Rhodesians Never Die: The Impact of War and Political Change on White Rhodesia, c.1970-1980
About this ebook
In Rhodesians Never Die, Peter Godwin and Ian Hancock offer a nuanced and critical look at the white community's response to the escalating guerrilla war and immense political pressure that defined the 1970s. The authors explore the profound impact of the conflict on Rhodesian society, examining the internal divisions, myths, and pervasive self-deception that characterised the white minority's attempts to maintain its privileged "way of life" in the face of inevitable change.
Drawing on parliamentary debates, newspapers, official reports, and personal interviews, Godwin and Hancock paint a vivid picture of a community under siege, living in a state of denial and unreality. They deconstruct the myth of Rhodesian unity and identity, detailing the deep fissures within white society and the psychological trauma, moral decay, and increasing emigration that signaled its unraveling.
Essential reading for anyone interested in the history of Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, and the end of colonial rule in Africa, Rhodesians Never Die is a powerful and poignant tale of a society confronting the loss of its dominion. It offers invaluable insights into how a community can be willfully blind to the realities it refuses to accept, and the devastating consequences of that denial.
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About the author
Peter Godwin was born and raised in Zimbabwe. He studied law at Cambridge University and international relations at Oxford. He is an award-winning foreign correspondent, author, documentary-maker and screenwriter. After practicing human rights law in Zimbabwe, he became a foreign correspondent, reporting from more than 60 countries, including wars in Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Somalia, Congo, Ivory Coast, Sudan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Kashmir and the last years of apartheid South Africa. He served as East European correspondent and diplomatic correspondent for the London Sunday Times, and chief correspondent for BBC television’s flagship foreign affairs program, Assignment, making documentaries in such places as Cuba, Panama, Indonesia, Pakistan, Spain, Northern Ireland, the Philippines, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, the Baltics, and the Balkans as it descended into war. His film, The Industry of Death, about the sex trade in Thailand, won the gold medal for investigative film at the New York Film Festival. He also wrote and co-presented a three-part series Africa Unmasked for Britain's Channel Four. He has written for a wide array of magazines and newspapers including Vanity Fair, (for which he was a 2009 finalist for the Michael Kelly award) National Geographic, New York Times magazine and Men’s Journal. He is the author of six non-fiction books: 'Rhodesians Never Die' - The Impact of War and Political Change on White Rhodesia c.1970 - 1980 (with Ian Hancock), Wild at Heart: Man and Beast in Southern Africa (with photos by Chris Johns and foreword by Nelson Mandela), The Three of Us - a New Life in New York (with Joanna Coles), Mukiwa, which received the George Orwell prize and the Esquire-Apple-Waterstones award, and When a Crocodile Eats the Sun - a Memoir of Africa, which won the Borders Original Voices Award. His book The Fear: Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe, was selected by the New Yorker as a best book of the year. He has taught writing at Columbia, Princeton, and the New School, and was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship. From 2012-15 he served as president of the PEN American Center. He is an Orwell fellow and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
