Rhodesia, 1964. A small boy witnesses the murder of his neighbour, killed by the African guerrillas known as the Crocodile Gang. It is the beginning of the end of white rule in Africa. In Mukiwa (Shona for 'white man') Peter Godwin has written a vivid and exciting account of growing up in a British colony rapidly collapsing into chaos.
Seen through the eyes of a child, Eastern Rhodesia was a magical and frightening world of leopard hunting, lepers, witch doctors, snakes, forest fires and the post-mortems conducted by his mother.
But through the eyes of an adolescent, a boy-soldier caught in the middle of a vicious civil war and finally an adult who returned to Zimbabwe as a journalist to cover the bloody transition to majority black rule, it became a land stalked by death and danger.