Wole Soyinka compares the Zimbabwe land programme with Stalin’s land collectivization in Soviet Russia, designed to get rid of the kulaks, the commercial farmers he saw as a political threat. To bank up his waning popularity, he inserted into the new constitution a law allowing the seizure of commercial farmland and its redistribution to Black peasants, most of who are still waiting. Many economists calculate the real collapse of the economy from 1997, when Mugabe started the pay-offs to war veterans, known to the people as “wovits”. Managers of mines and factories and the farms have begun training three people to fill every job. Life expectancy has dropped to thirty-three, the age when people should be in their prime. Many families are headed by grandparents or 12-year-old girls. Then AIDS, brought back from the Congo war, was nothing less than a huge disaster. The scale and ferocity of the killings were more than anything that happened during the war for independence yet they went largely unnoticed by the international community. Zim’s decline started in 1983 with the Matabeleland massacres carried out by North Korean-trained troops. Why, despite our huge mineral resources and favourable weather, are we so far behind? Now South Korea’s economy is a hundred and twenty times the size of Zimbabwe’s. In 1963, Zimbabwe had the same GDP as South Korea. These were particularly bad years – not that things have got much better since – for anyone, Black or White, except the “fat cats”.

Thus Zimbabwean Peter Godwin aptly titles his book on his own and his ageing parents’ experiences in Harare during the early 2000s. This celestial crocodile, they say, briefly consumes our life-giving star as a warning that he is much displeased with the behaviour of man below. Other southern African peoples like the Zulus and the Venda believe that it occurs when “a crocodile eats the sun”. The Mashona of Zimbabwe say that a solar eclipse is caused by angered ancestors.

When a crocodile eats the sun review