Zimbabwe: Peter Godwin's Book & How a Country Deconstructs

Start with what it looks like on virtual television:

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There are mornings where I feel I could simply share the references I find and leave the blogging at that.

But that would be too lazy even for ageing old me, so here, bear with, the simple observation that the distance between first letters in the alphabet may excede whatever humanitarian and political difference exist between the ruling junta in Burma and Robert Mugabe's totalitarian thugocracy in Zimbabwe.

Were my father alive and noting, as he did often, that "dictators are all alike," I would have had Pervez Musharraf to throw the wrench into the way his mind worked, and I'll hold to that most reluctant fist in the velvet glove thesis where Pakistan may be concerned, but dad would have most certainly drawn a tight wire between the racist fascists of World War II and those who have practically cleared the land of white farmers in the former Rhodesia while steeping the vast body of their constituents in degradation, fear, humiliation, ignorance, and poverty.

Peter Godwin's book, which judging by cover and title--When A Crocodile Eats the Sun--I mistook for potential entertainment as fiction, turns out a terrific personal history on how to turn the proverbial bowl of cherries, comparitively, into a huge mound of shit inside of a decade for two.

As you may have gleaned from elsewhere on this blog, some universal principles apply. Let me review them before returning to Godwin and country.

War is personal, especially as regards the contemplations of those who for gain or vengeance breath it into life.
Following from Canadian journalist Paul Watson's memoir, Where War Lives, what the source doesn't say--information not articulated--often fills out the story.
Ignorance and unhappiness help make a good mob for better educated and enterprising mobsters.
Where ideologues ply their trades, look for cultural refraction--many people, similar experiences, multiple interpretations: this is a function of education and has to do with the development in children and young adults of literary inter-cultural awareness and philosophicle and scientific intellectual rigor.

Peter Godwin's saga starts and ends with his father's cremation, for his is the son of the white farmer's story, but he gets into the memoir by relaying his taking notes on the second to last chapter, for a while, of the Zulu oral history, and that chapter ends with glorious, mad victory over the English.

"And here, Prince Biyela ends his telling, choosing not to dwell on what followed the Zulu victory. For the eclipse of the sun was a bad portent, and it drew down terrible times--the British reinforced and quickly snuffed out the independent Zulu nation. But still their spirit was not entirely doused. Their ferocity was merely curbed, and there was a sullen dignity to their defeat. It is said that before they would sign the surrender proclamation, one old induna stood and said to Sir Garnet Wolsely, "Today we will admit that we are your dogs, but you must first write it there, that the other tribes are the fleas on our backs" (Godwin, p. 10).

Again, when I bought it, I had no idea Godwin's would turn out another book about "conflict culture", but it has, and what remarkable tale telling of a state set up to feed itself and its neighbors and able to educate its own, blacks as well as whites, as well as its then white elite.

That alone wouldn't be much to brag today except by way of comparison with how things have gone beneath the ascendence of Mugabe's assemly of black elites where even the judges get farms to ensure alliegance to the power that be.

Godwin, who fought briefly on the white side of the civil war to end white rule, came of age with approximately 5,000 white-owned farms producing the country's agricultural wealth, and these may have included institutions like the white-black partnership that was Kendozi Estate, which until recently produced about $15 million U.S. dollars in trade annually and supported 5,000 workers and their families (in 2004, Mugabe deeded the property to Transport Minister Christopher Mushohwe, driving out owners and workers alike with machine guns and canon) [8].

Today, fewer than 400 white- owned farms remain.

By the end of the book Godwin's father, born a Polish Jew in 1923, made a refugee of war and Holocaust both and passing with and to his own family as a Christain, and becoming in Rhodesia a successful farmer, dies nearly a pauper's death--and then in death, to get his wish for buriel through cremation, glides off to his final pyre-empowered oxidation as a Hindu.

Godwin's life twines with the fate of the old Rhodesia's white farmers through his experience as the good son to his parents who rise in Rhodesia and then suffer in Mugabe's Zimbabwe, more and less, as do their neighbors and peers.

In his book, the "War Vets" invade the farms as misdirected, ill-educated, and surly gangs intent on theft rather than development. They become known as the "wovits", a peculiar class of predator poorly prepared--not prepared at all--for living on farms, much less operating them.

Events in Kenya last month where angered mobs with machetes killed in less than a discerning manner in the wake of a suspect election plus the absolutely dismal history of agriculture in Zimbabwe in the wake of the so-called "land reform" and redistribution to date underscore this: there is nothing productive about leaders who drive constituents to violence through appeals to ethnic or racial arguments and bias.

None.

For all intents, and this undeniably under Robert Mugabe's stewardship, Zimbabwe has run out of money (that is, except for its ruling elite, who live in patrolled enclaves); predictably, it finds itself short, and that is too mild a word, on food and oil; according to the above Reuters clip, its people flee (and burden neighbors) at a clip of about 5,000 each day [2].

As March elections near, the Zimbabwe story will become more prominent in day-to-day media coverage, but when popular interest fades, the story will remain far from over. Even if, miraculously, an army rose to depose Mugabe, back a popular, egalitarian leader, and return white farmers to their homes made ancestral in the 20th Century, the "wovits" would have to be accounted and cared for too, and that's going to make bringing Zimbabwe back from the living dead a most challenging revolution in human political, psychological, and social behavior.

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1. "Rhodesia." Wikipedia, as experienced February 19, 2008.

2. "War veterans rally for Mugabe." Video. Reuters, December 15, 2007.

3. Godwin, Peter. When A Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, First U.S. Edition: 2007; first published, Picador Africa, 2006.

4. Mutasa, Haru. "Zimbabwe faces farmers challenge." News Africa, Al Jazeera, October 11, 2007.

5. Modburg, Mencius. "Rhodesia: The Country That Used to Be." Global Politician, August 17, 2007.

6. Misc. Headlines. The Zimbabwe Situation. February 19, 2008.

7. "Zimbabwe: White farmers begin returning home." IRIN, February 19, 2008.

8. Sithole, Joseph. "More White Zimbabwean Farmers Expelled." February 9, 2007.

Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim