Zimbabwe's disastrous economic and political situation has led to calls for President Mugabe to resign. Rosita Bolandmeets the writer Peter Godwin, who grew up there, and fears things may only get worse.
It's one thing to see your parents grow old and frail as the years pass. But few of us also witness the country we grew up in begin a steady and seemingly irreversible transformation from stable and wealthy to collapsed and bankrupt. Peter Godwin, a former Sunday Times journalist who grew up in what was then called Rhodesia, has experienced both. When a Crocodile Eats the Sun is his second memoir about his family's life in Zimbabwe, recording the years between 1996 and 2004.
"The memoir form is more honest than journalism," he says. "You're always editing yourself anyway as a journalist, trying to get close to some kind of subjective truth. And memoir is different again to autobiography. With memoir, the camera may still be in your navel, but at least it's pointing outwards."
Godwin, folded into a dark suit, speaks with an accent tinged with the three places where he has spent most of his life: Zimbabwe, London and Manhattan. He has lived in New York for a decade. It is Zimbabwe, though, that defined his life. Although he has not lived there for years, his parents, George and Helen, and sister, Georgina, continued to live and work there throughout Robert Mugabe's increasingly terrifying rule.
When a Crocodile Eats the Sun (a reference to a Zimbabwean expression for an eclipse) begins in 1996, when Godwin, on assignment for National Geographic in Zululand, gets a call from his mother to tell him that his father has had a heart attack. George Godwin recovers to live another eight years: long enough to see the Zimbabwe he knew almost totally disappear.
In this book, his son uses his parents' house in a suburb of Harare, and their once-simple but now tortuous day-to-day routines - shopping, driving, banking, telecommunications, hospital visits - as a metaphor for the slow collapse of the country. The swimming pool his father designed and built is turned into a fish pool, to subsidise ever- increasing food bills in a country where inflation changes daily. Things run out and can't be replaced. As there are so many power cuts, there is no point buying perishable stores on the rare occasions when food does become available, as the frozen food rots during power failures.
Pensions and life savings become worthless. Even postage stamps become so expensive, because of inflation, that the Godwins can no longer afford to send Christmas cards. The fallout from shortages penetrates every aspect of life: the simple metal memorial plaque on their eldest daughter's grave is stolen, to be melted down. Inflation is now running at 1,594 per cent in Zimbabwe, where several bricks of banknotes are required to pay for one cup of coffee. Mugabe remains, infamously, in power. Can the country be salvaged?
"I fear that the damage is very, very severe," Godwin says soberly. "The damage that's been done is so fundamental. We can't assume, if Mugabe goes, that what will replace him in the short term will be any better. Quite possibly it will be worse. Zimbabwe was a wealthy, educated country. The fact is, when things become intolerable, you leave, and those with resources have got out already. Up to four million black, middle-class, educated Zimbabweans have left the country, and they and their skills have not been replaced.
"Zimbabwe is also a sick country: one-third of the existing population has HIV, which does not make for an active resistance. For many of the people who left, they have friends and family left in the country, and they send them back money, hard currency. Each one of us outside is subsidising between 10 and 100 people back home, ironically propping up the economy. Thus Zimbabwe has become a remittance economy."
You know things are bad when the food served on a flight into Zimbabwe is better than that available to the vast majority of people living there, no matter what socioeconomic group they are from. Over the eight years covered in this book, Godwin makes several trips home to Zimbabwe on the back of journalism assignments to other African countries. One of them is for Forbes magazine, visiting luxury safari lodges in South Africa, where wealthy tourists are pampered in an exotic bubble. He writes with irony about the fact that so many of his trips back to see his family are to a country once much visited for its wildlife and natural beauty, but where tourism has now collapsed, due to the new popularity of neighbouring countries once boycotted because of apartheid.
"We have spent far too much time talking about white farmers in Zimbabwe," Godwin says. "The real story is about what happens when the majority of the population faces a fierce opposition." Nobody knows how many - or, rather, how few - white settlers are left in Zimbabwe. "Between 20,000 and 30,000, although the official figure is almost three times that. Most of those are very elderly. Very few of them are doing any productive farming. They might be still living in their house on the farm, but they are not farming."
As long as they had each other, Peter Godwin's parents would not leave their adopted country, despite attempts at persuasion from both their children. After her husband's death, Helen Godwin eventually left for London, where her daughter, Georgina lives, although she hopes one day to return. This book is as much a tender study of family in ever-changing and ever-challenging social circumstances as it is about an imploding country. Shortly before George Godwin's death, he tells his son that, despite a lifetime's work in Zimbabwe, there is nothing for son or daughter to inherit, that the few things they own in Harare - a house, an ancient car, a government pension - are worthless. What he leaves unsaid is the assets that they do have: each other.
It is difficult even to die with dignity in Zimbabwe these days. George Godwin's one wish was to be cremated. In a chain of near-farcical events, after his death in Harare, his son and widow get a call from the morgue where the body is awaiting cremation to say that, unless the body is claimed within a day, it will decompose in the heat, as the diesel that powers the cooling system has almost run out. No new supplies will be arriving any time soon. If they don't take the body, it will have to be buried in a public mass grave. But if they take the body, they can't bring it to the crematorium as the dead man wished, as the crematorium is out of butane gas.
In the end, with the agreement of his mother, Godwin manages to have his father made a posthumous honorary Hindu, and he is cremated on a traditional funeral pyre.
"My parents," Godwin says with understatement, "were always very social." u
When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, by Peter Godwin, is published by Picador, £16.99 in UK