Peter Godwin: When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa (2007, Little Brown)

A couple of quotes from Joshua Hammer's New York Review of Books (Dec. 20, 2007) review of Peter Godwin's Zimbabwe memoir:

Rhodesia under Ian Smith declared independence from Great Britain in 1965, creating a racist government in a nation where whites made up less than 1 percent of the population. Smith's government fell to Robert Mugabe in 1980, who then had to balance off colonial economics against majority rule (p. 32):

[Zimbabwe]'s six thousand white-owned commercial farms were the engines of the new nation's prosperity. White farmers employed nearly 40 percent of the black population, and, although a de facto system of apartheid remained intact on their farms, more enlightened whites paid their workers good wages and built schools and health centers on their properties. Hard currency poured into Zimbabwe through agricultural exports -- mostly tobacco -- tourism, and minerals. This newfound wealth allowed the black-majority government (whites still served in the country's parliament and in the judiciary) to invest in schools, roads, and other infrastructure, bring in Western goods, and otherwise modernize the country.

Godwin doesn't dispute that a major land-redistribution plan was necessary to correct a century of injustice. But he blames the country's failure to do so earlier on Mugabe as much as on the country's white-racist past. A British-funded voluntary redistribution program did turn over 40 percent of white-owned land to blacks before it disbanded in the 1990s -- done in, Godwin says, by Mugabe's lack of interest in the program and by the British government's disgust over Mugabe's channeling much of the property to well-heeled loyalists. By that point, land redistribution had become a low priority for most Zimbabweans, thanks to urbanization, widespread literacy, and growing prosperity. [ . . . ]

Mugabe's real aim, of course, has not been to right colonial injustices, but to keep himself in power, whatever the cost. And white farmers are hardly his only victims.

(pp. 34-35):

Nearly four years after Godwin ends his narrative (with the death and cremation of his father in early 2004), the degradation and the suffering continue in Zimbabwe. Eighty-five percent of the population is jobless. Most schools and hospitals have collapsed. The rate of inflation reached 7,500 percent last June; the same month, the government declared a price freeze and arrested thousands of merchants who defied it. Production came to a standstill. The United Nations now estimates that some four million Zimbabweans -- about one third of the population -- will face food shortages or famine by the first quarter of 2008. [ . . . ]

The United States and the European Union have imposed sanctions on Mugabe and his cronies that have frozen their overseas bank accounts and keep them from traveling abroad; but the measures have been largely ineffective. Many African leaders continue to rally around Mugabe, championing him as a living symbol of black liberation. Thabo Mbeki, the president of Zimbabwe's powerful neighbor, South Africa, has refrained from publicly criticizing him, and has saved Zimbabwe from total paralysis by providing the government with fuel, power, and occasional dollops of cash.