Rhodesia, 1964: A young boy stumbles upon the dead body of his neighbor, killed by the African guerrillas known as the Crocodile Gang. It is the beginning of the end of white rule in southern Africa. In Mukiwa, Peter Godwin, the young boy confronted by that murder, has written a vivid and moving account of growing up in a British colony collapsing into chaos.

The story begins in the magnificent mountains of eastern Zimbabwe, where Godwin, the son of a country doctor and an engineer, grew up. Seen through the eyes of a child, the strangeness of Africa is perfectly rendered; it is a magical and frightening world of leopard hunting, witch doctors, lepers, snakes, forest fires, and the human autopsies his mother had to conduct.

But in the eyes of an adolescent, a boy-soldier caught in the middle of a civil war, and finally an adult who has returned to Zimbabwe as a journalist to cover the bloody transition into black rule, it becomes a land stalked by death and danger.