In my home country, they call me a ‘bornfree’

Africa Talks seminar

Simukai Chigudu was one of the first generation to be born after the end of colonial rule in Zimbabwe. Growing up, he heard stories about his grandfather’s murder by the Rhodesian regime, how his father had been imprisoned and tortured as a student before joining the bloody war of independence as a guerilla, and how his mother had thrown off the strictures of the past to build a successful career helping other women do the same. Yet Simukai’s early life was also steeped in British tradition. With his classmates he sang English folk songs, read Shakespeare, played cricket. Then, in 2002, he was one of thousands to leave the country as it descended into political violence and economic collapse. His new home: a boarding school in the north of England. What followed was a culture shock that unravelled his understanding of the world, his family and himself. Chasing Freedom is his profound and remarkably moving story – that of a boy shaped through his parents’ buried trauma by the great currents of late-twentieth century history. It is the story of a family haunted by the cause of liberation, and of a new generation, still searching for their promised freedom.

About the Author

Simukai Chigudu is associate professor of African politics at the University of Oxford and fellow of St. Antony’s College. He was previously a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. He was born in Zimbabwe in 1986, six years after the end of the war of independence that ousted the colonial Rhodesian regime. In 2015, he was one of the founding members of ‘Rhodes Must Fall in Oxford’, a campaign to decolonize the university and remove the statue of Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College.

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