"Some of Prince Biyela's people, the Zulus, and the Vendas too, believe that a solar eclipse occurs when a crocodile eats the sun. This celestial crocodile, they say, briefly consumes our life-giving star as a warning that he is much displeased with the behavior of man below. It is the very worst of omens."
The title of this memoir foreshadows the uproot of life for the Godwin family, during Zimbabwe's upheaval. Peter Godwin has written for many major publications like New York Times Magazine and "Some of Prince Biyela's people, the Zulus, and the Vendas too, believe that a solar eclipse occurs when a crocodile eats the sun. This celestial crocodile, they say, briefly consumes our life-giving star as a warning that he is much displeased with the behavior of man below. It is the very worst of omens."
The title of this memoir foreshadows the uproot of life for the Godwin family, during Zimbabwe's upheaval. Peter Godwin has written for many major publications like New York Times Magazine and National Geographic . I don't know personally about his reporting, but I enjoyed his writing in this memoir. There are many books that emerged from the former Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, that I've personally had difficulty reading because of the tone. Godwin has a great blend of subjectivity and objectivity, even at those moments when it gets deeply personal for him.
Land ownership was once something sacred in Zimbabwe. Farmers communally prepared the land and when the land became exhausted, they moved to the next patch. Buying land was foreign and akin to buying "the wind or the water or the trees." When the first white pioneer struck a deal with an African elder to get gold, the confusion began because the elder did not think he was giving up rights to the land. Even though whites made up only 1 percent of the population, they soon owned more than half of Zimbabwe's agricultural land. This problem formed the foundation for Zimbabwe's Civil War.
Godwin's parents, white, African, immigrants, were caught in the middle of the storm that followed. Zimbabwe went from white rule to black rule under Prime Minister, Mugabe. Later, Mugabe's political greed and narcissism would take him on a spin of unfair elections and unfair treatment to farmers. Mugabe ignited the nationalists and "war vets" or "wovits" who wanted to take their country back by any means necessary. The destruction that followed is heartrending, and is unfortunately one of many tales of Africa's struggle after colonialism. Godwin's story of his father is one that reinforces empathy through each section, as the deepening of this relationship becomes a life lesson for both reader and writer.
There is also something deeply universal that should resonate with any immigrant or exile, any survivor of war or victim of displacement; anyone who has experienced the loss of homeland and family, one who knows what it is to dream in native language and not hear it daily; anyone who has resolved that he or she will never fully feel at home anywhere, but may make home everywhere. When an African has lived through the loss of a country's values, the lens out of which to view sometimes becomes blurred:
"Most of us struggle in life to maintain the illusion of control, but in Africa that illusion is almost impossible to maintain. I always have the sense there that there is no equilibrium, that everything perpetually teeters on the brink of some dramatic change, that society constantly stands poised for some spasm, some tsunami in which you can do nothing but hope to bob up to the surface and not be sucked out into a dark and hungry sea. The origin of my permanent sense of unease, my general foreboding, is probably the fact that I have lived through just such change, such a sudden and violent upending of value systems."
Some fiction on Zimbabwe that I have also enjoyed are:
Maraire's Zenzele: A Letter for My Daughter ( https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ) and
Vera's Without a Name and Under the Tongue ( https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ) ...more