Chris Cocks

Chris Cocks was born in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia. Two days before his eighth birthday, on 11 November 1965, the country’s prime minister, Ian Smith, unilaterally declared independence from Britain (UDI), only the second British colony to do so, the United States being the first. Any similarity ended there as Rhodesia was plunged into 15 years of civil war. The boy was educated at St. John’s Prep School and Peterhouse, both, unusually for the times, multiracial schools. Excluded from writing his A’ levels at Peterhouse, he did four at Commercial Careers College in Salisbury where long hair, tatty denims and smoking were de rigeur.

Cocks served in 3 Commando, Rhodesian Light Infantry (RLI) from January 1976 to February 1979, at the peak of the Rhodesian bush war. From March 1979 to Zimbabwean independence in April 1980, he served with the paramilitary PATU, the Police Anti-Terrorist Unit, this time on the country’s southeastern border with Mozambique.

Chris wrote his first book, "Fire Force!", a military autobiography, when he was 29. As a freelance journalist, he was the sports reporter for the "Northern News" in Harare, and a travel writer for "African Safari Magazine" and the Johannesburg "Star" newspaper. He wrote for Denis Beckett’s "Frontline", a South African political magazine, in the mid-1990s, with his own column "Larfstarl" (Seffrican English for Lifestyle). He is a closet poet, but only writes poetry that scans and rhymes. He has also written a clutch of songs—poetry with a tune.

He moved to the UK in 2015. He lived variously in England, Scotland and Wales before returning to Africa in late 2023. He now lives outside Nelspruit, South Africa, where he is a freelance copyeditor.

He is author of "Fire Force: A Trooper's War in the Rhodesian Light Infantry" (1989, c. 35,000 copies sold), the sequel "Survival Course: Rhodesian Dénouement and the War of Self" (1998), a novel "Deslocado Redemption: A Story of Africa" (2018), and his childhood memoir, "A Colonial Boy: the soundtrack of an african childhood" (2023).