Peter Godwin, an award-winning writer, is on assignment in Zululand when he is summoned by his mother to Zimbabwe, his birthplace. His father is seriously ill; she fears he is dying. Godwin finds his country, once a postcolonial success story, descending into a vortex of violence and racial hatred. His father recovers, but over the next few years Godwin travels regularly between his family life in Manhattan and the increasing chaos of Zimbabwe, with its rampant inflation and land seizures making famine a very real prospect. It is against this backdrop that Godwin discovers a fifty-year-old family secret, one which changes everything he thought he knew about his father, and his own place in the world.
Rhodesia, 1964: a small boy witnesses the death of his neighbor, murdered by guerrillas-it is the beginning of the end of white rule in Africa. In Mukiwa, Peter Godwin, the witness to that murder, has written 'a classic of its genre' (Sunday Telegraph), a vivid and moving account of growing up in a colony rapidly collapsing into chaos.
In unforgettable tales of innocence lost under African skies, we follow Godwin's awakening to the often savage struggle between whites and blacks, his horror when he is forced to fight in a civil war he detests, and his experiences as a journalist covering the country's violent transition to black rule as Rhodesia's colonial era comes to an end and the new state of Zimbabwe is born from its bloody ashes. Mukiwa is a poignant, compelling memoir and an invaluable addition to the literature of southern Africa.
Born in what's now called Zimbabwe, journalist Peter Godwin returns to his homeland in 2008 after three decades of Robert Mugabe's brutal economic and human destruction. Hoping to "dance on Mugabe's political grave" in the wake of the tyrant's defeat at the polls, Godwin instead risks his life to secretly chronicle Mugabe's ruthless backlash of torture and terror locals call "The Fear." ". heart-wrenching and extremely moving."-Kirkus Reviews
