Mugabe Hits Home

The real heroes of Peter Godwin’s When the Crocodile Eats the Sun are the white farmers of Zimbabwe. And that is the problem. While no one in his right mind would support Robert Mugabe’s murderous depredations on his own country, it is sometimes forgotten that in the beginning Mugabe had a point. Rhodesia (the colonial name of Zimbabwe) was given to a tiny minority of white settlers in the late nineteenth century, while the vast majority of black Rhodesians were available for their use as virtual slave labor. The whites helped themselves generously to all the arable land; the blacks were left with scrub and rocky soil to eke out the necessities of life. This situation changed little over a hundred years. The whites fought to keep their privileges and their land while they casually brutalized the black population. This state of affairs lasted until the civil war that began in the mid-1960s and in which the author fought, in his own words, “on the wrong side”—i.e. against the black liberators of the colony. When Mugabe came to power in 1979, he talked about an equitable redistribution of the land, and he guaranteed the white farmers that they would be compensated for the land they had to give up. The resulting Lancaster House Agreement slowly fell into desuetude.

The descendants of the original white farmers are a constant subject of this book. They are the reluctant converts to nonracialism who, having controlled the black population with an iron fist for nearly a century—and, having been on the losing side of the civil war (1974–80)—had to adjust their practices to include the blacks and improve their standard of living. White farmers have been killed by black so-called “war vets,” who have squatted on white land and assaulted and murdered white owners trying to protect their farms. It remains the case, however, that far more blacks than whites have been attacked and killed by government-sponsored thugs. Zimbabwe’s once-rich farms are being slowly destroyed, and the economy hovers on the brink of total collapse. Inflation is about 7,000 percent. It is no doubt true, as Godwin maintains, that many of the farmers were heroic in attempting to protect their farms and their African workers from the violent and terrible takeovers. What Godwin seems reluctant to address is that by the time the redistribution of farmland had become acceptable to the white farmers, it was essentially too late. Black hatred of the whites was old, deep, and real; and, given the opportunity for revenge, the dispossessed population carried it out with terrible force. Godwin’s compassion for the white farmers is commendable, but he might have shown more awareness of the century-long legacy of oppression and violence against the blacks.

Prior to the war and the Lancaster House Agreement of 1980, the whites fought hard to keep their privileges and the land they and their families had owned for decades. The white electorate (95 percent of voters) overwhelmingly voted the racist party of Ian Smith into power on the grounds that he promised not to yield to the British demands that power and land be shared with the blacks. The mainstay of the economy, they were successful and rich; but there was historic resentment of them by the blacks who made their wealth possible, which is indisputable. There can be no doubt that Mugabe and his henchmen, among whom are brutes rejoicing in such noms de guerre as Hitler and Stalin, are primarily responsible for encouraging and legitimizing the farm attacks and appropriations and causing the disastrous slide into national bankruptcy. With very few exceptions, however, the white farmers resisted sharing their land, and they must bear some responsibility for the descent into disaster. Chaos reigns on the appropriated farms, and corruption is ubiquitous in the government.

There has long been a liberal white component to the Rhodesian/Zimbabwean population. To this faction Godwin’s family seems always...