Mukiwa

"In Mukiwa he talks with the voice of a child and that child grows up during the book – it’s very affecting. It’s really a love letter to my mother. And the second one is a love letter to my father, or, perhaps an examination of him. It’s also a kind of Zimbabwe 101 and it’s what new diplomats to Zim read because it explains what happened, why it happened. The book Rhodesian never Die which Peter wrote with Ian Hancock is a very useful academic work which examines white society post UDI. But Mukiwa is a memoir and explains what happened through Peter’s perspective. Well, it’s about how Rhodesia became Zimbabwe, from Ian Smith’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965, through the war, which was basically between black and white Rhodesians, and then Robert Mugabe’s election in 1980 and the birth of Zimbabwe. His next book, The Fear , is going to be about what happens now, what happens next. People often ask me how I deal with that, but the family has the last edit. He’s very good about it. We can take out anything we don’t like or that we disagree with, but, in the sense that a memoir is looking out and biography is looking in, it’s hard to say ‘that didn’t happen’ because he’s seeing it through his eyes, it looked like that to him. And once it’s in the book it becomes the new truth. Once it’s in then that’s how it was. No. In fact it’s very liberating. We were brought up with this enormous secret, my father’s secret, that he was Jewish – Peter writes about this in When a Crocodile Eats the Sun – and suddenly it’s out there for everybody, absolutely everybody. It’s kind of odd. I think people do find it cathartic even though it isn’t their own experience. From the letters we get – people get us muddled up as though we are sort of interchangeable – I think they do feel that their life has been given a voice somehow. Peter was actually a combatant in the war, fighting for the white Rhodesians against Mugabe and other factions. It was black versus white and… I’ve just been to Sarajevo and it’s amazing being somewhere that has had a war people can talk about, are allowed to talk about. We, white Zimbabweans, aren’t allowed to talk about the war because we were on the losing side. It’s unhealthy. We are very unhealthy. Because there’s nowhere for us to go with our experience. I think many white Zimbabweans don’t feel welcome at home and they don’t fit in anywhere else. Many of them have been very privileged– they lose servants and swimming pools and gain nothing. The politics of the Diaspora is very unhealthy as well, for blacks and whites. It’s really toxic. There is a lot of backstabbing. You’re not there, not on the ground and so it’s easy for ex-pat factions to develop when nobody really knows what’s going on. It’s the country in microcosm and it’s not nice. Yes. We went on a research trip earlier this year and drove around having experiences. He has to have experiences to write about them and he has to have them with someone. We discuss everything a lot, the stories we’ve found. I mean, I suppose we are quite interchangeable… It seemed much healthier. The government of National Unity seemed as though it might work. Two weeks ago I thought it would, but now I think it might just fracture. Many parts of ZANU (PF) – Mugabe’s party, are trying to undermine the GNU and are working to split the Movement for Democratic Change. I suppose there is a chance that some of the opposition might stay with ZANU, (Mugabe’s party). The MDC was formed for a sprint and has ended up in a marathon. They are activists, not necessarily educated people. There are already two factions. But the good thing is that the US dollar is now the currency. That is a major difference, has stopped the rampant hyperinflation and means there’s money around, that people can buy things with their wages. I have a 100 trillion Zimbabwean dollar note. When you can’t write a cheque because the figures won’t fit onto it, things are really bad. But now the ZANU-PF are trying to make as much money as possible before they have to go, selling all the crops and abandoning the farms. It’s a feeding frenzy."