"When A Crocodile Eats The Sun"

I found this memoir a few weeks ago and decided to share it with you all. Not only is the writing beautiful, but it speaks the truth. The children that I've seen at Nyumbani Children's Home and in Kibera do live in constant proximity to death every day. The younger children don't necessarily understand what they have or why they're sick, but they do understand death. They understand that their friend who was with them last week, is now buried under the ground. But the older children understand the disease. They understand that unless they take their antiretroviral drugs every day, there's a big chance they will die some day. They understand that their parents and possibly their siblings died as a result of this virus and they could be next. So you can understand why maintaining the illusion of control is difficult in a world where children don't know if they'll have a tomorrow. They don't know if they'll have a future.

Would you feel in control of if you didn't know you were going to have a tomorrow or if you didn't have a future?

"I feel too that the gap between my new life in NY and the situation at home in Africa is stretching into a gulf, as Zimbabwe spirals downward into a violent dictatorship. My head bulges with the effort to contain both worlds. When I am back in NY Africa immediately seems fantastical, a wildly plumaged bird as exotic as it is unlikely.
Most of us struggle in life to maintain the illusion of control, but in Africa that illusion is almost impossible to maintain. I always have the sense that there is no equilibrium, that everything perpetually teeters on the brink of some dramatic change, that society constantly stands poised for some spasm, some tsunami in which you can do nothing but hope to bob up to the surface and not be sucked out into a dark and hungry sea. The origin of my permanent sense of unease, my general foreboding, is probably the fact that I have lived through just such change, such a sudden and violent upending of value systems.
In my part of Africa, death is never far away. With most Zimbabweans dying in their early thirties now, mortality has a seat at every table. The urgent, tugging winds themselves seem to whisper the message memento mori, you too shall die. In Africa, you do not view death from the auditorium of life, as a spectator, but from the edge of the stage, waiting only for your cue. You feel perishable, temporary, transient. You feel mortal.
Maybe that is why you seem to live more vividly in Africa. The drama of life there is amplified by its constant proximity to death. That’s what infuses it with tension. It is the essence of its tragedy too. People love harder there. Love is the way that life forgets that it is terminal. Love is life’s alibi in the face of death.
For me the illusion of control is much easier to maintain in England or in America. In this temperate world, I feel more secure, as if change will only happen incrementally, in manageable, finely calibrated, bite size portions. There is a sense of continuity threaded through it all: the anchor of history, the tangible presence of antiquity, of buildings, of institutions. You live in the expectation of reaching old age.
At least you used to."

When A Crocodile Eats The Sun
A Memoir of Africa

Peter Godwin