Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Memoirs of a childhood in Rhodesia and a personal account of what Zimbabwe has become.
Shall we start at the beginning?
These first two books are by my brother, Peter, who is ten years older than me. What’s interesting is that people go up to him and say; ‘Oh my God, you wrote my life! That’s just what it was like growing up in Rhodesia!’ But, for me, he really did write my life. What he’s done, I think, is to encapsulate the white experience in that country. In Mukiwa he talks with the voice of a child and that child grows up during the book – it’s very affecting. It’s really a love letter to my mother. And the second one is a love letter to my father, or, perhaps an examination of him. It’s also a kind of Zimbabwe 101 and it’s what new diplomats to Zim read because it explains what happened, why it happened.
The book Rhodesian never Die which Peter wrote with Ian Hancock is a very useful academic work which examines white society post UDI. But Mukiwa is a memoir and explains what happened through Peter’s perspective.
What did happen?
Well, it’s about how Rhodesia became Zimbabwe, from Ian Smith’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965, through the war, which was basically between black and white Rhodesians, and then Robert Mugabe’s election in 1980 and the birth of Zimbabwe.
His next book, The Fear, is going to be about what happens now, what happens next.
His books are very personal family stories. Did you mind being written about in such detail?
People often ask me how I deal with that, but the family has the last edit. He’s very good about it. We can take out anything we don’t like or that we disagree with, but, in the sense that a memoir is looking out and biography is looking in, it’s hard to say ‘that didn’t happen’ because he’s seeing it through his eyes, it looked like that to him. And once it’s in the book it becomes the new truth. Once it’s in then that’s how it was.
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Georgina Godwin is a journalist and broadcaster now based in London. She is the founder of NicoPipe Ltd and in her home town of Harare, Zimbabwe, she was for 10 years presenter of the prime time Good Morning Show for Radio 1 of the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation, and the inaugural presenter of AM Zimbabwe, the first breakfast television show in the country. She is a co-founder of the Harare International Festival of the Arts, Hifa.
