It is more thant 10 years since Peter Godwin published his account of growing up in a Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) that collapsed into civil war. He has now published a follow-up, When a Crocodile Eats the Sun which he spoke about at the Hay Festival.
Zimbabwe's decline since 2000 has been eerily reflected in the decline of Godwin's parents; his mother, an experienced and compassionate doctor, is now frail, and his father, a respected engineer, dead. The mother begs her son not to allow a blood transfusion to be given her at the local hospital in which she has herself worked; she knows they simply do not have the equipment to ensure the procedure can be carried out safely. She can no longer trust the blood of her adopted land. A nurse waits for the doctor to leave the room before quietly agreeing with Godwin's mother.
Godwin uses a neat metaphor to demonstrate how his own family life, in microcosm, mirrors Zimbabwe's deterioration. His parents install a new swimming pool and his father proudly keeps it at peak performance and shows it off to all visitors - but the water turns green as the chemicals to keep it clean become scarce, it has to be used to farm fish as money becomes tighter, its water is used to flush the toilets as the supply diminishes, and finally the water is filtered and used by Godwin's parents for drinking.
According to Godwin, between two and three million Zimbabweans have now left their country. He has left himself. The inflation crippling the nation has reached such proportions that his mother's lifetime of work in the health industry now offers a pension yielding around $1 a month.
Meanwhile the Christianity promoted in the country is of an old puritanical streak; the Anglican church, unlike the Catholic, offers no opposition to Mugabe. I recently interviewed a gay Zimbabwean refugee who is now in hiding in the UK. Her family faces threats from local religious leaders for not bringing their daughter back to the country to suffer the correct punishment for her sexuality. She has filed a rape claim against the local police - her family have been told that they will not be protected by the state until the charges have been withdrawn. She, in particular, has very little incentive to return to the country of her birth.
Godwin himself wonders why his parents remained. His mother answers by quoting Kipling's Roman Centurion's Song: "Rome is Britain and Britain is Africa," she explains to her son. His father's reasons are more complex and compelling. In the last months of his life, he reveals to his son that he is a Polish Jew who, in 1939, happened to be studying a language course in England when the Nazis invaded his homeland. He never saw his mother and sister again. He fought for the Free Polish in the war and was not now going to run away from this second Hitler in his lifetime.
Godwin doesn't view the next decade with optimism. Even when Mugabe finally dies the opposition party will remain infested with government agents and divided on key issues. The infrastructures and industries needed to run a country simply do not exist any more.
Zimbabwe, according to Godwin and to most others with any knowledge of the country, will take a generation to fix. As for who to blame - "there's a lot to go around". The tacit support of the Zimbabwean Anglicans, the expat Zimbabweans (like himself) that send money back to support their loved ones, keeping the economy afloat, the West's Cold War sympathies for Mugabe as "their" dictator and, of course, the "quiet" diplomacy of South Africa, a country he (and I) see as being capable of bringing about the end of Mugabe in a moment if it chose to do so. But South Africa faces its own internal crises and still lives in a world where it does not wish to criticise an independent, black-run neighbouring state, despite the reality of the 2000 election and the fact that the swimming-pool water has long been too foul for any democracy to drink.
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