Land, Race and Victimhood in Peter Godwin’s When a Crocodile Eats the Sun

Abstract

SummaryIn this article, I discuss different interpretations of Zimbabwean land in relation to the contradictory notions of victimhood in Peter Godwin’s memoir When a Crocodile Eats the Sun. I also explore the concepts of race, landownership and redress in relation to the legacy of colonialism in Zimbabwe. Through the use of the Cultural Interpretive Theory, Genre Theory and the Theories of Autobiographies, I explore how the politics of victimhood are used by both the Black Nationalist elites and the alienated White citizens to project the essence of ethno-racial grievance before local and international audiences for different ideological and political objectives. I show how the politics of victimhood and retribution which engender feelings of resentment and betrayal in Godwin’s memoir play into the hands of the Zimbabwe state’s anti-Western and anti-Imperialist propaganda. I argue that Godwin’s otherwise important memoir on the destructive effects of Mugabe’s rule undermined its message through traces of “whiteness”, and also by competing on the same turf of victimhood that a politically discredited state had constructed for its own preservation. In the article, I suggest alternative readings of the Mugabe regime’s violent farm grabs to the rather one-dimensional one offered by the memoir.