Peter Godwin: Truth in black and white

"This is a book I tried not to write," says Peter Godwin, brushing his hand across the colourful jacket of his second memoir, which lies on the kitchen table next to him. "I felt squeamish about it. In the end I only started writing it by kidding myself that it wasn't going to be a memoir."

It is always, it is said, a mistake (except in the eyes of your publisher) to follow up a successful book with more of the same. But that is essentially what Godwin has done. A decade after Mukiwa, his account of growing up a white boy in what was then Rhodesia, won prizes and plaudits, When a Crocodile Eats the Sun (Picador, £16.99) takes up the story of his ongoing love affair with Africa. It chronicles Robert Mugabe's cruel retribution on his country for voting against him in a 2000 referendum, as Godwin frames the tale of the disintegration of his homeland with an account of his father's last years in poverty in Harare.

This is a follow-up, then, but one that comes with caveats. "As a white writing about Africa, I always feel quite self-conscious," explains Godwin. "The suffering of blacks in Zimbabwe is many multiples of what white suffering is. I take that as a starting-point. And I do find the idea of whites writing about what is predominantly black suffering a bit rich."

He offers, in this context, the cautionary example of apartheid South Africa. "I used to find it faintly ironic that after whites had spent 100 years oppressing blacks there, it ended up being our best white, liberal writers who were writing about what it is like to be oppressed. It was as if whites were taking away that experience too, and moderating it through our eyes. I'm not arguing for a minute about segregating the experience, but equally I am very aware that there are plenty of good black Zimbabwean writers."

That said, he still believes that the white African experience can justify being explored in print - if only to prove that the words "white" and "African" are not an oxymoron.

Sitting in the north London home of an old friend, Godwin, a youthful, animated figure, with a shock of thick, greying hair and a big, open face, recounts how in New York, where he now lives with his wife and two small sons, there is tremendous competition to land places at good schools. "All have a vocal commitment to diversity and so ask about parents' ethnic background. I wrote 'Zimbabwean' in the box and we got an interview almost at once. But when I walked into the room, they said 'Sorry, there has been a mistake. Your form says you come from Africa but you're white.'"

The anecdote highlights one of the problems that comes with the territory Godwin has chosen to inhabit as a writer. Why write about Africa when you have chosen to leave? "My link is more than a drive-by experience," he explains. "It is a love of the landscape, and a knowledge of the place, the fact that I am immersed in it. It's an emotional attachment that is historical. I feel that there are ties made up of Velcro, but all of different strengths. In some places the Velcro is very strong, in others it is quite easy to rip yourself off and attach yourself to somewhere else.

"The weird thing," he adds, "is that you only know where you are from when you leave. It's your experience of departure that is the litmus test. You realise that you are leaving a big part of yourself behind."

While Godwin makes no excuses at all for white Rhodesians and their domestic apartheid regime, which finally collapsed in 1980, his new book is, in one sense, a powerful lament for the missed opportunity in Zimbabwe of building a truly multi-racial society in Africa. "The white population was much reduced post-independence when those who couldn't stomach black rule left. Those who remained were getting close to becoming indigenous. The circumstances of how your ancestors had arrived there two or three generations back are - or at least were - becoming less important."

Even Mugabe's attacks after 2000 on white farmers have not entirely destroyed that process, Godwin believes. Playing the race card may protect Mugabe from the wrath of other African leaders, but it doesn't fool ordinary Zimbabweans, black or white.

"When you are in extreme circumstances, there is often a bonding experience and life under Mugabe has done that to Zimbabweans. You are all under the heel of this dictator and you are all in petrol queues together. Suddenly race peels away... For the first time, you see a really multiracial society in Africa just as it is about to die."

Godwin's parents had gone to Rhodesia after the Second World War. His mother was a doctor who worked to build a network of rural clinics and hospitals as well as raising her three children. His father was an engineer. They chose to stay on after independence but When a Crocodile Eats the Sun chapters their economic and physical decline, with hyper-inflation eating away at their pensions and Mugabe's misrule destroying anything good or enduring that had been created during their lifetimes there.

As Godwin travels between his home in America and theirs in Harare, trying to mitigate their struggle during his father's last illness, a family secret is revealed. Far from being the more-English-than-the-English colonial type his son always assumed him to be, George Godwin is in fact Kazio Goldfarb, a Jewish refugee from Poland who lost his family in the Holocaust. He escaped to England and headed for Africa in 1945 with his new bride in an effort to bury his past and its horrors.

In the book, his son is broadcasting what his father tried for so long to keep hidden. Does it cause him any unease? "There is," Godwin is quick to acknowledge, "a certain amount of revelation that comes with the territory in books like mine. The curse is to have a writer in the family. In Mukiwa I gave my parents a qualified power of veto. It is not an exaggeration to say that my anticipation of what they would object to and their actual objections did not overlap in a single place. It just shows how little you know about how people see themselves, and what they are sensitive about or not."

With the new book, he submitted himself to the same process but, because most was written after his father's death, this time only with his mother. "She has given her approval. I miss my dad's eye," Godwin says, slipping into the present tense. "He is so exacting and he's the best fact-checker. He clears the desk, rolls his sleeves up and gets on with it."

How, I wonder, would he have reacted to seeing his "secret" in print? "It was the secret that shaped his worldview and ultimately it was why my parents went to Zimbabwe after the war. My father was running from something... A lot of the book is about a collapsing African state, but in his youth it was Europe that did that. If you look, as he must have, at Europe from the vantage point of the end of the Second World War, the barbarity, brutality and unimaginable savagery didn't have anything to do with blacks or Africa. It was white. So he has crossed the world to get away from that... but ended up in a situation of barbarity and brutality."

Godwin talks - and indeed writes - with a certain detachment about these tragedies. That is what, in the family sections of When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, makes his memoir so affecting. You never feel your emotions are being manipulated. The distancing is his way of dealing with the enormous changes he has already witnessed. "My family has lost literally everything," he reflects. "And so has Zimbabwe. It's a shame on so many levels because I don't see how that can ever be recreated. I'm beyond anger now."

Though a British audience may have a particular interest in Zimbabwe, there is also a profound foreignness to the tale Godwin tells. We live in a place where, as he puts, we have "clear sight lines to past and change seems to evolve in organic, bite-site, calibrated chunks". By contrast, Zimbabwe is a place where there is no continuity but instead a series of seismic and unpredictable shifts.

The pace of change has left Godwin rootless. In such a context, his two memoirs represent his best stab at rootedness. "Writing," he says, "is the way I deal with things. Writing it down will make it safe... Otherwise what has happened is just too sad. It's just literally, terminally sad. And writing is all I've got."

Peter Stanford's biography of C Day Lewis appears from Continuum next month

Biography

Peter Godwin was born in white-ruled southern Rhodesia in 1957. He studied at Cambridge and went on to work as a foreign correspondent for The Sunday Times and a news correspondent for the BBC. He was a founding presenter and writer of Assignment, the television foreign-affairs strand. His 1996 autobiography, Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa, won the George Orwell Prize and the Esquire/Apple/ Waterstone's Award. He now lives in New York with his wife Joanna Coles, editor of US Marie Claire, and their two children. Together they wrote The Three of Us: a new life in New York (2003). He has been Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton and currently teaches at the New School in Manhattan. His second memoir, When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, is published this month by Picador.