4 ideas
After his father George Godwin suffers a heart attack in Zimbabwe, Peter learns that his father was born Kazimierz Goldfarb, a Polish Jew. His mother and sister were murdered in the Holocaust, most likely at Treblinka. He had rebuilt himself as an English engineer and raised his children in Rhodesia without ever telling them.
Between roughly 1996 and 2004, Godwin repeatedly flies from New York to Harare to care for his failing parents. Meanwhile Mugabe's regime sends 'war veterans' to seize white-owned farms, hyperinflation wipes out pensions, and food and fuel disappear. His parents' shrinking lives, from their savings to their medicine to their safety, become a close-range measure of the national collapse.
The title comes from a southern African belief that a solar eclipse happens when a crocodile swallows the sun. It is read as a sign that the ancestors are angry with the ruler. Through this lens, Mugabe's late rule is a natural order so poisoned by one leader that the society itself goes dark.
Godwin finds a parallel between his father and his own generation. The father was a Jew cast out of his European homeland. The son is a white African whom Mugabe's rhetoric now brands a settler with no right to the land. The book argues that people often discover the conditional nature of their belonging only when a regime decides, for political purposes, to redefine them as outsiders.