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.”   Rod Madocks

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.

Currently available for order at Blackwells bookshops in the U.K. and from online retailers in the U.K and the U.S.A.

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