Peter Godwin's When a Crocodile Eats the Sun and Mukiwa; Alexandra Fuller's Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight; Doris Lessing's African Laughter; and Yvonne Vera's The Stone Virgins
Linfield, Susie
ZIMBABWE WAS known as the "jewel of Africa," as Samora Machel, the Marxist president of Mozambique, told Robert Mugabe when the new nation won its independence in 1980. As the...
...Despite the country's daunting problems, she wrote in 1988, "what came across was not the flat dreary hopelessness of Zambia, the misery of Mozambique, but vitality, exuberance, optimism, enjoyment...
...Zimbabwe's decimated health care system, combined with AIDS and poverty, have produced a life expectancy for women of thirtyfour years: shockingly, the world's lowest...
...Godwin offers a panoramic look at a crumbling nation...
...We had cook boys and garden boys, however old they might be," Godwin writes...
...still, as he recounts in his first memoir, Muhrwa: A White Boy in Africa, he fought for Ian Smith's apartheid government...
...Mugabe's government has tortured, raped, and killed opposition activists...
...his sadism is not a cry for help but a shout of joy...
...Godwin is lucky to have such folks...
...And whereas Godwin, as a child, spent long hours listening to the stories of the black servants and reverentially absorbing their wisdom, Fuller, known to her family as "Bobo," is a brat who bosses them around while threatening to fire them...
...One can't help wondering if Zimbabwe would, or at least could, have become a very different place had it found the space, the means, and the courage to delve into the violence of its birth...
...Vera understands that sadistic violence not only shatters but actually unmakes the world of the survivors...
...On the eve of arrest, he flees the country...
...A war ends, you bury the dead, you look after the cripples—but everywhere among ordinary people is this army whose wounds don't show: the numbed, or the brutalized, or those who can never, not really, believe in the innocence of life, of living...
...This makes the country's destruction even more bewildering, infuriating, and tragic...
...his mother was a doctor who often worked in the countryside, his father the manager of a mine...
...Armed youth militias were sent to patrol the markets and threaten shopkeepers...
...Still, however complex Zimbabwe's recent history may be, every discussion of its ruin centers, always and inevitably, on one factor: Robert Gabriel Mugabe, head of the country's ZANU-PF party and Zimbabwe's president for twenty-seven years...
...Even as Matabeleland was massacred, the rest of the country hummed with hopeful energy, and literacy zoomed to almost 80 percent: an astonishing figure for Africa...
...It lands near two women who are bent over, hoeing their cemetery corn, their babies strapped to their backs...
...Lessing shows us the "triumphant malice" of whites eagerly pointing to black failures, and the hopefulness of those who want to help the country prosper...
...SUSIE LINFIELD is the director of the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University...
...But, as far as I know, there were no girls called Disappointment, Pain or Exhaustion...
...Equally shocking: it was sixty-one years in 1991...
...But not only opponents are targeted...
...Of her initial exile, she recalls, "I did not want to live in Southern Rhodesia, for if its climate was perfection, probably the finest in the world, and its landscape magnificent, it was provincial and tedious...
...He kills not because he is oppressed but because killing suits him...
...It is set in Matabeleland during the massacres: "Then independence arrived and brought with it a spectacular arena for a different war, in which they were all casualties...
...MOST OF us accept the fact that violence is sometimes necessary in the pursuit of political aims...
...If you start thinking that bad luck comes all together on purpose or that it has to do . . . with you or with anything else, you'll go bonkers...
...THIS IS THE TERRAIN that the black Zimbabwean writer Yvonne Vera explores in her novel, The Stone Virgins...
...he looks exhausted...
...After Olivia dies, Mum and Dad's joyful careless embrace of life is sucked away, like water swirling down a drain," Fuller recalls...
...Mugabe's treatment of the white farmers is utterly indefensible: they were terrorized and sometimes assaulted, and an estimated fifteen were killed...
...The war and mosquitoes and land mines and ambushes don't seem to matter...
...There is, most crucially, the takeover and ruin of the once-proud farms by drunken, unskilled youths...
...But he seems loath to acknowledge that the vast inequities between blacks and whites, both before and since independence, were both unsustainable and wrong...
...This is a book written in bitter anger: Mugabe, Godwin writes, is "the man who would grimly turn his country into an African Albania rather than relinquish power...
...hundreds of thousands of black farm workers have, consequently, also lost their homes, livelihoods, and access to medical care—particularly devastating in a country where at least one-fifth of the population is HIV-positive...
...The Fullers were the kind of riffraff that the Godwins probably never met...
...It is a kind of moral autism...
...DISSENT / Fall 2007 101...
...or those who will for ever be slowed by grief...
...Just two years after his election in the country's first multiracial vote, he unleashed a reign of terror against Matabeleland, a province in the southwest that he suspected of housing a dissident movement...
...For if violence has an aim, it has a limit...
...yet Godwin seems unaware that this is precisely what blacks must have felt about his parents, and virtually all other whites, in the pre-independence days...
...That's just the way it is...
...On the political front, Zimbabwe's judiciary and electoral processes have become bitter farces, the rule of law is virtually nonexistent, and its corruption is considered startling even on a continent known for kleptocracy...
...Fuller's powers of observation are so trenchant that she suggests a world, or sometimes several worlds, in a few sentences...
...Zimbabwe's human-rights score on the Failed States Index equals Iraq's...
...and thousands of Zimbabweans stream each week into a none-too-welcoming South Africa in search of food, jobs, and asylum...
...And he trails his mother as she makes her rounds (there were, of course, separate clinics for blacks and whites), helping to dispense sugar-cube vaccinations...
...The parents drink constantly and the family, carrying "our new, hungry sorrow," takes off on a griefstricken holiday...
...Paradoxically, though, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, far more than Godwin's books, sings with a lush, raw love for Africa...
...Her family also lived in Malawi and Zambia...
...the aim might be impossible or unjust...
...But this comparison, too, mistakes discrete parts for a much wider whole, and therefore clouds rather than illuminates reality...
...He is a man who not only loves violence but who needs violence: "If he loses an enemy, he invents another...
...Also, she has a nice and useful feel for the incongruous...
...Baby girls were often called after the emotion felt by the mother at birth—Joy, Happiness, Delight...
...Here is the "moment of social evolution" presented from a dizzying array of angles...
...We erect a massive fence with slanting-backward barbed wire at the top...
...One day, Godwin drives his father to a grocery store to collect bottle-deposit refunds...
...MUGABE'S authoritarian tendencies— and his murderous ones—were evident early on...
...Still, this kind of violence has not seceded from cause and effect, claims and demands...
...the commodity price of tobacco rules their lives...
...But disillusion arrives quickly: Godwin becomes one of the first reporters—and risks his life—to expose the Matabeleland massacres...
...Godwin was born and raised in Southern Rhodesia...
...Vera died two years ago, at age forty...
...The cult of suffering and death, the exultation in suffering and death, does not necessarily answer to traditional political solutions...
...But, she adds, "These rational considerations did not reach some mysterious region of myself that was apparently an inexhaustible well of tears, for night after night I wept in my sleep and woke knowing I was unjustly excluded from my own best self...
...Another striking scene takes place at Godwin's sister's gravesite...
...Fuck this!' I shout, and I hurl the flowers away...
...This is what Levi called "useless violence": the infliction of unbearable pain, humiliation, and suffering, just for its own sake and no other...
...The black shop assistant manages to look sympathetic and embarrassed at the same time...
...Zimbabwe's vast, sophisticated commercial farms were ingeniously irrigated and passionately tended...
...He points to one of the loaves, and she removes it...
...Mau Mau,' says Dad...
...It is Alexandra's older sister, Vanessa, who finally explains the simple, prosaic truth: "Bad-luck things happen...
...Rhodesia's war has turned the place back on itself...
...But it turns out that George Godwin was actually Kazimierz Jerzy Goldfarb, and Kazimierz Jerzy Goldfarb was a Jew from Warsaw whose mother and sister were murdered at Treblinka...
...Dad slowly counts out all the notes in his wallet but they fall short...
...in the unexpected, was very much the note of new Zimbabwe...
...this led to panic buying, closed stores, and production shutdowns...
...But it is the little details of Godwin's early childhood in Rhodesia rather than the dramatic later events in Zimbabwe that are the most engaging parts of Mukiwa: for it is in these details that the complexity of life, and of human relations, in a racist regime are revealed...
...We knew them just by their Christian names, which were often fairly strange...
...They sometimes got ill, and even died, but this was rare...
...and anyway, an eighteen-year-old Peter naively promises himself when he enters the war, "I wouldn't do anything I disagreed with or was ashamed of...
...There is cruelty in that randomness, but perhaps a glimmer of freedom too...
...Brutality's tenaciousness, and its mystery, is Vera's subject...
...And she finds an odd parallel of arrested development: whites, she writes, were drowning in childish self-pity, while blacks were in thrall to a fantasy, equally childish, of instant modernity, instant wealth, instant justice...
...unbeknownst to his parents, he even joins her Apostolic sect, whose revival meetings thrill him...
...It is we who must ask this question, especially in this age of martyrs' brigades and suicidekillers...
...The word "genocide" has been used to describe this assault, which lasted five years...
...Yet in thinking of its ruin, I am haunted by Lessing's warnings about the hidden poisons of war...
...This summer, in a belated response to the inflation—which, bizarrely, he has blamed on Britain—Mugabe imposed dramatic price controls...
...Yet some of Godwin's most vivid scenes are also the most problematic, and raise questions not about what he sees but about what he doesn't...
...Because Godwin fails to discover, or to formulate, any organic link between the destruction of the Jews and of Zimbabwe, he slips into a series of sloppy, fundamentally misleading analogies...
...There is the human-rights collapse, epitomized by a hospital full of wounded protesters, including "middle-aged black ladies" beaten by Mugabe's thugs...
...Zimbabwe experienced two wrenching years of severe drought in the early 1990s...
...Well, no...
...They were tolerant, and progressive, and they knew that white rule was wrong...
...But it is a portrait that is also startlingly, almost willfully, partial, and it sent me looking to Zimbabwe's complex past—exactly the place Godwin refuses to go—in an attempt to understand its present despair...
...and there were vast disparities between whites and blacks in wealth, education, skills, and land ownership...
...An old black woman, whose name Godwin never learns, tips him off: "You must write about this thing in your newspapers, otherwise it will never stop until all of us are killed...
...as a member of the Communist Party, she had been declared a Prohibited Immigrant by the government in Salisbury...
...Something has been blasted or torn deep inside people, an anger has gone bad, and bitter, there is disbelief that this horror can be happening at all...
...96 DISSENT / Fall 2007 In his new book, the childhood idyll is long gone...
...most of all, they refuse self-pity...
...There is the explosion of crime, forcing his parents to install a "rape gate" to protect against violent intruders —though his father is viciously carjacked anyway...
...or that the thirst for martyrdom will be quenched if Israel pulls back her borders (though that might be a good idea...
...Their house is ugly, their food disgusting, and their land so bad that when Mugabe appropriates it, he gives it to an enemy...
...they produced, and often exported, fruits, flowers, peanuts, grains, tobacco, cotton, coffee, poultry, pigs, and some of the best beef in the world...
...Doris Lessing, who was raised in Southern Rhodesia, called the country "paradise," and she is among the least sentimental of writers...
...and democratic institutions such as a relatively free press and a functioning judiciary...
...The World Bank has called Zimbabwe's woes unprecedented for a country not at war, while the International Crisis Group has, ominously, compared its meltdown to that of the Congo at the end of Mobutu's rule...
...Godwin's anger is not only justified, but bracing...
...This is the "curing" that took place in Auschwitz, and several decades later in the hills of Rwanda, and it was the aim, I think, of the rape camps in Bosnia...
...And yet the answer, I think, may be impossible to come by, for the very texture of such violence defies reason...
...But the total is still too much, so he hands back the rolls one at a time...
...Appearing in the Sunday Times of London, Godwin's exposés infuriate the government, which declares him an enemy of the state...
...Godwin is right to insist that the politics of resentment that Mugabe has fomented—evidenced most clearly in the farm takeovers—are both practically destructive and morally ugly, and should never be mistaken for justice...
...as they protest government corruption...
...DORIS LESSING left Southern Rhodesia for London in 1949, when she was thirty...
...Again and again she finds people—mainly blacks, though not only they—stunned and grief-stricken by the war, yet unwilling or unable to explore their bewildered pain...
...Godwin, who now lives in New York, charts the decline of his country, and of his parents as they age, and the ways in which the former makes the latter so much sadder and scarier and worse...
...jailed journalists...
...Coming upon his sister's grave, Godwin finds a fresh mound of excrement...
...Years later, as a reporter in Mozambique, Godwin's life will be saved when the fierce guerrilla who captures him turns out to be a grateful former patient...
...Mugabe's policy of racial reconciliation was rare and inspirational...
...As the second-mostindustrialized country on the continent, the former Southern Rhodesia already had a decent infrastructure, including roads and railways ("You were lucky to have had the British," another Mozambican leader told Mugabe, no doubt wistfully...
...Each move meant to shock, to cure the naïve mind...
...The point is well-taken...
...The newly appropriated farms, many now in the hands of Mugabe's cronies, lie in ruins: and so in what was once the breadbasket of Africa, famine looms for millions...
...And from the first, the ruling party's rapaciousness, combined with its sense of utter impunity, was startling to outside observers and native citizens alike...
...But Godwin doesn't stop to think that for most blacks, the former dispensation was probably not great, or good, or fun...
...And to try, too, to find voices other than those of Zimbabwe's liberal whites—not because their views are wrong or unimportant, but because there is much that they cannot tell us...
...DISSENT / Fall 2007 97 The critic Vivian Gornick once observed how George Orwell, in "Shooting an Elephant," "shrinks from the natives, yet his repulsion is tinged with compassion...
...The U.S...
...This is why, Jean Amery claimed, in Auschwitz it was intellectuals who were particularly defenseless...
...The country's once-promising economy is in a grotesque free-fall...
...He is a man, in short, whose nihilistic violence foretells the civil wars of places like Liberia and Sierra Leone, as well as the madness of today's jihadist groups...
...the injustices peek through, so there is no need to shout about them...
...She writes: 100 DISSENT / Fall 2007 "They committed evil as though it were a legitimate pursuit, a ritual for their own convictions...
...The war has cast a ghastly magic . . . .Everything is waiting and watchful and suspicious . . . .The only living creatures to celebrate our war are the plants, which spill and knot and twist victoriously around buildings and closed-down schools...
...Earlier, and in a similar vein, Godwin writes that Zionism "resonated too closely with my white African narrative," and that Israel's similarities to apartheid-era South Africa are "uncanny": a truism of the Southern African left...
...But their real bad luck lies elsewhere...
...Its central act is a horrific rape and mutilation—the victim's lips are sliced off—by an ex-guerrilla named Sibaso of a village girl named Nonceba...
...Godwin spends his early years roaming the countryside with his nanny, Violet, whom he dearly loves...
...Alexandra's mother gives birth to five children, three of whom die before they are toddlers...
...I N HIS NEW BOOK, When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, the journalist Peter Godwin paints a portrait of an imploding Zimbabwe that is alternately tender and furious...
...He is good at what he does, for he has honed "all the fine instincts of annihilation...
...Lessing's portrait of Zimbabwe is the richest of any that I know...
...The cemetery is a shambles, and apparently people now live, or at least farm, in it: dirty toilet paper is littered among little plots of maize...
...And disappointed sorrow: "A people who once rose against white rule and joined guerrilla movements in the thousands has now been cowed...
...Like Godwin, Fuller tries to understand the connection between her family's trauma and her nation's...
...it may or may not be accurate, but there is no doubt that tens of thousands of unarmed civilians were beaten, raped, starved, and killed in a merciless scorched-earth policy...
...What does it say, what does it mean, that women must raise their food, and their babies, among graves...
...In The Stone Virgins, Nonceba wonders "what exactly it took for a man to look at a woman and cut her up like a piece of dry hide without asking himself a single question...
...Lessing continues, "But it seems the War has never really left her: she has terrible headaches and sometimes cannot move for days...
...But Godwin attempts, also, to synthesize his father's history with the present realities of Zimbabwe, and this is where the book falters most...
...Fuller's mother is a drunk, and she belly-dances in bars, and her hands are "worn, blunt with work: years of digging in a garden, horses, cows, cattle, woodwork, tobacco...
...Most tellingly: Sibaso is "a hunter who kills not because he is hungry but because his stomach is full, and therefore he can hunt with grace...
...Four out of five Zimbabweans are out of work...
...Through it all his parents, then in their seventies and ailing, remain modest, level-headed, sane...
...They believed that having a name in the white man's language would attract the white man's power...
...Sixpence, Cigarette or Matches were commonly used...
...He's sitting in the kitchen doorway with a joint the size of a sausage hang98 DISSENT / Fall 2007 ing from his bottom lip . . . .The gardener stands to attention on his bush-broom, with which he is sweeping leaves from the dusty driveway...
...It is wishful thinking, for instance—and an odd sort of narcissism—to believe that the torturecarnage that has swept through Iraq will end if America pulls out its troops (though that might be a good idea...
...The novel, which is highly impressionistic, alludes to the ways that suffering changes Nonceba, splitting her off from a former, now irretrievable self: "Now she is alone, the shadow to her own being...
...But the violence that "cures" the mind, which is to say negates it, is something different...
...one United Nations official remarked on the rapidity with which Zimbabwe had created a "boss class . . . to the accompaniment of Marxist rhetoric...
...and the rigged, indeed absurd, elections: " 'I shan't be voting for Mr...
...Large chunks of Crocodile chart Godwin's search for his father's family's fate, and his more general research into the Holocaust, about which he apparently knew almost nothing...
...Fuller is close to the feel of the dirt and the things that grow in it, to the shrieks of the animals and "the smell of people who are not afraid to eat meat," to the pitilessness of the sun and the fury of the rains...
...She sees the squatters, too: angry, ignorant, destroyers of the land they covet...
...all of us feel comforted by this fact...
...In the 1980s, Zimbabwe was surrounded by the destabilizing forces of violence and failure—in Angola, Mozambique, Namibia—much of it fueled by the apartheid regime in South Africa...
...they hold hands like teenagers, "murmuring to each other like new lovers...
...She returned to Zimbabwe for the first time in 1982, and visited again in 1988, 1989, and 1992...
...Mum's] is a contained, soggy madness, which does little more than humidify the dry, unspoken grief we all feel...
...Ironically—precisely because she is less "political" than Godwin, and because she tells her story through a child's eyes—she is more successful at allowing us to feel her sense of that terrible bond between personal and historic cataclysm...
...This year, Zimbabwe ranks number four— perched between Somalia and Chad—on the Failed States Index of Foreign Policy magazine...
...Godwin substitutes hyperbolic, emotionally charged parallels—a "this equals that"—for the difficulties of real thought...
...LIKE PETER GODWIN, Alexandra Fuller came of age as white-led Rhodesia was 4 bloodily transformed into majority-rule Zimbabwe...
...Our line sullenly watches these diplomats and black-marketeers, expatriates, and corrupt government officials packing their Pajeros and Range Rovers and Mercs with mountains of groceries," he recalls...
...She watches the visitors: inDISSENT / Fall 2007 99 ternational aid workers traipsing in and out of the country, and South African soldiers on holiday who "have had to forgive themselves too much...
...This is precisely what Godwin too often lacks...
...In one scene, a group of government soldiers carefully skins alive an Indian shopkeeper, then massacres all the customers, including children, in his store...
...It is the second death—for which Alexandra blames herself—that tips her mother from wacky neurosis into something closer to madness...
...The stakes are high, the expectations even higher, the outcome never overdetermined...
...Lessing discovers something else too, something subtler and deeper and harder to bear...
...an energetic, talented, book-hungry populace...
...Relish...
...We see how inequality—how difference—looks to a child...
...As the Failed States Index report points out, "Though many events—natural disasters, economic shocks, an influx of refugees from a neighboring country—can lead to state failure, few are as decisive or as deadly as bad leadership...
...The violence itself may be obscene, disgusting, criminal...
...This would prove to be untrue—all the more reason, at war's end, for Godwin to welcome ZANU's triumph and the end of Zimbabwe's international isolation...
...In 2005, in an operation called "drive out the rubbish," the state forcibly evicted an estimated 700,000 black, mainly poor city dwellers: burning their homes, destroying their businesses, savagely beating them...
...Now Bob Marley performed at our independence celebrations...
...She meets black villagers desperately yearning for work, for literature, for the life of the cities...
...She tells of the students who shout "Tiananmen Square...
...Who would not feel the same...
...There go the horses, two white faces and one black peering over the stable doors . . . And here come the dogs running, ear-flapping hopeful after the pickup...
...Miss Bobo,' he mouths, and raises his fist in a black power salute...
...Duty was considered a higher value than individual conscience...
...only Sudan is worse...
...Zimbabwe's inflation rate is the highest in the world: as of late June, it stood officially at 4,500 percent and unofficially at 9,000 percent, though both those figures will in all likelihood be obsolete by the time you read this...
...In another vignette, white farmers at a pre-departure party speak of the "great life" and "good fun" they have lost...
...For Alexandra, the center cannot hold in either home or world—the war is over but the violence continues—and she watches a dance of disaster unfold...
...In one scene, at a bakery, "Dad loads his little basket with a small selection of loaves, which he will later freeze, and, as a special treat . . . two croissants...
...But the early years under Mugabe were full of good things too...
...What Lessing encounters, again and again, is a country of complexity, contradiction, and movement: a country in the midst of remaking itself...
...It is a matter of broadening one's perspective, of expanding one's sightline, of synthesizing one's personal reactions with the realities of the wider world...
...this deepened an already paranoid style of governance...
...a quarter of its citizens, including many of the most skilled, now live abroad...
...It doesn't mean anything, Bobo...
...an early speech welcoming all citizens of the new nation as friends and allies is "still remembered," Philip Gourevitch wrote, "as one of the great declarations of the age...
...Zimbabwe isn't Rwanda or Cambodia or Sierra Leone...
...its development was predicated, in fact, on the repression of trauma...
...In the Fullers' garden stands "an enormous cardboard cutout of a crouched, running terrorist," which the family uses for target practice...
...GODWIN is especially sharp, and heartbreaking, in evoking his parents' descent into penury (their pensions aren't adjusted for inflation...
...the confluence of these factors couldn't have been worse...
...And there goes the old cook, hunched and massive . . . He is almost seventy and has just sired another baby...
...The Fullers are not lucky...
...On one of Godwin's visits home, his mother abruptly reveals a secret about Godwin's father, a man of propriety and deep reserve who had always struck his son as the quintessential Englishman: "George Godwin, this Anglo-African in a safari suit and desert boots, with his clipped English accent...
...They stop their hoeing, look up for a moment . . . and one laughs...
...She has not an ounce of liberal sympathy, or even liberal explanation, for this monstrous predator...
...I loved the bizarre mix of people...
...closed newspapers...
...last year, the government estimated that a family of five would need seventeen million Zimbabwean dollars—per month—to survive...
...At all times he is possessed of a sense of history, proportion, and paradox...
...In 1974, when Alexandra is five, they move to a farm in a bad location, "right into the middle, the very birthplace and epicenter, of the civil war in Rhodesia and a freshly stoked civil war in Mozambique...
...The Scandinavian sandal brigade and the Third World groupies, the sudden flood of communist diplomats . . . .The cultural boycott was over...
...ambassador to Zimbabwe has predicted that inflation will reach 1.5 million percent by the end of the year, which conjures images of Weimar-era wheelbarrows stuffed with cash...
...Beginning in 2000, most of the country's commercial farmers, who were white, were driven from their lands, vio94 DISSENT / Fall 2007 lently and without compensation...
...So did their son...
...I reveled in that brief and liberating period of social anarchy that marked the change between societies," he recalls...
...Lessing listens to a young ex-guerrilla named Talent who says, in a rare moment of exposure, "I was lucky, I wasn't one of the pretty girls"—for the pretty ones were used for sex...
...For a calamity of this magnitude, there can be no one cause...
...Those wounds that "don't show" have revealed themselves, and they bleed...
...Alexandra's father is rough, though very good with guns—"Dad is away in the bush, fighting gooks"—and the parents refer to blacks as "Piffles," "cheeky kaffirs," and "bloody baboons...
...Primo Levi described it as "hateful but not insane...
...The mind [is] not supposed to survive it, to retell it, but to perish...
...We are driving through a dreamscape...
...The problems, of course, were immense: there was the need to recover —economically, psychically, spiritually— from over a decade of brutal civil war...
...Sibaso also decapitates Nonceba's beloved sister, Thenjiwe...
...She admires the idealistic organizers mobilizing women in the villages, who remind her of the early Russian revolutionaries...
...She had been killed, at age twenty-seven, by "friendly fire" during the civil war...
...It is not possible to fight this kind of war, a civil war, without the poisons going deep," she observes...
...Naturally, this sends his son who, as an expatriate white from Africa, is already struggling with his "mongrel" identity—into a tailspin...
...Mugabe's descent into unrestrained tyranny, and the bizarre wreckage of his country, were not inevitable: one can easily imagine very different scenarios that are neither fantasies nor wishful thinking...
...Zimbabwe's catastrophe is so multilayered, its paradise so lost, that to describe it is a daunting task...
...They insist on using the public hospital rather than seek out special treatment...
...And more than that: can it be that Godwin has forgotten, so quickly, the violence and inequities of Rhodesia's white-supremacist regime...
...At the same time, unwise structural readjustment programs, imposed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, led the country to sell its grain reserves in search of foreign currency...
...Yet there is something puzzling about his lack of interest in the women's plight...
...Lessing loved Zimbabweans' sense of "intense personal involvement" in the country's future, so different from the ironic apathy of the West...
...A white in Africa is like a Jew everywhere —on sufferance, watching warily, waiting for the next great tidal swell of hostility," Godwin claims...
...To ask this question is not a matter of political correctness or pity, nor does it suggest that Godwin should mute his rage...
...So we drive recklessly through war-ravaged Rhodesia," Fuller writes...
...But in addition to having had some historic, manmade luck, Zimbabwe was naturally lucky, too: beautiful, mineral-rich, and astoundingly fertile...
...But Harare is not Sderot—much less Warsaw in 1939...
...After the third child's death, "things get worse," and Fuller's mother has a breakdown...
...The total: Z$12,000...
...Although they work very hard, they do not prosper...
...The Stone Virgins reads like a slow-motion atrocity film...
...But then the outside world starts to join in and has a nervous breakdown all its own, so that it starts to get hard for me to know where Mum's madness ends and the world's madness begins...
...Unburdened by tradition, by politics, by consequences, it claims for itself an absolute freedom...
...as Lessing noted, "Never has a ruler come to power with more goodwill...
...When a Crocodile Eats the Sun contains another story, too...
...Zimbabwe was reeling from violence, brutality, betrayal, yet determined to refashion itself without acknowledging its wounds...
...We watch a young Peter begin to notice his world, and to try to make sense of it: "White people didn't get such interesting diseases as Africans...
...The other is vanished with a sudden and astonishing finality" Most striking is Vera's portrait of Sibaso...
...The world is a terrifying, unhinged blur and I cannot determine whether it is me, or the world, that has come off its axis...
...Lessing writes that on the day the education budget surpassed that for defense, memDISSENT / Fall 2007 95 bers of Parliament "cheered and wept...
...and she observes former guerrillas, now government "chefs," who have "taken to thievery as if born to it...
...There is no doubt that the vast majority of Zimbabweans, especially in the rural areas, trusted Mugabe and, in many cases, loved him...
Vol. 54 • September 2007 • No. 4
