When a Crocodile Eats the Sun Quotes

“I feel to that the gap between my new life in New York and the situation at home in Africa is stretching into a gulf, as Zimbabwe spirals downwards into a violent dictatorship. My head bulges with the effort to contain both worlds. When I am back in New York, Africa immediately seems fantastical – a wildly plumaged bird, as exotic as it is unlikely.

Most of us struggle in life to maintain the illusion of control, but in Africa that illusion is almost impossible to maintain. I always have the sense there that there is no equilibrium, that everything perpetually teeters on the brink of some dramatic change, that society constantly stands poised for some spasm, some tsunami in which you can do nothing but hope to bob up to the surface and not be sucked out into a dark and hungry sea. The origin of my permanent sense of unease, my general foreboding, is probably the fact that I have lived through just such change, such a sudden and violent upending of value systems.

In my part of Africa, death is never far away. With more Zimbabweans dying in their early thirties now, mortality has a seat at every table. The urgent, tugging winds themselves seem to whisper the message, memento mori, you too shall die. In Africa, you do not view death from the auditorium of life, as a spectator, but from the edge of the stage, waiting only for your cue. You feel perishable, temporary, transient. You feel mortal.

Maybe that is why you seem to live more vividly in Africa. The drama of life there is amplified by its constant proximity to death. That’s what infuses it with tension. It is the essence of its tragedy too. People love harder there. Love is the way that life forgets that it is terminal. Love is life’s alibi in the face of death.

For me, the illusion of control is much easier to maintain in England or America. In this temperate world, I feel more secure, as if change will only happen incrementally, in manageable, finely calibrated, bite-sized portions. There is a sense of continuity threaded through it all: the anchor of history, the tangible presence of antiquity, of buildings, of institutions. You live in the expectation of reaching old age.

At least you used to.

But on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, those two states of mind converge. Suddenly it feels like I am back in Africa, where things can be taken away from you at random, in a single violent stroke, as quick as the whip of a snake’s head. Where tumult is raised with an abruptness that is as breathtaking as the violence itself. ”
― Peter Godwin, When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa

“As we get ready to leave, Georgina announces that she wants to keep the kitten. But of course she can't. We walk up and down looking for its mother, calling for its siblings. But the nearby kraals are deserted, of both people and animals. And eventually we have to leave it at the gate of an empty kraal, the closest one to where it found us, hoping that this might be its home. As we start to drive away, the kitten totters down the dirt road after us, a furry ball of khaki with irregular black spots, and Georgina bursts into tears.

'Over the kitten? Really?' I ask, gesturing around the ruins of the torture base and the mass graves. 'With all of this?'

'No,' she sniffs. 'It's not just the kitten. It's everyone here. They've all been abandoned. No one gives a **** about what happened to them. They're completely alone.”
― Peter Godwin, The Fear: Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe

“It's always instructive to observe the life cycle of the First World aid worker. A wary enthusiasm blooms into an almost messianic sense of what might be possible. Then, as they bump up against the local cultural limits of acceptable change, comes the inevitable disappointment, which can harden into cynicism and even racism, until they are no better than the resident whites they have initially disparaged.”
― Peter Godwin, When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa

“The idea of land ‘ownership’ as such was an alien one. A white farmer once told me of his grandfather going to see a local chief about buying some land. ‘Buy land?’ said the chief. ‘You must be crazy, you don’t buy the wind or the water or the trees.”
― Peter Godwin, When A Crocodile Eats the Sun

“When Robert Mugabe, resentful at his overshadowing on the African stage by Nelson Mandela, sent thousands of Zimbabwean soldiers to fight rebels in the jungles of the Congo, in return for diamonds for himself and his cronies, many of the soldiers came back on leave infected. It was said that whole units came back with the virus, shared among them by the bar girls in the noisy village shebeens; and the camp followers who became their ‘temporary wives’ and even bore their children; and by the timid tribal”
― Peter Godwin, When A Crocodile Eats the Sun

“They dig their graves under aloes because these succulents are poisonous to hyena, which might otherwise dig up the bodies and eat them. Many of the aloes here mark the grave of Zulu warriors felled at Isandlwana.”
― Peter Godwin, When A Crocodile Eats the Sun

“When I reach the head of the line, I hand my passport to the black official and greet him in Shona, Zimbabwe’s main vernacular. He ripens in smile and demands, “Why don’t you stay here? We need people like you.” By “people like you,” he means white Zimbabweans.”
― Peter Godwin, When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa

“You must remember how many years we weren’t even allowed to talk about AIDS here,” my mother reminds me. “It was all a dreadful secret. Herbert Ushewekunze, the minister of health, issued an edict, a ministerial fatwa, that there was to be absolutely no publicity at all. And later he died of it himself.”
― Peter Godwin, When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa

“Love is the way that life forgets that it is terminal. Love is life’s alibi in the face of death.”
― Peter Godwin, When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa

“It began as a minor obstacle on the political skyline, an irritating clause in the constitution that limited his term in office. So he has rewritten the constitution to increase his already considerable presidential powers, and reset the presidential clock, another twelve years in office. But his change needed to be ratified by a referendum, and he needed something to sweeten the deal, something to entice the continued loyalty of a threadbare people. So he inserted into the new constitution a law allowing the seizure of commercial farmland and its redistribution to black peasants.”
― Peter Godwin, When A Crocodile Eats the Sun

“His children are safely in the US at college, he says. The profits from the cellphone network deals he’s cobbling together are parked securely out of Africa too. He palms some peanuts and chugs some Cape sauvignon blanc and turns to look out of the window. ‘Africans can’t do governments,’ he suddenly announces. ‘We are useless at it, disorganized.”
― Peter Godwin, When A Crocodile Eats the Sun

“Mugabe concedes immediately. These ex-guerrillas were the backbone of his revolution. And from 1997 he starts putting through what are, by Zimbabwean standards, enormous one-off payments to the fifty thousand war vets, plus generous monthly pensions. Many economists calculate the real collapse of the economy from this moment. The Zimbabwe dollar crashes, never to recover. Mugabe brings Hunzvi into the government; he is too much of a threat outside it.”
― Peter Godwin, When A Crocodile Eats the Sun

“For some years now she has also been playing another role: trying to roll back corruption, in a small way, by sitting on a medical compensation board, reviewing the claims from former guerrillas disabled in the independence war. The compensation fund set up to make grants to them has been ransacked by false claimants, for fictitious injuries. Several perfectly fit cabinet members have qualified as quadriplegics and are being paid for hundred per cent disability.”
― Peter Godwin, When A Crocodile Eats the Sun

“In the immensity of earth, sky and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent. Pop, would go one of the six-inch guns; a small flame would dart and vanish, a little white smoke would disappear, a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech – and nothing would happen. Nothing could happen.”
― Peter Godwin, When A Crocodile Eats the Sun

“And I realize that maybe not so much has changed as we all thought, that maybe the whole idea of progress is a paradox, a rocking horse that goes forward and back, forward and back, but stays in the same place, giving only the comforting illusion of motion.”
― Peter Godwin, When A Crocodile Eats the Sun

“And worse, some of them have begun saying that the only way for a man to cure himself of this lethal affliction is to have sex with a young virgin, that this will make him clean again. Many young girls are raped by men for this reason, and they too die in their turn, as do the ones who rape them. Some of the unscrupulous ngangas fall back on atavistic rites long suppressed by overbearing white district commissioners, instructing their patients to eat the heart of another human, promising that it will give them the strength to survive.”
― Peter Godwin, When A Crocodile Eats the Sun

“Some unscrupulous ngangas, traditional herbalists and sorcerers, say they know how to defeat this sickness, for a fee. And they prescribe snuff to be shoved up the vagina; or muti, various bogus unguents and ointments made from the ground bones of wild animals.”
― Peter Godwin, When A Crocodile Eats the Sun

“see his greatgrandchildren bring him gourds of beer before he died. But life expectancy dropped to fifty, and now it has collapsed, all the way down to thirty-three. It is hard to comprehend. At thirty-three, just as people should be in their prime, they suddenly sicken and die. And the managers of the mines and the factories and the farms have begun training three people to fill every job, because they know two will not live to do the work. I can”
― Peter Godwin, When A Crocodile Eats the Sun

“ever mention the opportunistic diseases that actually felled the victims. They never mention that these diseases galloped in through the open gate of a collapsed immune system – collapsed because of Aids.”
― Peter Godwin, When A Crocodile Eats the Sun

“Shame, and its offspring, secrecy. The”
― Peter Godwin, When A Crocodile Eats the Sun

“the black elite here swan round in squadrons of the latest luxury SUVs, each of which is worth ten times this eccentric old thing.”
― Peter Godwin, When A Crocodile Eats the Sun

“a ragged crocodile of small black children jogging back from school.”
― Peter Godwin, When A Crocodile Eats the Sun

“partial to men, a somewhat precarious position given that Mugabe had denounced gays as ‘lower than pigs and dogs’, declared them to be ‘a colonial invention, unknown in African tradition’, and passed laws punishing consensual homosexuality with ten years’ hard labour.”
― Peter Godwin, When A Crocodile Eats the Sun

“Teach us to demand our share of the gold, And forgive us our docility.”
― Peter Godwin, When A Crocodile Eats the Sun

“Her presence enables my absence.”
― Peter Godwin, When A Crocodile Eats the Sun

“paterfamilias.”
― Peter Godwin, When A Crocodile Eats the Sun

“Or on the whim of a deity. As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods.”
― Peter Godwin, When A Crocodile Eats the Sun

“is literally going to die of a broken heart.”
― Peter Godwin, When A Crocodile Eats the Sun

“A knot of women bursts through the glass door behind us. They slump onto the kerb, weeping and rocking on their haunches. Some have babies tied to their backs in white crocheted shawls. Their grief is raw and fierce, unmediated. A couple of men in ragged jackets stand by, embarrassed and self-conscious, and a gaggle of bewildered toddlers with mango-smeared mouths look up with wide almond eyes.”
― Peter Godwin, When A Crocodile Eats the Sun

“Today we will admit that we are your dogs, but you must first write it there, that the other tribes are the fleas on our backs.”
― Peter Godwin, When A Crocodile Eats the Sun