“What the Fire Left Behind” by Malcolm K. Rowe

What the Fire Left Behind

Malcolm K. Rowe
Independently Published (2025)
ISBN: 978-1069947604
Reviewed by Paul Knobloch for Reader Views (12/2025)

I started my Substack last year over a political situation in another country that is currently practicing apartheid. It’s hard to believe that this abomination still occurs in the 20th century, but that fact makes former policeman Malcolm K. Rowe’s book, What the Fire Left Behind: A Spiritual Memoir, all the more important, for several billion of the world’s citizens seem to be able to see and recognize this truth. Americans really do have a lot to learn from a memoir like this, which addresses problems that are deeply intertwined with the darker chapters of our own country’s narrative, including racism, violence, a militarized police force, and segregation.

Malcolm Rowe grew up with an extreme sense of alienation, as if he were born in the wrong time and place, that he did not belong here, and not in any “poetic sense,” but in his blood and bones, in a cellular way, and that his “soul had taken a wrong turn.” A mother who struggles with showing love and an alcoholic father only add to the isolation, leaving Malcom and his brother “like satellites around an absent sun.”

Even the police academy is racially segregated, run by Afrikaners. It makes brutally clear just how much one is expected to toe the line, stay silent, and accept the intense indoctrination from an unjust system focused primarily on perpetuating an inhuman status quo:

We were trained to maintain order, yet the order itself was built on separation… To serve justice inside an unjust system is to live with a fracture that never fully heals.

Once inside and part of the force, things get no easier for Rowe. Some of the situations he has to confront truly illustrate the horror he has to deal with, not to mention the effect that apartheid has on the nation, the scars it leaves on the country and its people. His recounting of this particular murder investigation is exceptionally harrowing. Rowe was working in a part of the country where apartheid zoning laws pitted Southeast Asian communities against white residential areas and black townships. Mrs. M, the victim, was already an alcoholic, living out there on the edge of society. The crime scene is like a culminating moment, a reminder of the reality imposed by legislated hatred known as apartheid:

The place was filthy, overturned – the walls painted with blood. Someone had fought for their life. Then I saw it: Mrs. M reduced to a half-naked pile of body parts, hacked apart with a machete. It was not just murder – it was enraged butchery.

This is the price we pay for stripping people of humanity and imposing morally unjust laws: it is a recipe for a culture of dissolution, violence, and failure.

Rowe is brutally honest in this fine memoir, even going so far as to admit that he was almost seduced by a life of crime himself, and that is no indictment of the man. Anyone who has led such a hardscrabble life has the right to dream of an easy way out, and who among us hasn’t dreamt of being George Clooney in Ocean’s Eleven? He makes the right choice, trusts his instincts, and “resists the lure of wealth.”

It’s nice to see that Malcom and his wife make it out of Africa and find a home in Canada, but the trauma still lingers, and culture shock is a harsh reality. Ultimately, it was not an instance of Malcom abandoning Africa, which would be a harsh and unjust criticism of a man who has given back so much and shown the courage to be so honest. The truth is that, unfortunately, many people like Malcom Rowe are forced to make similar difficult decisions when a child’s welfare is involved. In the end, this gripping memoir, What the Fire Left Behind, pulls no punches. It will require readers to look at America through the same lens through which they judge other countries.