Since the 1990s there has been a spate of post-colonial memoirs written by white Africans. The best was Rian Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart, a poetic, guilt-stricken Afrikaner confessional published on the eve of Nelson Mandela’s release from prison. Two others of note were by Rhodesian/Zimbabwean writers: Douglas Rogers’s The Last Resort and Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight. Both were beautifully written, funny and full of original insights. Peter Godwin, another Rhodesian/Zimbabwean, is the most prolific of all, and Exit Wounds is now his third memoir. These writers, all beneficiaries of an excellent British-supervised education system, can really tell a tale.
Godwin has a significant hinterland as a respected foreign correspondent and documentary film-maker. He has written many books, some very good (When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, about his parents’ slow decline in Mugabe’s crumbling Zimbabwe – a theme repeated here); some average (The Fear, the Mugabe book one of his fellow Zimbabwean writers said read as though he’d phoned it in); and one execrable (The Three of Us, written with his then wife Joanna Coles, a solipsistic two-Brits-arrive-in-New-York romp, littered with cultural clichés and self-absorption).I would argue that his most important book is his first, Rhodesians Never Die (1995), written with Ian Hancock: a vivid narrative that covers the Rhodesian bush war and the last days of colonial rule.
I approached Exit Wounds with some trepidation. An early reviewer had drawn attention to some clunky similes, and we do indeed have: ‘The knowledge that my mother couldn’t be bothered to say goodbye… unfurls in my brain like a malignant flag’; and ‘She emerges from her cellphone, a rabbit startled out of a lettuce patch’.
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