Chasing Freedom

'Intimate and epic, Chasing Freedom will teach you more about the legacies of colonialism than a hundred op-eds or a dozen textbooks' SATHNAM SANGHERA, author of Empire land In my home country, they call me a ‘bornfree’. Chasing Freedom is the story of the inheritance of violence, of struggle, of African liberation. It is guided by one central question: what does it mean to be truly free? As a member of the first generation born after the end of colonial rule in Zimbabwe, Simukai Chigudu had heard stories about his grandfather’s murder by the Rhodesian regime, and of how his father was imprisoned and tortured as a student activist before joining the bloody war of independence as a guerrilla soldier. Yet, despite his country’s hard-won freedom, Chigudu’s early life was steeped in British tradition. He’d sung English folk songs, read Shakespeare, played cricket. When Zimbabwe convulsed from political turmoil and economic collapse, Chigudu left his home to attend a Catholic boarding school in Lancashire. What followed was a culture shock that unravelled his understanding of the world, his family and himself. Simukai Chigudu elegantly weaves together his own story with Zimbabwe’s history, from a young Cecil Rhodes on the diamond trail to the making of Rhodesia through plunder and dispossession, from his parents’ meeting in Idi Amin’s Uganda to his family’s fight to free Zimbabwe, and from the undoing of Robert Mugabe to the Rhodes Must Fall movement in Oxford, of which he was a founding member. Chasing Freedom traces the tangled threads of personal and political history to give a new perspective on race, class, identity and the heavy legacy of colonialism. It is an intimate reckoning with the ghosts of the past that haunt our politics and our psyches in ways we cannot always see.

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 is 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.