Author Peter Godwin Shares His Firsthand Account of the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe

Author Peter Godwin gave a presentation at the earlier this month about his most recent book, The Fear:  Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe.

In it Godwin relates in painstaking detail his return to his home country, Zimbabwe, in the southern part of the African continent, during a tumultuous period of bloodshed in which dictator Robert Mugabe, unwilling to concede power after losing an election, waged a surreal campaign of terror against his own people.

Godwin was born and raised in Africa after his parents emigrated from Britain in the aftermath of the Second World War.  He studied law at Cambridge University, and international relations at Oxford.  He is an award-winning foreign correspondent, author, documentarian and screenwriter. 

He has taught at the New School, Princeton and Columbia, and is a 2010 Guggenheim Fellow.  Godwin's memoir, When a Crocodile Eats the Sun won the Borders Original Voices Award, and was chosen by the American Libraries Association as a Notable Book Winner for 2008.

The free event generated a large turnout of those who came to hear Godwin share his moving account, read especially poignant excerpts from his latest book and answer audience queries.

Copies of The Fear were available for purchase and signing courtesy of Best Bargain Books.

Mugabe, the ruler of Zimbabwe, took over at the time of the country gaining independence in 1980, and is the only ruler it has ever known.  Godwin described him as an intelligent, manipulative dictator, a despot that had grown accustomed to being seen as a liberator, and would stop at nothing to keep his position in power.

"He loves to try to occupy the moral high ground, and goes through fake, bogus elections," said Godwin of the tyrant.

In 2008, Zimbabwe had an election that went out of the dictator's control.  In part, due to a law passed that imported 4000 disposable cameras in voting stations, making it more difficult to manipulate the figures.

"In the end there was such a swing against him," explained Godwin who read a passage from his book that elucidated the point further:

"They have many reasons to reject him.  Once they enjoyed the highest standard of living in Africa.  Now their money is nearly worthless, halving in value every twenty-four hours.  Only 6 percent of workers have jobs.  Their incomes have sunk to pre-1950s levels.  They are starving.  Their schools are closed, their hospitals collapsed.  Their life expectancy has crashed from sixty to thirty-six.  They have the world's highest ratio of orphans.  They are officially the unhappiest people on Earth, and they are fleeing the shattered country in their millions— an exodus of up to a third of the population."

During this time Godwin, now living in Manhattan with his wife and two young sons, accepted a commission from Vanity Fair to go over there at this watershed moment and do a piece.  At great personal peril, he clandestinely revisited the land that he once called home.

 "I was delighted after 30 years, the old dictator was about to go.  It looked like he was ready to go.  It was a question of time," said Godwin

But, the results of the elections weren't being announced.

"[Mugabe] launched a campaign of torture on an industrial scale.  He went around the country putting up office bearers on the village and town level, burning houses; he would kills cattle in appalling ways," said Godwin.  "He would herd men and women into torture chambers within an inch of their life.  Women were raped multiple times and sent back to the village as human billboards — a political stigmata — to send out ripples of anxiety of what would happen if you oppose the dictator."

The author conveyed the unimaginable atrocities he witnessed:  Bed after bed, on floor after floor, in countless hospital wards Mugabe's mangled victims could be found.

Godwin said he became "part chaplain, journalist, scribe, lawyer."

Today, at 87, Mugabe is the world's oldest leader.

Zimbabwe's moral outrages receive little press, and have no celebrity spokesperson, unlike Darfur or the Congo, which are both classified as Civil Wars in Africa, and have thus earned international peace-keepers.  In an excerpt from The Fear Godwin wrote:

"Ours is not, [a Civil War] because the opposition has not yet picked up weapons.  Ours is a war with only one side."

Despite the horrors he saw, Godwin said he is hopeful for the future due to the fact that in the last five years international law has been moving fast as far as prosecuting crimes against humanity.

"It's crucial in the case of Zimbabwe," he said.  "The advent of this kind of law means that when Mugabe and his generals were behind closed doors, this would have played on their minds very heavy."

Godwin's mind-bending life, which consisted of moving between two worlds that were polar opposites of one another, was written about in first person, he explained, as a vehicle for the reader to comprehend the incomprehensible on a personal level.

Another excerpt from The Fear which Godwin shared with the audience stated:

"I wish there were a better word than victims to describe what these people were ... survivors I suppose defines them better.  They are proud of their roles and the sacrifices in all this, and I want it recorded.  I'm bearing witness to what is happening here, to the sustained cruelty of it all  ... So it will not have happened in vain."

If you want to help the people of Zimbabwe, or find out more about their continuing struggle, go to petergodwin.com for links to charities operating in Zimbabwe, and the latest news of events there.