'Mukiwa'

I'm steadily working my way through my old books - there really doesn't seem much point in keeping them unless I'm going to read them again, though several have huge sentimental value so I couldn't dispose of those ones.

Some of my favourites I'm reading for perhaps the fourth or even fifth time. 'Mukiwa' falls into the category of those I've only read once although, now I've finished it, I realise I should have re-read it long ago.

Mukiwa means 'white man' in the Shona language of what is now Zimbabwe. Peter Godwin was born and lived much of his early life in Southern Rhodesia / Rhodesia / Zimbabwe but was caught up in the terrible war that tore the country apart during the 1960s and 70s. Although he sympathised with the black majority - he was a fluent Shona speaker - and although he knew it was a war that the Rhodesian government under Ian Smith could never win, he had to join the white side and witnessed, both as a policeman and later, in the 1980s, as a reporter, some of the horrors of both the guerrilla war and the Mugabe regime that followed it.

He desperately wanted the new Zimbabwe to succeed but finally, as with so many of the whites who felt it was their hard work which had created a wealthy country, he gave up on it - and therein lies the tragedy of the book.

'Mukiwa' is vividly written so doesn't need photographs, though I love the only one he includes, a very small one almost lost on the back cover, which shows him playing with a Shona friend in the African dirt. Somehow it perfectly illustrates what might have been.