THIS is Peter Godwin's second memoir of his family's southern African lives. It starts and finishes in 2004 with the author assembling tropical wood and a few conifer logs around his father's corpse, and lighting the pyre. Despite being trailed in a prologue, George Godwin's death is remarkably affecting when it eventually comes. This is testament to his son's skill at blending a gentle domestic intimacy with scrabbled reportage on the tragedy of Zimbabwe.

A decade ago, Mukiwa: a White Boy in Africa, Godwin's first memoir, gave an earthy account of his own childhood roaming through the glorious, lush landscapes of Rhodesia during the latter days of British colonial rule. Conscripted into that country's vicious civil war, Godwin witnessed the bloody birth in 1980 of independent Zimbabwe.

Now settled in New York City with his family, Godwin seeks out journalistic assignments that allow him to pop in on his ageing parents back in Harare. One piece, for National Geographic, is on the appropriation of white Zimbabweans' farms by gangs of unruly "war vets" (known as "wovits") who fought in the struggle for independence and, unsurprisingly, have accumulated little to show for it.

Mugabe's lunatic land reforms have encouraged and legitimised this aggressive squatting by mobs in a nation that has lost the rule of law. Wovits were arbitrarily marking out plots of land, destroying crops and livestock, threatening, assaulting and sometimes killing the farmers with impunity. Often their partitioned farms were frittered away as political rewards for Mugabe's urban henchmen.

Godwin witnesses first-hand the scale of governmentfomented race-baiting and violence, but his horror is matched by anguish at its consequences for his native country. By 2003, all manner of production had crashed; the economy had halved in size since 1988, with hyperinflation adding to the threat of politicallyinduced famine. Since 1980, life expectancy has almost halved to 33, assisted by ministerial decrees denying the existence of the Aids pandemic.

Mary and George Godwin, a doctor and an engineer, are now disabled, impoverished pensioners eking out their retirement amid the wreckage of an infrastructure that they helped to sustain, but that is not Godwin's only shock. George's lifelong taciturnity on his own family history turns out to have masked his origins as a Polish Jew whose wartime studies and soldiering in England meant that he avoided the fate of his sister and mother: Treblinka. Archival research fleshes out a personal Holocaust tragedy, but also puts Nazi atrocities into uncomfortable proximity with Mugabe's ethnic purges.

Godwin now feels ambivalent towards a land that he had passionately held on to as his home: where he was born, where his sister had died and where his parents had worked for 50 years.

He documents small, cumulative acts of courage, philanthropy and dignity in the face of aggression.

"A white in Africa is like a Jew everywhere, " he reflects after reading a depressing poll in New Africanmagazine that ranks Mugabe as Africa's thirdgreatest leader of all time: "on sufferance, watching warily, waiting for the next great tidal swell of hostility".

Ironically . . . and this is the only glimmer of hope in the story . . .

Mugabe has fomented the racial unity that his vitriol had intended to smash for good. Rallying around Godwin's mother in her bereavement is a truly panAfrican, cross-cultural group of well-wishers, securely united in their resistance to a man described by Archbishop Desmond Tutu as "the very caricature of an African tyrant".

Tender, frustrated, unsentimental . . . this potent memoir holds little joy for Zimbabwe but is fiercely proud of its subjects' unyielding