Things fall apart: an affecting, elegant memoir of life in Mugabe's Zimbabwe.

• Author: Hammer, Joshua
• Position: Book review

When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa by Peter Godwin Little Brown, 352 pp.

Among the many examples of failure in Africa, the descent of Zimbabwe from hope of the continent into beggar is one of the saddest. More than a quarter century after leading his guerrilla army to victory over the racist regime of Ian Smith in white-minority-ruled Rhodesia, President Robert Mugabe has morphed into a caricature of the African Big Man, and taken his country down with him. In 2000 Mugabe launched a ruinous policy of seizing Zimbabwe's 4,000 white-owned farms and handing them to generals, ruling party hacks, and self-proclaimed "war veterans" in the name of land reform. The result, as is now well known, was a national tragedy: Agricultural production was gutted. Foreign exchange dried up. Social services disintegrated. Crime soared. Hundreds of thousands fled the country. Throughout it all, Mugabe has remained defiant, a snarling figure peering through oversize spectacles, lashing out at Great Britain, America, and the country's whites and threatening to kill anyone who dares to challenge him.

Peter Godwin's new memoir, When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa, brings home the consequences of Mugabe's descent into paranoid despotism with unflinching detail. (The title refers to a myth of the Shonas, Zimbabwe's largest tribe, that attributes a solar eclipse to a crocodile devouting the sun and regards the event as a portent of evil.) Godwin is an author and foreign correspondent whose first memoir, Mukiwa, was the bittersweet story of his boyhood in rural Rhodesia and the civil war that swept away that period of innocence. This gripping sequel picks up the story in the 1990s, after Godwin has moved away from the country to pursue a journalism career in London and New York. His parents, however, and younger sister, Georgina, a TV and radio journalist, have remained in Harare, the capital, where they begin to bear the full brunt of Mugabe's disastrous policies. Returning frequently to document Zimbabwe's collapse, Godwin deftly weaves scenes of brutal farm confiscations with the poignant decline--both physical and material--of his elderly parents. In doing so, he elevates what could have been simply another work of good journalism into a story with devastating emotional impact.

Godwin doesn't dispute the exploitation that allowed white colonialists in the early part of the twentieth century to grab the country's best land, but he blames...