KEY POINTS:
Peter Godwin mentions often in this memoir that Africa is his home, that he is a white African, and that one day he will return to live in Zimbabwe, the country where he was born in the days when it was called Rhodesia and ruled by a repressive
white minority.
Should we believe him when he says this, especially as affluent Manhattan is his home and nowadays he is a habitue of the club-class lounge and the luxury hotel? Could he give this up to return to ruined Zimbabwe, one of the most forlorn nations on Earth?
There is a scene at the end of the movie Blood Diamond, set during the recent civil war in Sierra Leone, in which the central character, a white, Rhodesia-born mercenary played by Leonardo DiCaprio, lies slumped against a rock having been shot in a gun battle with rebels.
He knows he is dying and he knows as well that there is nowhere else he would rather die than in the remote bush on the continent of his birth.
He reaches down and picks up a handful of iron-rich red soil, which he allows to run through his fingers in a grand gesture, borrowing from Hemingway, of blood and belonging.
He is of the soil, he wants to tell us, and Africa is his home - and yet, as a white man, he is implicated by the failures of colonialism, destined always to be apart, an outsider.
The DiCaprio character, like Peter Godwin, found himself fighting on the wrong side during the bitter conflicts that hastened the end first of Ian Smith's autocratic rule in Rhodesia and then of apartheid South Africa.
But, unlike Godwin, he never left Africa. Perhaps Godwin wishes that he, too, had stayed on, as his sister and parents did after the free election of Robert Mugabe's Zanu-PF in 1980, rather than becoming another melancholy white exile.
Godwin wrote well of his experiences as one of Ian Smith's soldiers in an earlier memoir, Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa (1997).
He grew up in the eastern borderlands, close to Mozambique and in Mukiwa he recalled how his childhood was coloured by a civil war that would in time claim the lives of many of his neighbours as well as one of his two sisters. Mukiwa was a more detailed and textured book than this present offering, which concentrates only on the recent collapse of Zimbabwe after the start of the farm invasions and land grabs that ultimately resulted in the destruction of the economy and the exodus of more than two million people, including most of the country's black middle class.
At its best, Crocodile is an intimate and tender portrait of a rather remarkable marriage - of two old people living in a country that they no longer understand, part of a racial minority whose numbers are diminishing with each passing week, an old couple lost, alone and bewildered as all around them is anarchy and despair.
Godwin's mother is a doctor, who, during a long career, has done much to control and eradicate many routine childhood diseases.
His father, a retired engineer, is a rather secretive and reserved "Englishman", in the usual colonial model.
As it turns out, he is nothing of the kind. In fact, he was born into a Jewish family in Poland; some of his relatives died in the Holocaust.
Godwin belatedly discovers all this on one of his intermittent visits "home" to see his parents in crumbling Harare, and worries about it.
But one isn't really interested in his father's backstory; what one wants to know more about is how it feels to live in Zimbabwe, in the here and now. How do you get around when there is no petrol? What do you eat when the agricultural infrastructure has collapsed?
What do the black urban poor think about Mugabe? Why is the opposition so riven and ineffective?
Godwin never really answers any of these questions, partly because he is understandably preoccupied by the struggles of his ageing parents, but also because he is never in the country long enough to offer a convincing account of its fall.
* Published by Picador
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