When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa

In some remote villages of Zimbabwe, it is believed that a solar eclipse occurs when a crocodile eats the sun. This celestial crocodile, they say, briefly consumes our life-giving star as a warning that he is much displeased with the behavior of man below. It is the very worst of omens.
Peter Godwin is living a comfortable first-world life when he is summoned by his mother to Zimbabwe, his birthplace. His father has suffered a heart attack, and she fears he will soon die. When Godwin returns to his homeland, he finds that his father's health is not the only thing failing. The country of Godwin's youth - once one of Africa's great hopes - is struggling under the power of an embattled dictator, spiraling downward into a vortex of brutality and hatred.
His father recovers, but over the next few years, Godwin returns often to Zimbabwe, where inflation is rising so fast that the currency can't keep up, and violent land seizures unleash the threat of famine. But even as their country's troubles fill his parents' once-comfortable life with poverty and peril, they resolutely refuse to leave. As he struggles to understand their loyalty to a desperate country - a land that has turned them from citizens into outsiders, into targets - he uncovers a shocking family secret. Everything he once knew about his father, his family, and his own place in the world is changed in an instant. And through this knowledge, Godwin embarks on his own journey into the mysteries of person, place, and identity.
When a Crocodile Eats the Sun is the account of a family's tragedy set against a country's collapse. It is also a devastating story of resilience and the enduring power of love.

Peter Godwin is an award winning author and journalist. Born and raised in Zimbabwe, he studied law and international relations at Cambridge and Oxford. He worked as a foreign correspondent in Africa and Eastern Europe for The Sunday Times of London. He was founding presenter and writer of Assignment/Correspondent, BBC TV's premier foreign affairs program. He now lives in Manhattan and contributes regularly to National Geographic, New York Times magazine, and BBC Radio, among others.