Volume 54, Number 20 · December 20, 2007
In the Pit of Africa
By Joshua Hammer
When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa
by Peter Godwin
Little, Brown, 344 pp., $24.99
At the beginning of Peter Godwin's enthralling memoir, When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, the author, a foreign correspondent living in New York City, returns home to the bush of Zimbabwe, back to the town where he was born and spent his childhood and teenage years. The year is 1997, and the black liberation struggle that ripped apart the country during his youth is a distant memory; the future seems bright for blacks, and Zimbabwe's roughly sixty thousand white residents, not only farmers but well-to-do business people and professionals, remain in a separate world of prosperity and security. Godwin and his girlfriend, an Englishwoman new to Africa, drive through the countryside, marveling at the tranquillity of a place so recently scarred by war. At one point they encounter 'a ragged crocodile of small black children jogging back from school,' he writes. The sight of this threadbare procession prompts contrary reactions from Godwin and his girlfriend (now his wife):
Review, 4204 words
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