When a Crocodile Eats the Sun by Peter Godwin (2006)
The saying, “When a Crocodile Eats the Sun,” comes from a belief in some remote villages of Zimbabwe that a crocodile eats the sun when a solar eclipse occurs. This event is a very bad omen, signaling the celestial crocodile's displeasure with the behavior of humans living on earth.
At the beginning of the 2000s, two total eclipses occurred within the span of less than two years. The Zimbabwe villagers became very scared, saying that the crocodile must be very angry with humans, with the threat of perpetual darkness occurring so close together.
When a Crocodile Eats the Sun is Peter Godwin's memoir, recounting the final years of his father's life. Godwin grew up in Zimbabwe. His parents emigrated to Rhodesia, as Zimbabwe was formerly known, after World War II. Following several years of a civil war, which pitted black nationalists against white settlers, the country was becoming increasingly more violent. Robert Mugabe's government began taking over white-owned commercial farms and began redistributing the land to his supporters, who had no farming knowledge or interest. The government refused to acknowledge the AIDS epidemic and refused assistance from other countries. The life expectancy plummeted to about 34 years.
Mubage's henchmen, men who began calling themselves "War Vets", began terrorizing white farmers. Many of the so-called War Vets had not actually fought in the War of Independence, but were actually a band of rogues and Mugabe supporters, whom others began calling "Wovets. They carried out their threats with AK-47s and machetes. Many farm owners lost their lives in confrontations with the Wovits. Many of the wovit leaders took such names as Hitler Hunzvi, Comarade Satin and Stalin Mau Mau.
Peter's parents were white liberals, his mother was a physician in a black hospital. When she was in need of a hip replacement, she insisted on being treated in the same hospital where she worked instead of opting for a better-equip facility.
In 1978, shortly before her wedding, the author's older sister, Jain, and her fiance, were ambushed in a guerrilla attack. Later her grave is desecrated by wovits, simply because she is interned in a white cemetery.
Mugabe turns many blacks against the whites. Mavis, the Godwin's housekeeper, whom they regarded as a member of the family, began stealing from them and demanding money. The elderly Mr. Godwin was attacked outside the gates of his house. Fires are set in the bushes surrounding their house. Despite all this, the Godwin's refuse to leave the country that has been their home for 50 years.
When his father suffers a heart attack, Peter returns from his overseas journalist job to tend to his parents. He finds a photograph of a middle-aged couple and a young girl. His mother informs him that the people in the picture are his paternal grandparents and aunt. With this comes the knowledge that the man known as George Godwin was actually a Polish Jew named Kazimierz Goldfarb. He had been sent to England to a boarding school in 1939, thereby surviving the ensuing Holocaust. The rest of his family was not so lucky. His mother and sister were killed in the Holocaust. Although his father survived and remarried, George never saw him again. Instead, he reinvented himself as an Anglo and moved to the deepest part of Africa.
George Godwin observes that being a white in Zimbabwe is a bit like being a Jew in Poland during the Holocaust.
Read: October 25, 2009
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