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Mukiwa is intended as a memoir rather than an autobiography. The characters who populate these pages are a mixture of actual people and composites. I have changed many of their names and identifying characteristics, not particularly for legal reasons, but to protect them against possible intrusion. In some cases, especially in the war chapters, I have altered quite a lot – people still risk retribution. But all famous people, politicians and other leaders, are accurately identified.

Although Mukiwa is a work of nonfiction it is not a work of forensic research. For that you should read Rhodesians Never Die – the history book I wrote (with Ian Hancock) on the end of white Rhodesia. In Mukiwa I have written as I remember, with all the foibles and imperfections brought on by the passage of time.

This book was both easy and traumatic to write. There are things here which I had very effectively buried under layers of emotional scar tissue. The process of tearing it away was in some cases pleasurable and in others deeply disturbing. But it was always liberating.

I have tried not to be wise after the event but to describe things as they seemed at the time, even where that may have portrayed us unattractively. I have tried not to preach or to politic. I have tried not to be sentimental or censorious.

Above all the book is intended as a tribute to Africa – the home I never knew I had.

Peter Godwin

London, 1996