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Memoir of Africa is said to be bleak but necessary

By M&C News May 20, 2007, 14:57 GMT

In his new book, Peter Godwin shares what is part personal memoir, part family history and part examination of a country's slide into disaster. When a Crocodile Eats the Sun is an odd title that refers to an ancient African belief that a mystical crocodile causes the solar eclipse.

Godwin is a freelance journalist who frequently visits Africa as a way to see his parents (his identity is that of a white African who spends much of his life living in the West). In this book he also chronicles the gruesome changes in Zimbabwe as the policies of transferring ownership of white-owned farms to blacks take effect. In 1996 when his father suffers a heart attack, he returns to Africa and therefore the central revelation of the book is revealed: that the father is Jewish and has hidden it from Godwin and his siblings.Other topics include the effect AIDS has had on the population, as well as the government opposition in changing policies for the better. While his parents refuse to leave the country despite its problems, Godwin also makes efforts to learn more about his father's true history as he tracks down his family that died in the Holocaust. He feels unable to bear the burden of colonialism, leading him to ponder, "A white in Africa is like a Jew everywhere — on sufferance, watching warily, waiting for the next great tidal swell of hostility." In this book Godwin creates a portrait of a family and nation across decades as he comes to deal with his father's death and humans disregard for one another.

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P. MangwendeMay 21st, 2007 - 05:02:21

A great book about the deterioration of a once great nation and how a family coped with it.

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