It’s an oppressive, torrid day in Cape Town when I meet award-winning author, journalist and filmmaker Peter Godwin. The temperature matches the state of affairs I’m here, partly, to talk to him about.
US President Donald Trump has just triggered a widespread Middle East war, the global economy is fraught as energy markets roil, Cuba is patently his next target and Europe is into year five of a war on its eastern border. In Godwin’s country of birth, Zimbabwe, Zanu-PF is in the process of mischievously changing the constitution.
Our conversation also meanders around his four memoirs, the latest of which is Exit Wounds. The title is apt on multiple levels: his mother is dying, his marriage suddenly collapses, his adult children leave home. These shake his identity, but the book feels like a closure of sorts, a coming to terms with, in particular, a state of permanent homesickness for Zimbabwe — and regret at what it could have been had its democracy thrived.
Godwin practised human rights law in Zimbabwe before switching to journalism, a career which saw him cover foreign affairs and wars in 60 African and European conflict zones for some of the world’s leading television and print media.
His first memoir, Mukiwa, incorporated a narrative account of the Gukurahundi, Robert Mugabe’s Fifth Brigade 1983-87 genocide in Matabeleland. He had initially broken the story of horrors for the Sunday Times (UK) in 1984, for which the government mouthpiece The Herald editorialised that Godwin himself had committed a war crime and “deserved the hangman’s rope”.
He left Zimbabwe quickly, moving first to London and then New York, where he has lived for the past few decades. Is America’s democracy also dimming?
“We are certainly stress-testing democracy,” Godwin says, though he remains relatively confident in a return to normalcy. “Trump will soon turn into a lame-duck president,” he said, “and I think the Iran war will probably be short; he’ll declare victory arbitrarily. But who knows what damage has been done and may still be done.”
It’s Ukraine, he feels, that is “the big moral war of our time”. The country has protected Europe with minimal support. “They’ve kept Russia preoccupied. I admire what they’ve achieved and I’ve found the Ukraine situation very affecting.”
The sentiment applies to my reading of Exit Wounds, an extraordinary book — moving, multilayered, rich in imagery and literary references. I ask if this craft comes naturally.
“Well, I’ve always kept a journal,” he responds, “because I don’t know what I think about something until I write about it”, referencing Joan Didion and mentioning that the quote is more accurately attributed to Gertrude Stein. (My point exactly, I think.)
“Now, I have hundreds of thousands of words of my thoughts, ideas and bits of dialogue accumulated over 30-plus years on computer, and searchable. So, no, I don’t just search the web for ‘what does Emily Dickinson say about Hesperian depression?’”, referring to a particularly memorable passage in the memoir describing a deep melancholy Godwin feels at sunset.
He hasn’t returned to Zimbabwe since researching The Fear, his third, 2011 memoir and an account of the fallout from the country’s 2008 elections. A complicated situation, arising from his work as a human rights barrister and his early writings, remains in 40-year legal limbo, and the government may yet view him as persona non grata. So he is understandably reluctant to talk in depth about the situation in the country.
“Besides, because I don’t live there anymore, I shouldn’t pontificate. But the same people are still in power,” he says of Zanu-PF.
Indeed, democracy in Zimbabwe remains chimeric. The government has just gazetted a change to the country’s constitution to extend presidential terms from five to seven years, allowing Emmerson Mnangagwa’s presidency to endure until at least 2030. And parliament, not voters, will now choose the president. Dissenting voices are, again, being suppressed. Civil society protesters are requesting intervention by South Africa President Cyril Ramaphosa as the Southern African Development Community chair.
This echoes 2008, when Zimbabwe’s opposition groups urged Thabo Mbeki to intercede and protect the results showing that Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC had won. Instead, Mugabe applied all manner of malfeasance to retain power — a reign of state-sponsored terror which Godwin captured in The Fear.
Godwin believes Mbeki, as flagbearer for the AU and in his role as mediator between the MDC and Zanu-PF, “could have sorted Zimbabwe with one stroke of a pen by not signing off the elections. He could have organised a deal between the parties that would have returned Zimbabwe to democracy. [All the while] people were being killed and tortured.”
At that point the status quo was that all Southern Africa’s liberation movement-based parties were still in power. “I think Mbeki believed that if one of them lost power, it would break the wall. He didn’t want the precedent.”
But hypocrisy was manifest, Godwin notes: “He punted human rights — just not in Zimbabwe.” Ramaphosa, too, will almost certainly make no persuasive effort in favour of protecting Zimbabwe’s constitution.
Does the Gukurahundi still fester in the country’s collective psyche? “It’s never been talked about,” he responds, “and in my experience covering wars, often the people who have been the victims are not asking for much. They really just want an acknowledgement that this shit happened. Otherwise, it’s a historical ghosting. And it was a terrible thing.”
In all Godwin’s books, I find the descriptions of violence skilful but almost deadpan, capturing the brutality and bloodshed straightforwardly, letting shocking scenes speak for themselves, and only later filtering in the emotions of the victims or relatives.
“I think you need to be bit forensic in describing violence,” Godwin explains. “I don’t want to glorify or romanticise it. It’s a bit like Hannah Arendt’s famous epithet, the banality of evil. In my experience that chimes. I try to just describe accurately what I’m seeing and not get overemotional. The emotions must come from the people involved, not from me.”
Still, witnessing war and atrocities takes its toll. And his family has suffered. His father tried to forget the deaths of his entire family in the Holocaust, but trauma followed him. Godwin’s 27-year-old elder sister Jain and her fiancée were killed in a Rhodesian army ambush. The government used security legislation to whitewash the incident and block any court case, Godwin tells me.
His mother served as a rural doctor for half a century, but she lost everything after the country’s supposed transition to democracy. Godwin had to leave; his younger sister, Georgina, presented the national news bulletins on state broadcaster ZNBC-TV, “until it became impossible”. He means propogandist. So she too had to leave.
Yet Godwin knows the vast majority of Zimbabweans had it worse. Apart from the war and genocide, peak economic catastrophe saw hyperinflation at 80-billion percent per month in 2008-09.
“The Fear needed to be written because I felt there was a whole new cohort of democracy activists who were incredibly brave. [But] there’s much less interest in Zimbabwe when whites aren’t involved.”
In that sense, Godwin feels that the history of Zimbabwe has yet to be sensitively and accurately told. I suggest that his four memoirs go some way, at least, to correcting that. “My efforts didn’t move the needle at all, really,” he replies, “and I think my memoir writing journey is now closed.”
It isn’t a thousand-yard stare as he looks away, but, like a poker player’s tell, there’s unmistakable sadness at what the country of his birth gave, and then took away — from him, his family and all ordinary Zimbabweans.
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