When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa.

Godwin, Peter (author).

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When journalist Godwin, author of the memoir Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa (1996), learns that his father is gravely ill, he flies home to Zimbabwe. Against the odds, his father makes a full recovery, and Godwin seizes the opportunity to get to know both his father and his country better. He finds Zimbabwe in a sad state in the late 1990s. Disgruntled veterans of the Rhodesian war and mobs of young men are terrorizing and sometimes killing white farmers and seizing their land with the tacit approval of Robert Mugabe’s government. Political opposition to the violence only brings more bloodshed as politicians from the opposition party are subject to similar attacks. On the personal front, Godwin’s mother reveals a surprising secret: his father’s real name is Jerzy Goldfarb, and he is actually a Jew born in Poland before World War II. Godwin is as enraptured by his father’s history—and its effect on his own sense of identity—as he is by tumultuous Zimbabwean politics. Godwin seamlessly blends a journalistic quest to get at the heart of the problems plaguing his home country with a family memoir in this absorbing, powerful book.