The memoir provides a first-hand account of the series of events which resulted in the decimation of Zimbabwe, which Godwin called no less than the personification of an African tragedy. The decline of a civilized productive country is paired with Godwin's vivid descriptions of his family and his late discovery that his father was not just the difficult and strict British expatriate that he presented himself as, but a Polish Jew who lost his family to the horrors of the Holocaust who never spoke of it to his children until just before his death.
To more than 150 rapt listeners, Godwin interwove his comments about the past and present state of matters in Zimbabwe as he described the lives of his parents: an emotionally distant but brilliant father, "a quintessential British colonial, with a great handlebar moustache, truculent, strict and emotionally dissident, my mother the emotional portal to him."
Godwin portrayed his mother as a loving parent and trained physician who spent much of her life in clinics healing and helping until the AIDS tidal wave rendered her efforts virtually useless.
"Zimbabwe," said Godwin "was not a dirt poor developmental nation like Sierra Leone, but the great hope of Africa. Zimbabwe had well educated people, food enough to provide for export. To see it laid so low is a greater tragedy measured against its potential and the fact that it was so obviously unnecessary." Godwin blames the decline of the country on "one man's hubris" - Robert Mugabe, the President of Zimbabwe since 1980.
"Zimbabweans were not dull-eyed peasant folks sitting on their hands while war raged and the helicopters came," said Godwin, but an educated population with a mobility second to none, who left the country because, as trained professionals, they were sick of conditions there and believed they could find a better life. Although there is no real census, Godwin estimated that 70 percent of the population between the ages of 20 and 65 left the country.
Godwin provided plenty of colorful examples of the gradual disintegration of the farming system in Zimbabwe as the war vets or "wovits," as they are called, grab land from the rightful owners, rendering the great farms useless even as they demand food and money and sustenance from those farm owners. The spell-binding stories are replete with violence and chaos.
Godwin left the country and returned repeatedly to write about Africa, for such publications as the Sunday Times of London and National Geographic, but despite the ever declining and more dangerous conditions in Zimbabwe, his parents refused to leave, though their lives were often in jeopardy.
"As the country sickened and died, said Godwin, "so did my father. Just before he died, he hammered up a sepia portrait of two adults and a child." That was how Godwin found out that his father was sent by his family from war-ravaged Poland to Britain in 1939 where he fought for the Allies, and eventually met and married his British wife, losing his family to the Holocaust.
Godwin described the paradox of his life with his family in an African country spiraling ever downward. "I was the African, my parents were the emigrants. They got there in their 20s. Now, as I don't live there, they have become more African, and I become less African."
The title, "When a Crocodile Eats the Sun," comes from an African tribal belief, which holds that an eclipse of the sun occurs when a crocodile eats it: "This celestial crocodile, they say, briefly consumes our life-giving star as a warning that he is much displeased with the behavior of man below. It is the very worst of omens." In 2000, two total eclipses occurred within less than two years, something no one he knows can recall, "even in the stories handed down through the generations." People are saying that "the celestial crocodile must be truly furious to be back so soon, threatening us again with perpetual darkness."