Growing up in Rhodesia in the 1960s, Peter Godwin inhabited a magical and frightening world of leopard-hunting, lepers, witch doctors, snakes and forest fires. As an adolescent, a conscript caught in the middle of a vicioud civil war, and then as an adult who returned to Zimbabwe as a journalist to cover the bloody transition to majority rule, he discovered a land stalked by death and danger.

About the Author

Peter Godwin is an award-winning author and journalist. Born and raised in Zimbabwe, after military service he studied law at Cambridge University and international relations and African history at Oxford. He was a foreign correspondent for the Sunday Times and a founding presenter and writer of Assignment/Correspondent, BBC television's premier foreign affairs programme. Mukiwa was an international bestseller and winner of the George Orwell Prize for political writing and the Esquire-Apple-Waterstone's Non-Fiction Award. When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, about his return to Zimbabwe as it began to collapse into chaos, is also published by Picador. He lives in New York.

Reviews

With humor, portent and melancholy, Godwin (Rhodesians Never Die) recreates his 1960s youth in white Rhodesia. The son of relatively liberal whites, Godwin, through family servants, gained a sense of black African culture, language and religion. His mother, a doctor, helped African women with contraception; Godwin, in one of his wistful flash-forwards, observes that after the country became Zimbabwe, the government saw family planning as racist-but women in this still patriarchal society mutinied. He describes his strange private school-"racial enlightenment within a system of extreme conservatism"-and how he learned, in a job at his father's mine, that he fit in neither with racially unquestioning whites nor with restive blacks. As a policeman sworn to defend his renegade homeland against black guerrillas seeking independence, Godwin found himself pained by guerrilla cruelties to civilians, but shamed by his own role in arresting local leaders. Godwin soon concluded that a black victory was inevitable, and escaped the deepening war for studies in England, trailed by bad dreams. When he returned three years later as a lawyer and journalist, he experienced some peace-a black soldier he met absolved him offhandedly. However, his efforts to uncover the new government's human rights abuses led him to be declared an enemy of the state. (May)