What dire effects from civil discord flow

Richard Acton

MUKIWA: A WHITE BOY IN AFRICA by Peter Godwin Picador, f15.99, pp. 419 titer Godwin has written an eminently readable if harrowing account of his child- hood and youth in late Rhodesia and early Zimbabwe. Without overburdening the reader with soul-baring, the book shows the difficulties of being an anti-Smith white during those troubled years.

The Godwins lived in eastern Rhodesia, where the father was manager of a wattle company and the mother was a doctor. The book starts ominously with the author, aged five, watching his mother pull a hunt- ing knife out of the murdered body of an Africaans neighbour. A note left near the body said, 'Viva Chimurenga!' The latter word, unknown to the whites in 1964, referred to the guerrilla war for Zimbab- wean independence.

Godwin gives a lively description of his childhood and schooling. A fluent Shona speaker — `Mulciwa' means white man in that language — he adored the family ser- vants and his father's workers. His parents sent him to boarding school, aged six, where he was duly miserable. There he heard Ian Smith's historic broadcast announcing UDI.

The boy's home life was a wonderful mixture. The author ranges over his mother's post mortems, a terrible forest fire, barefoot wanderings in the bush, and joining the Apostolic church of Africa with the cook's wife. He writes movingly of African people, customs, animals and land- scapes.

On leaving senior school Godwin did his national service in the police. Trained in counter-insurgency, he was posted to southern Matabeleland. He saw villagers who had been gruesomely murdered as `sell-outs' by the Shona guerrilla army, and — with the black police under his Basically, what we've got is the old boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy stalks girl, boy kidnaps girl, boy tortures girl boy . . . ' command — he gave chase.

On the same day that Ian Smith extend- ed national service from a year to 18 months, the author was ordered to guard the prime minister. The latter thumbed through a speech. Furious at his poor leadership and intransigence, Godwin was tempted to draw his pistol and shoot him. Smith 'looked tired and hopeless,' and the author resisted the impulse.

As the war worsened, Godwin was appalled by its effects — not least on him- self. He saw his own reflection after one episode:

It was a terrifying face, coursed through with anger and despair. It was the face of some- one who would kill an unarmed civilian for withholding information.

With his policeman's grasp of detail and his writer's gift of narrative, Godwin tells his tale of death, land mines, Shona guerrillas, Matabele guerrillas, the Rhodesian security forces, and the suffer- ing civilians. He has a striking description of the words written on a but in a village devastated by the Rhodesian security forces: 'Hate us and see if we mind.'

The author left for Cambridge, and while there, his beloved sister and her fiancé were senselessly killed in a Rhodesian army ambush. In 1981, Godwin returned to the euphoric Harare of post-independence Zimbabwe, ruled by Shona Prime Minister Robert Mugabe. The hopeful mood was shattered when vast caches of arms were discovered in Matabeleland.

Seven Matabele leaders were accused of treason and other capital crimes. Godwin, now working for a Harare lawyer, assisted in their defence. He gives a vivid descrip- tion of the trial, in which the principals were acquitted.

Many Matabele soldiers, in the wake of their leaders' arrest, deserted from the Zimbabwe National army and took to the bush with their weapons. The government sent the North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade into Matabeleland to quell the dis- sidents.

The author by now had become a journalist. Events in Matabeleland gave him a scoop in the (London) Sunday Times. After a plea from an old Matabele woman, he went into the sealed-off countryside to seek evidence of Fifth Brigade atrocities against Matabele civilians. He recounts the dramatic story of how, disguised as a Catholic monk, he found witnesses to killings, beatings, rapes, and other horrors. He discovered that the dead bodies were being thrown down mineshafts — it is estimated up to 7,000 died.

Godwin's conclusion, buried deep in the book, comes when he visits his great-aunt's ashes at the Bloemfontein crematorium in South Africa. For the first time in years, he fmds himself crying:

Small, self-conscious tears at first. But then wracking gushes of repressed weariness and self-pity. At the impermanence of my family in Africa. At our silly misguided attempts to fashion the continent to our alien ways.

For this reviewer, who also grew up in Rhodesia and lived in newly independent Zimbabwe, Peter Godwin's book poignant- ly evokes the extremes of that beautiful country.