Rod Madocks's Blog: Memories, Dreams, Reflections
October 19, 2022
See You In Valhalla
My little book celebrating the centenary of the World War Two poet Sidney Keyes is out today in Kindle ( only £1.99 or $2.20 for my U.S. readers) I have a special place in my heart for Sidney Keyes, a talented young poet killed while fighting bravely in Tunisia in 1943, my father met and formed a friendship with the poet when they were both young soldiers. My father never forgot his time with the young doomed genius and often spoke about him to me.
June 25, 2022
Muzungu
Well, 'Muzungu' is out at last this hot June.
Muzungu
A memoir of a strange and frightening childhood in Africa in the 1960s. “A book that tips you into a dark and troubled world where memories, dreams and reflections jostle with startling confessional passages when I write about the things I have done that I’m scared of telling about.”
Nowadays you are taught to celebrate and embrace your identity but what if you are given an identity that the world hates? This writer was born in 1950s Rhodesia, his early life was spent in the remote wilderness, a vivid, extraordinary way of living that seemed set to last forever yet all was to be swept away by the end of Empire and the overthrow of the whole Rhodesian enterprise that is now seen as racist and despicable. This is a book about scars, the ones life gives you and the ones you give yourself. It’s a memoir, a confession and a rejection of contemporary models of history. Muzungu is an act of resistance against the contemporary disavowal, forgetting and reshaping of the uncomfortable past. African tribal people helped form the writer’s uncompromising view on life and he in turn casts a brutal, contesting eye over the social landscape of his adoptive home in England. You will find here many redeeming acts of memory and a meditation on all the loss and devotion that makes up a small family, Most of all this book shows you that it is possible to transcend and outrun the hurts of the past.
Muzungu
A memoir of a strange and frightening childhood in Africa in the 1960s. “A book that tips you into a dark and troubled world where memories, dreams and reflections jostle with startling confessional passages when I write about the things I have done that I’m scared of telling about.”
Nowadays you are taught to celebrate and embrace your identity but what if you are given an identity that the world hates? This writer was born in 1950s Rhodesia, his early life was spent in the remote wilderness, a vivid, extraordinary way of living that seemed set to last forever yet all was to be swept away by the end of Empire and the overthrow of the whole Rhodesian enterprise that is now seen as racist and despicable. This is a book about scars, the ones life gives you and the ones you give yourself. It’s a memoir, a confession and a rejection of contemporary models of history. Muzungu is an act of resistance against the contemporary disavowal, forgetting and reshaping of the uncomfortable past. African tribal people helped form the writer’s uncompromising view on life and he in turn casts a brutal, contesting eye over the social landscape of his adoptive home in England. You will find here many redeeming acts of memory and a meditation on all the loss and devotion that makes up a small family, Most of all this book shows you that it is possible to transcend and outrun the hurts of the past.
July 12, 2019
The Last Rhodesian
I wrote the book, 'The last Rhodesian' in order to rescue the term 'Rhodesian' from the vocabulary of haters and instead to promote a spirit Rhodesian identity, a way of looking at the world. Let's hope I can find a publisher to take it on.
