A crocodile ate the sun twice during a very short time span in the early years of the millennium. It coincided with Robert Mugabe's ever-increasing brutality and Zimbabwe's first slow collapse; before the rate of unemployment reached 80 percent and inflation reached 2.2 million percent. Back before the rest of the world seemed to care anything about the plight of Zimbabwe. Back before this most recent election.
I bought "When a Crocodile Eats the Sun" last January. It was one of Amazon's best books of 2007, and it sounded interesting to me, but I couldn't get around to reading it until my summer break in grad school. I'm really glad I finally got the chance.
It is a memoir written by a white Zimbabwean journalist, who moved first to England and then to America, but continually traveled back to his home as it descended into chaos. He traveled back as a reporter, risking his freedom and safety, since journalists had been banned from the country. He traveled back as a concerned son, who worried about his parents' safety and deteriorating health. And he traveled back as a native African, who loved his country and couldn't seem to stay away.
The memoir is both fascinating and touching. It's fascinating in its examination of a brutal dictator and the collapse of a once-thriving nation. It's touching in its honest look at familial ties and the emotions that bind us together. As a former journalist and a person who's deeply interested in Africa, I loved it.
But the book goes far beyond the surface of the situations, both national and familial. And it does so in a way that I can't really explain. It's just ... moving. The emotional power is twice that than a cursory look at Zimbabwe would be because you follow a mother and father who are aging and succumbing to illness, all while their beloved nation falls into greater disarray and despair. Personal and political tragedy become inseparable. I spent much of the last 100 pages in tears—a feat I haven't repeated since reading the Kite Runner.
The book doesn't just cover Mugabe's dictatorship, though, and it doesn't just address the loss of your dearest loved ones. It also addresses the Holocaust—first in passing, then in horrifying detail. As the book progresses, we're left to add up the sum of mankind's atrocities, both past and present, alongside personal loss. It becomes a sobering glimpse at the human condition.
Honestly, it just left me wondering how we can do such things to one another. How one man can do something so horrifying to another man and find pleasure in it. How a group of people can try to wipe out an entire race, not because they were forced to, but because they enjoyed doing it. It's sickening and heartbreaking all in the same breath. And it just doesn't ever seem to end.
I felt this same way last semester when I was researching a paper for my International class. I read story after story about the plight of refugees, and I read endless accounts of genocides, ethnic cleansings, and systematic rapes and torture. And I just wondered—much as I'm doing right now—how we can do these things to one another.
It makes me wonder why God created mankind at all. As an omnipotent God, He knew what would happen—what we would do to each other in the Holocaust, the Crusades, the Civil War, Sierra Leone, 9/11, Rwanda, Abu Ghraib, Darfur—and yet He still created us. He knew that we would hurt each other, dehumanize one another, and destroy life, but He still let us go down this path of destruction. And I just don't understand why.
It's a question I've struggled with since I was eight. I remember asking my parents, after their nightly prayer over me, why God created Adam and Eve when He knew what they would do and what would come later. I remember they gave me some long, intricate answer that left me unsatisfied then, just as I'm unsatisfied now. An answer that basically said, "I don't know."
Sometimes I think it was to display His love. That without free will and that first horrible choice, Jesus' death, resurrection, and redeeming grace would never have come, and we wouldn't know the full extent of God's love and perfect grace. But sometimes I still struggle with that grace. It's beautiful, and it's humbling, and it's hopeful, and it's overwhelming. But sometimes it's hard to accept because we are so unworthy, and we deserve nothing but the worst. I think that's why Catholics focus on works—because they want to do something to earn that grace—when in reality, all we have to do is accept it.
But most people won't. So while we clamor for peace and human rights and freedom and dignity, there will be more war, destruction, anger, and hatred. For every Mother Teresa or Nelson Mandela, there will be 10 Mugabes and Milosevics and bin Ladins, until there is no longer a sun for the crocodile to eat.
Until that time comes, I can only hope there will be more memoirs like this one, which force us to turn off the TV and put aside our petty obsessions; accounts that force us to focus on the world around us and examine mankind as a whole. Because it is books such as this that give me hope that change is possible, and perhaps we can overcome oppression in the world after all. At the very least, it is books such as this that remind me there are still people who are willing to try.
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