Since the 1990s there has been a spate of post-colonial memoirs written by white Africans. The best was Rian Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart, a poetic, guilt-stricken Afrikaner confessional published on the eve of Nelson Mandela’s release from prison. Two others of note were by Rhodesian/Zimbabwean writers: Douglas Rogers’s The Last Resort and Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight. Both were beautifully written, funny and full of original insights. Peter Godwin, another Rhodesian/Zimbabwean, is the most prolific of all, and Exit Wounds is now his third memoir. These writers, all beneficiaries of an excellent British-supervised education system, can really tell a tale.
Godwin has a significant hinterland as a respected foreign correspondent and documentary film-maker. He has written many books, some very good (When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, about his parents’ slow decline in Mugabe’s crumbling Zimbabwe – a theme repeated here); some average (The Fear, the Mugabe book one of his fellow Zimbabwean writers said read as though he’d phoned it in); and one execrable (The Three of Us, written with his then wife Joanna Coles, a solipsistic two-Brits-arrive-in-New-York romp, littered with cultural clichés and self-absorption).I would argue that his most important book is his first, Rhodesians Never Die (1995), written with Ian Hancock: a vivid narrative that covers the Rhodesian bush war and the last days of colonial rule.
I approached Exit Wounds with some trepidation. An early reviewer had drawn attention to some clunky similes, and we do indeed have: ‘The knowledge that my mother couldn’t be bothered to say goodbye… unfurls in my brain like a malignant flag’; and ‘She emerges from her cellphone, a rabbit startled out of a lettuce patch’. There are lame jokes – ‘She was now an expert on cout-ure while I was an expert on tort-ure’ – and excruciating sixth-form-poetry-prize alliterative attempts: ‘Parading a posse of potential purchasers’, and ‘Torn by tumults of temper’.
But there is far more good writing than bad in this smart, observant, touching story of a colonial family in various stages of progress and decline, set against the disappointments of their homeland. The unpromising prospect of yet another white African burdening a broadly uninterested 21st-century western audience with his sad experiences is overturned by Godwin’s enthusiasm, vivid memory and erudition.
So here we are in Life with the Godwins. The author’s elderly mother Helen and respected journalist sister Georgina are living in the UK, and he and his soon-to-be ex-wife Joanna, a driven superwoman, are in America. They all come and go and bicker. Joanna wears Prada and climbs the publishing greasy pole; Peter brings up their two sons. The couple play tennis in the Hamptons one afternoon, after which Joanna tells Peter she wants a divorce. Then he ruminates at length, poetically, philosophically, about these swirling engagements as he witnesses both his marriage and his mother disappear.
I found the passages centred around the dying Helen deeply affecting, containing not only the best writing but also the most heartfelt emotions. I identified strongly with this. The mother and son’s exchanges could well have been between me and my mother, who was also a clever, articulate woman translocated from post-second world war Britain to the colonies before finally returning to Britain to die. In her final months, Helen suddenly starts speaking in the cut-glass accent of our late Queen. (My mother became convinced that our unspecified but apparently deeply shameful family secrets were being revealed nightly on the ITV news. ‘They’ve been at it again,’ she would tell me whenever I visited her in the hospice.) Godwin’s recreation of his mother’s final days and the impact it had on the siblings felt touchingly familiar.
I was less taken by his recollections of life on New York’s Upper West Side – his jogging route along Riverside Park and his role of stay-at-home writer and raiser of the children as his powerhouse wife spins through glamorous Manhattan like the Hearst Corporation’s equivalent of Anna Wintour.
This third memoir may mark an appropriate moment for us to move on from the old colony’s white confessionals and turn our attention instead to the new generation of exceptional black Zimbabwean writers who are producing novels of brilliance. They, too, are beneficiaries of an outstanding British education system – possibly the best in Africa, and virtually the only legacy Mugabe failed to trash. NoViolet Bulawayo, Brian Chikwava, Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu and many of their peers dance through the English language with the grace of a Nureyev or a Fonteyn. Now is their moment. Time to move on.
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