Mukiwa opens with Peter Godwin, six years old, describing the murder of his neighbor by African guerillas, in 1964, pre-war Rhodesia. Godwin's parents are liberal whites, his mother a governement-employed doctor, his father an engineer. Through his innocent, young eyes, the story of the beginning of the end of white rule in Africa unfolds. The memoir follows Godwin's personal journey from the eve of war in Rhodesia to his experience fighting in the civil war that he detests to his adventures as a journalist in the new state of Zimbabwe, covering the bloody return to Black rule. With each...

This book tells the story of how White Rhodesians, three-quarters of whom were ill- prepared for revolutionary change, reacted to the "terrorist" war and the onset of black rule in the 1970s. It shows how internal divisions--both old and new--undermined the supposed unity of White Rhodesia, how most Rhodesians begrudgingly accepted the inevitability of black majority rule without adjusting to its implications, and how the self- appointed defenders of Western civilization sometimes adopted uncivilized methods of protecting the "Rhodesian way of life." This is a lively and accessible account,...

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...

In 2008, memoirist and journalist Peter Godwin secretly returned to his native Zimbabwe after its notoriously tyrannical leader, Robert Mugabe, lost an election. The decision was severely risky--foreign journalists had been banned to prevent the world from seeing a corrupt leader's refusal to cede power. Zimbabweans have named this period, simply, The Fear.
Godwin bears witness to the torture bases, the burning villages, the opposition leaders in hiding, the last white farmers, and the churchmen and diplomats putting their own lives on the line to stop the carnage. Told with a brilliant...