougainvillea - like them, a transplant from another place.

Helen was and still is a doctor whose ministrations to blacks prolonged and saved lives. George was an engineer so incorruptible that he "stayed poor while lesser men prospered all around him".

Godwin suffers at the sight of his parents spending their declining years in a state of fear as Mugabe encourages land grabs from white farmers by marauding war veterans. He's torn apart by seeing his homeland run by people with names such as Stalin Mau Mau and Hitler Hunzvi, who preside over elections where, in some regions, the number of votes is greater than the population.

The spectre of AIDS hovers over all this. Yet Godwin is never completely despairing. How can he be when time and time again, the gentler Africa reveals itself? "Just as you're about to dismiss it and walk away, it delivers something so unexpected, so tender," he says. "One minute you're scared shitless, the next you're choked with affection." In one instance, a middle-class black woman pays for his father's bread as rampant inflation evokes the Weimar Republic of pre-Nazi Germany.

The comparison is apt because while flying back and forth from his African family to his new wife and son in New York, Godwin is finally let in on his father's greatest secret. His mother reveals that George Godwin, with the "upper-middle-class British accent, clipped and correct and authoritative", was born Kazimierz Jerzy Goldfarb in Warsaw, Poland.

Suddenly, it's clear to Godwin why his father never spoke of his childhood. Stranded in England on the eve of the invasion of Poland, the 13-year-old boy became a man overnight. His mother and sister died in the Holocaust and, though his father survived, they never saw each other again.

Godwin learns, too, that his father concealed his Judaism from his children so they could be safe.

He made a fresh start in Africa, "a place where he can wipe his memory of past hurt and start again". But as the white farmers are bullied and threatened and beaten and murdered, George Godwin observes, "Being a white here is starting to feel a bit like being a Jew in Poland in 1939 - an endangered minority - the target of ethnic cleansing."

History is inescapable and repeats itself in intricate and subtle ways. His parents will not leave and Godwin cannot stay. He feels that, like his father before him, he is rejecting his own identity. He is an exile, his heart yearning for another place. As he said in an interview, "I'm a wanderer twice over; with my father's background, it's in my veins."

Goodwin combines his narrative and journalistic skills in a rich portrait of Zimbabwe that is more insightful than most media analyses. He coolly records Mugabe's madness, the farmers' courage, the opposition Movement for Democratic Change's adherence to non-violence, as well as the everyday things such as finding petrol or being pulled over by a jumpy soldier at a road block.

He continually fuses the personal and the political. At his father's funeral, looking at the long line of black and white faces, he says, "I realise just how colour-blind their society has become. Mugabe has managed to achieve something hitherto so elusive; he had created a real racial unity - not the bogus one portrayed in the beer commercials of the new South Africa, but something more substantial, a hard-won sense of comradeship, a common bond forged in the furnace of resistance to an oppressive rule."

Godwin's steady voice sounds throughout this book, even when recounting the death of his older sister Jain at age 27, most likely decapitated by soldiers. He knows that this kind of sorrow is emblematic of so many other stories.

© 2007 Sydney Morning Herald

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