When A Crocodile Eats The Sun – Peter Godwin
I seem to have read a number of books recently which filled me with various emotions – anger at injustice, sadness at the blind greed and selfishness of the human race, and rage at people who use power for their own ends, whilst trampling on anyone around them who gets in their way. When A Crocodile Eats The Sun is a memoir from the journalist, Peter Godwin who was a white who was born and grew up in Rhodesia (as it was then), and who watches the collapse of the country he called home as it fell into corruption, destruction and a pit of injustice and cruelty beneath Mugabe. This descent is tracked through his experience with his parents who had lived in Zimbabwe for 50 years and who would not leave. Yet again, I was left annoyed at my own ignorance of what goes on elsewhere in the world, and speechless at the quagmire this country has become.
Rather than going into the detail, I wanted to put forward a thought which was raised by this book. Interestingly enough, just before I finished it I was listening to a podcast which was talking about the first mass murder of the 20th Century – the 3 to 4 million Africans who were killed either directly or indirectly by the colonial rule of Belgium in the Congo and the subsequent drive for rubber. Reflecting on that and all of the other racist cruelties which occurred on account of colonialism, on the surface of it one can almost understand why, when the blacks seized power, they felt the need to treat the remaining whites with equivalent cruelty.
However, is it just me, but when has a problem ever been solved by straight revenge? When has treating the old oppressor in the same way as they treated us been an appropriate and effective tactic? There could be argument that fighting back against the actual oppressor might be justified, but what if the people you are fighting and second generation, third generation, removed from the act of oppression by years? Unfortunately, the world is such that humans have long memories when they choose and amnesia when it suits them. And in the melee, ordinary people who are just trying to get on with their lives have to suffer.
Godwin’s story of his parents is heartbreaking in so many ways, and yet they maintain their spirit and try to maintain some semblance of life. The tragedy is, the author discovers that his father had already had his fair share of loss – he was a Polish Jew who lost his mother and sister to the hell hole of Treblinka. Another time, another oppressor, another cruel period of history. Does it ever end?
I am very grateful to the author for telling us his story and allowing us to see Zimbabwe from someone on the inside. You can’t help but feel the same sense of betrayal and bitterness which his parents must have felt, and fury at the corruption which meant that the poor, who had supposedly been oppressed by the whites, remained poorer than ever as their black leaders stole even more from them. Once again, I finished this book thinking ‘what hope is there in the face of human greed?’. Perhaps I should take hope from the individual stories that the author offers – the people who help one another, irrespective of colour, the people who support one another because there is need, not because there is gain, and the sense that perhaps, just perhaps, something can be done.
Rating: 10/10
ISBN: 978-0-330-43369-3
Publisher: Picador
Year: 2007
Date Finished: 23 December 2009
Pages: 342
