A square circle is the classic contradiction in terms. More recently other oxymora have found their way into common parlance such as military intelligence and social security. Should white African be added to the list? Some see no reason why a white cannot be a fully fledged African who just happens to be of paler complexion. They point to many a white's love for the continent, which is akin to a convert's zeal for his new religion. Others insist that a white African is a creature out of its natural habitat and will never be more than a temporary sojourner.

Peter Godwin seems to agree. In his book Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa he tells the story of his youth in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. Growing up in the pastoral Eastern highlands, Godwin was one of those white children who probably spoke more Shona than English. Unlike many of his linguistically challenged fellow Rhodesians, he didn't have to use kitchen kaffir, a bastardized patois in which "the verbs were Zulu and the nouns were English and the swear words were Afrikaans." Godwin's childhood days were halcyon ones. Mukiwa, named after the Shona word for "white man," brings to life the vibrant images and smells of Africa. You can hear the incessant chirping of cicadas. You can see the riotous purple of a jacaranda in full bloom or the quartzite mountains looking sugar-coated in the sunshine. Squabbling with a mate at boarding school, Godwin missed the one moment that was to forever change Africa as he knew it: Ian Smith's infamous 1965 radio announcement of UDI--Rhodesia's unilateral declaration of independence from Britain to pre-empt black majority rule.

Clinging to white rule on a black continent has always been an exercise in futility, an attempt to defy the laws of political gravity. Godwin was conscripted into the armed forces defending white supremacy and soon found out that there was nowhere to hide for someone who held no brief for the white herrenvolk yet who still fought Ian Smith's battles. When he stood up for the blacks, he was branded a kaffir-lover by his fellow whites. But he also felt rejected by blacks, not all of whom welcomed a visitor from beyond the racial divide. "There really wasn't much room in the middle of Africa--all sides ended up despising you," he recalls. During the pursuit of a group of black freedom fighters, he caught a glimpse of a strange reflection in a windowpane. "It was a terrifying face, coursed through with anger and despair. It was a face of someone who would kill an unarmed civilian for withholding information. It was my face."

Finally Godwin got to leave the country. "I took off my uniform with relief, and resolved never to come back." But he did return after attending university in Britain, and by then Rhodesia had become Zimbabwe under the presidency of former guerrilla leader Robert Mugabe. Many whites expected to be driven into the sea, but Mugabe preached reconciliation and they got off lightly--at least initially. Apart from the Congo, Africa didn't turn the tables on its former colonial masters. Instead it was other minorities who were pushed out or persecuted: Arabs on Zanzibar, Indians in Uganda, blacks everywhere. Zimbabwe was no exception. Mugabe used the draconian emergency powers he had inherited from Ian Smith against recalcitrant Matabeleland. Now a journalist, Godwin sneaked into the area that had been cordoned off by the army and found signs of gruesome massacres. The new regime had turned out to be the mirror image of the old one. "The revolution might have come, but they didn't want to change everything at all," observes Godwin, albeit on the subject of school uniforms. "They just wanted a part of it."

The question raised, but only indirectly answered by Godwin's powerful memoir, is whether South Africa can be the home to whites that the rest of the continent never was. Numbering 5 million, white South Africans have reached critical mass. And the Afrikaners, settlers since the 17th century, have sunk deep roots into the soil. Godwin had a brief infatuation with the Afrikaners, although this was inspired not by admiration for the "real white Africans" but by admiration for an Afrikaans-speaking girl. Hard-headed and respectful of authority, many Afrikaners have adapted to the new South Africa. In the battle of the isms, opportunism has often won over racism.

Afrikaners have a contemptuous name for English-speaking South Africans who carry the white man's burden: sout piel (salt penis). One foot in Africa and the other one in Britain leaves the middle part of the anatomy dangling in the ocean. They are the ones who have trouble coming to grips with change. When they criticize a public figure of a darker hue, they are startled by the response. The old government called them communists; the new one calls them racists.

Godwin recalls standing at his great-aunt's grave in South Africa where he wept at "the impermanence of my family in Africa. At our silly misguided attempts to fashion the continent to our alien ways." These days he lives in London.