When a Crocodile Eats the Sun

by Peter Godwin

  When, a few years later, he receives a cable from Poland that Stefan Golaszewski has died, George is unable to weep, my mother says. He tears up the telegram and refuses to discuss it with her.

  George has already applied to be naturalized, though there is a five-year backlog of applicants, Poles and Czechs and Hungarians, whose countries are now behind Stalin’s Iron Curtain. But before Princess Elizabeth could marry Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark, in late 1947, he too needed to be naturalized. And rather than let the prince be seen to line jump, the Home Office clears the logjam, and my father finally becomes a British citizen in early 1949.

  Once he is naturalized, my father changes his surname too. First my mother has to change hers. She drops “Godwin,” her third Christian name, an old family name. And my father adopts it as his surname, and so it now becomes my mother’s married name. When he emigrates to Africa, he is George Godwin. A new man. A man fleeing racial persecution and war, mayhem and genocide. And with him, a woman who will keep his secret, even from their own children.

  THE AFRICA IN WHICH my parents arrive after the war is a hopeful place, at least if you are white. It is still entirely white ruled. The better part of a decade is yet to pass before Harold Macmillan, as British prime minister, will make his famous 1960 “Wind of Change” speech, which signals Britain’s flagging imperial energy and its intention to shed its African colonies.

  At first George is sent out by his employer, Gwynn’s Pumps of Lincoln (whose machines drain the Fens of East Anglia), to install a new water supply system for Blantyre, the capital of Nyasaland — a country named after the lake that forms its core. David Livingstone had so named it after pointing at the lake and asking the local Yao people what it was called. “Nyasa,” they said. So he named it Lake Nyasa. In chiYao, nyasa means “lake.” Lake Lake. So good they named it twice.

  It is here in Nyasaland (now Malawi) that George poses for the earliest photos I have so far seen of him. In one he’s on the veranda of Riley’s Hotel, a liveried black waiter at his side in the act of serving him a frosty beer on a tray. In another he stands against the majestic backdrop of Mount Mulanje, wearing small aviator shades. His legs are planted apart, his fists are on his hips, and he is grinning at the newness of it all, grinning at this place that seems to have no history, a greenfield site for Europeans of energy and aptitude. You can almost see him deciding that he wants to stay.

  For him, Africa is clearly the antidote to Europe’s great burden of history, the blood feuds and the destruction, the prejudices and the pogroms and the Holocaust. It is a place where he can wipe his memory of past hurt and start again. It is the final phase of establishing his new identity. Once he arrives he breaks off all contact with the past.

  “I arrived in Africa, in Nyasaland, for the first time in October,” he tells me. “And the hotel I stayed in, Riley’s, was on the corner of two streets with views up both, lined with jacarandas in full bloom. Pete, I thought it was one of the most beautiful sights I’d ever seen.” His heart was lifted by the sheer exuberance of it, the extravagance of the blossom. Though he didn’t know it then, he was responding to something not indigenous to Africa at all — jacarandas were imported from South America. One exotic was luring another.

  He finds a job in Nyasaland’s near neighbor, Rhodesia, and one for Helen too, with the Ministry of Health. And he writes persuading her that this is the new start they need. This is their destiny. So, as soon as she finishes her first-year medical internship, she boards an airliner on the Zambezi service of Central African Airways. Her plane hops from London to Nice to Malta and then down colonial Africa, stopping at Khartoum, Entebbe, and Victoria Falls, until finally she reaches Salisbury, the Rhodesian capital.

  Thirteen

  February 2002

  IT IS SOMETIMES SAID that the worst thing to happen to Africa was the arrival of the white man. And the second worst was his departure. Colonialism lasted just long enough to destroy much of Africa’s indigenous cultures and traditions, but not long enough to leave behind a durable replacement.

  There is a paradox at the heart of Africa: it is mankind’s crucible, the motherland, the place where early hominids evolved and, presumably therefore, the environment originally most hospitable to man, yet Africa is now the economic laggard, the Cinderella continent, a byword for poverty, disease, and underdevelopment; the Third World’s Third World. In 1963, Zimbabwe had the same gross domestic product as South Korea. Now South Korea’s economy is a hundred and twenty times the size of Zimbabwe’s. Africa accounts for more than 11 percent of the world’s population and less than 2 percent of its trade.

  Zimbabwe is undisputed leader of the comparative economic decline. It has the world’s fastest shrinking economy. Today the average Zimbabwean has a standard of living that is half what it was at independence in 1980.

  The paradox has long bewildered me, and I get a chance, in 2002, to examine it when asked by the British TV station, Channel 4, to make a documentary. They want me and Aminatta Forna, a writer (and former colleague at the BBC) whose Sierra Leonean father was executed by the local dictator when she was a child, to answer the question, Do Africa’s problems reside principally in the continent’s underlying environment, or with imposed colonial distortions, or with the travesty of Africa’s postcolonial leadership? We are not proposing solutions here; we are just conducting a biopsy of the blame.

  The historic lack of big cities is certainly one clue. The city is the petri dish of civilization, a marketplace for produce and ideas, a site where man can specialize. But sub-Saharan Africa had few cities of any size at the time it was “discovered” by Europeans, as Jonathan Swift noted in a satirical ditty:

  So geographers, in Afric maps,

  With savage pictures fill their gaps,

  And o’er unhabitable downs

  Place elephants for want of towns.

  You need a food surplus to establish real cities, and Africa’s uniquely hostile environment conspired against this, the anthropologist Jared Diamond explains to me. The continent was dealt a hand perversely plagued with pestilence, which kept Africans largely isolated from each other and from the rest of the world until relatively recently.

  “It seems that for our sins,” one sixteenth-century Portuguese explorer of Africa despaired, “or some inscrutable judgment of God, in all entrances He has placed a striking angel with a deadly sword of flaming fevers.” Today, we find, the limits of Islamic conversion in Africa tally roughly with the range of the dreaded tsetse fly, which wiped out the horse-borne northerners in the west and limited Arab traders to the coast in the east.

  Diamond also explains that Africa has no indigenous beasts of burden. For a wild animal to be domesticated, it has to possess a series of attributes, including a follow-the-leader social structure, a nice disposition, and a tendency not to panic. “Rhinoceroses, boy would they be fantastic meat production animals,” he says. “But there are two things against rhinos: they have a nasty disposition, and they have a territorial social structure, so you cannot herd them. If that had not been the case, then the Zulus would have ridden into Europe on rhinos and just plunged through the ranks of European cavalry with their wretched little horses — but it never happened.”

  So African agriculture remains at only a subsistence level for millennia because without draft animals nearly all tilling must be done by hand. As the old African axiom goes, “It’s a wise man who cultivates just as much land as his wife can conveniently hoe.” Unsurprising then, that by 1500, sub-Saharan Africa had a population density of only 4.9 per square mile — when Japan had 120.2 and Europe, 35.4, and where cities flourished.

  The notable African exception is the highlands of Ethiopia, which remain free of malaria and sleeping sickness. And it’s no coincidence that this rugged region is where the ancient stone city of Aksum rises, where an indigenous form of writing is invented, and where a strong centralized government evolves. No coincidence either that but for a tiny window of five years when M
ussolini tried vainly to subjugate it, it’s the one African country that largely resisted European colonization. (Liberia, on the west coast, was settled and effectively colonized by freed slaves from the Americas.)

  When the first Europeans arrive in Africa, they bring their territorial imperative with them. And once the dust settles from the “Scramble for Africa,” the continent finds itself sliced up into bizarre and arbitrary shapes. Kilimanjaro, for instance, is said to have been given by Queen Victoria as a birthday present to her cousin, the Kaiser, because she has two snowcapped African peaks, and he has none. Many of these new states lump together ancient antagonists, cut across cultural and economic hinterlands. Europeans take Africa by the scruff of its neck and shake the bejesus into it, knocking it clear off its cultural fulcrum by doing good things and bad on so many fronts: religion, trade, infrastructure, health. Societies that are built on the mathematical fundamentals of women giving birth to twelve babies in order to bring two or three to maturity suddenly find themselves with five, seven, nine children and all the attendant cultural chaos. Europeans entice them to want stuff — soap, clothes, bicycles, radios, stoves; turn them into impoverished consumers; co-opt their chiefs, tax them, and compel them to leave home to labor for wages.

  WE CRISSCROSS THE CONTINENT, puzzling over this blame game, from South Africa to Sierra Leone to Ethiopia. There, sitting in Emperor Haile Selassie’s lovingly preserved imperial railway coach, I ask the country’s leading historian, Chifera Aberkelly, what the advantages are of never really having been ruled by the white man. Certainly Ethiopia has been as plagued with dictatorship, war, and famine as anywhere else in Africa.

  “This is a very tricky question,” he says. Dodging the bullet of colonialism means that Ethiopia has never benefited from sustained colonial investment in public works, in infrastructure, however lopsided that might be. The water-supply networks that my father came out to build in colonial Nyasaland were never built in Ethiopia. But on the other hand, says Aberkelly, “we were able to maintain our identity, our national language, our national traditions and institutions, and this kind of independence had a big impact on the national psyche of the people, on our pride.”

  THERE IS ONE CONTEMPORARY Zimbabwean writer who has wrestled more than most with the bear of African identity. His name is Dambudzo Marechera, and I met him once in Harare: slight, bespectacled, and cursed with a most terrible affliction for one so enamored of words — a maddening stutter.

  Later, when I try to write about him, I find that there are many different versions of his life. Just like my father’s, Marechera’s biographical facts changed like the njuzu, the mythical manfish that populates his writing and is constantly altering its form. As a boy, Marechera scavenged the local rubbish dump for old books and magazines tossed away by the white community. His father, a mortuary assistant, was run down and killed by a car when Dambudzo was in his second year of a scholarship at St. Augustine’s, an Anglican mission school in the eastern Highlands. His mother turned to prostitution to make ends meet. Marechera was expelled from the University of Rhodesia for taking part in student protests in the dog days of the white regime. But he went on to Oxford.

  Like a great river, education seemed to swirl him downstream, farther and farther from his roots, marooning him on a cultural sandbar far from the banks of belonging. He felt within himself a number of different identities, and it was the conflict between these that he mined to such good effect. Even as he castigated himself as “a keen accomplice in my own mental colonization” for his enthusiasm for Western education, he remained unapologetic about his catholic thirst for literature. He wanted to escape the ghetto of “African” writing to claim a broader, universal canvas.

  Marechera’s refusal to trade on blackness as his defining trait, but rather to remain a free literary spirit, annoyed many of his fellow African writers and soon the badge of heretic — one he wore with pride — had been applied to him by the orthodoxy of black nationalism. “No, I don’t hate being black,” he wrote crossly. “I’m just tired of saying it’s beautiful.”

  He had shunned those who wanted him to become a literary champion of the African cause, accusing them of “trying to reduce me to some kind of Bantustan writer with all the fucking Boers applauding. . . .”

  When he was decried in some quarters for choosing to write in English, the tongue of the “colonial oppressor,” which was seen by some as an act of subjugation in itself, he wrote, “I prefer to go along with Caliban’s theory: ‘You learned me your language, now I can insult you in it.’?”

  And he pointed out that Shona (his native tongue) in its written form was covered with the white man’s fingerprints — it was, after all, missionaries who standardized it and rendered it onto the page, largely to facilitate their Christian proselytizing, which often functioned as the Trojan horse leading to full-blown indigenous cultural servitude.

  In the light of recent events in Zimbabwe, his views on the corruption of the elite — the so-called chefs — and their betrayal of the povo — “the people” — who delivered them to power were more than prescient. “Ring studded black fingers / Around the pink gin of change,” he wrote of the new leaders. But his criticism of the new black elite in Zimbabwe came unfashionably early. In the days when almost all Zimbabweans had been dyed in the vat of optimism, Marechera was already the canard at the party, blowing raspberries at the heroes — sometimes literally. When Robert Mugabe visited London in 1978, at the height of the war for Zimbabwean independence, Marechera was the lone heckler in an audience full of sympathizers.

  He felt strongly that there was something of the emperor’s new clothes in the specter of new African leadership, that African postcolonial identity provided a protective fog of black culture to obscure a multitude of sins against the people. In his poem “Oracle of the Povo” he talks of those “Who yesterday a country won / And today poverty tasted.” And he mocked the patronizing white liberal cheerleaders of the African cause for falling for a sentimentalized view of the “African image.” He wished to break out entirely from the sterile binary bout between colonizer and subject, oppressor and victim, exotic and indigenous — the lazy, generalized shorthand of evil and good that seemed so natural to impose on Africa in the first flush of independence. In fact, he questioned the whole foundation of Africa’s newly independent states, based as they are on these flawed colonial territories, “nations” invented by whites. Was independence nothing more, he asked, than a rebranding of essentially the same product?

  I’d like to speak to Marechera for this documentary, but I can’t. He died of AIDS-induced pneumonia at the age of thirty-five, a homeless pauper on a Harare park bench. A prophet without honor in his own land.

  THE IDEA IS THAT I will complete the filming by going on to Zimbabwe for the forthcoming presidential elections (which are held separately from parliamentary elections), to take its democratic pulse. Prospects for a free and fair election there are, once more, but dim indeed. The general in charge of the defense forces, Vitalis Zvinavashe, goes on TV to say that his soldiers will not permit the victory of any candidate who has not served as a guerrilla in the war for independence, which would preclude Mugabe’s main opponent, Morgan Tsvangirai. The warning is tantamount to a preemptive coup. Then Tsvangirai himself is charged with high treason for allegedly fomenting plans to assassinate Mugabe. The evidence comes from a grainy videotape secretly recorded by an Israeli con man, the voices on it largely inaudible.

  BY THIS TIME, Mugabe has made it illegal to hold dual nationality and banned long-term residents who give up their Zimbabwean passports from voting. Mugabe’s move affects mostly whites, and many are torn. Some suspect that he may push through laws forbidding nonnationals to own property or businesses. But there is also a fear that by giving up rights to a second nationality they will forfeit foreign refuge in the face of a complete meltdown in Zimbabwe. My parents decide to spread the risk. One will keep a British passport and the other will forfeit it and remain Zimbab
wean. Because Dad is British, not by birth, but by naturalization, he will keep his British passport. A legal appeal has been launched against disenfranchisement of registered voters, like Dad, as being unconstitutional, so he hopes he will keep his right to vote. Mum, a Briton by birth, will give up her British passport. Hoping that the Queen will understand that circumstances require it, she sends her British passport off to the Zimbabwean Ministry of Home Affairs as stipulated by the new law. But because it actually belongs to Her Majesty’s government, the ministry, under diplomatic protocol, has to forward the passport to the British High Commission, which in turn — much to Mugabe’s chagrin — sends it back to my mother. Several months after surrendering her British passport, she finds it back in our mailbox.

  So Mugabe tries again. This time, he orders all those with even a notional birthright to a second nationality to bring him proof of repudiation of that right. My mother signs a form that states that she turns her back on the Queen and on any possibility of a British nationality, that she is irrevocably African. She lines up at the British High Commission to sign the documents, and the British charge her — at the higher black market rate — for the privilege.

  For some, however, the process of preserving their Zimbabwean citizenship is positively Kafkaesque. Robin Watson, my honorary godfather, and one of my father’s best friends, was born in India when it was still a British colony. When he goes to the British High Commission to sign a form saying he renounces all claims to be British, they say they cannot cosign it as he was born in India. “You need the Indians to sign,” they tell him. But when he goes to the Indian High Commission, they turn him away, saying it is a British matter, nothing to do with them.