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Around the World in Books / Zimbabwe
When Terror Struck A Writer’s Family
His sister was killed in an army ambush, but a former BBC correspondent kept reporting on Robert Mugabe’s outrages
This is the final post in the “Around the World in Books” series, which has reviewed books about 30 countries during the first 30 days of March 2022. Thank you for reading!
“In Africa, you do not view death from the auditorium of life, as a spectator, but from the edge of the stage, waiting only for your cue,” Peter Godwin writes in When a Crocodile Eats the Sun. He speaks from tragic experience in his elegant memoir of the terrors inflicted on his family and others during the brutal regime of dictator Robert Mugabe (1924–2019), who dominated Zimbabwe politics for four decades.
Godwin’s older sister and her fiancé were killed in 1978, just before their wedding, when they ran into army ambush during the war for independence. No one can know the full effects of that tragedy on his mother, a doctor, and his father, an engineer, among the last wave of English immigrants to arrive before Rhodesia became Zimbabwe. But if Helen and George Godwin thought their lives couldn’t get worse, they were wrong.
