Chasing Freedom: Coming of Age at the End of Empire - Dr. Simukai Chigudu

Session Description: 

Join Dr. Simukai Chigudu for a book talk on Chasing Freedom: a story of being born in postcolonial Zimbabwe, shaped by his family's buried trauma of war and liberation. It is a moving account of a generation still searching for the freedom they were promised. 

Dr. Simukai Chigudu’s Chasing Freedom: Coming of Age at the End of Empire is a candid, emotionally resonant exploration of family, nation, and the promises and limits of liberation. Drawing on his own life, Dr. Chigudu reconstructs a family shaped by struggle: a grandfather killed by the Rhodesian regime, a father who endured imprisonment and later fought as a guerrilla, and a mother who broke social constraints to support other women. Yet his upbringing was also suffused with British cultural practices, singing English folk songs, reading Shakespeare, and playing cricket, setting the stage for a disorienting culture shock when, in 2002, he left Zimbabwe for a boarding school in northern England. The book traces how historical violence, migration, and education reconfigure identity and belonging, and how a new generation continues to seek the freedom imagined by earlier movements. With scholarly rigor and humane storytelling, Dr. Chigudu offers a moving account of inherited trauma, resilience, and the complex legacies of empire, prompting reflection on both personal healing and public memory. 

About the Speaker

Simukai Chigudu is an associate professor of African politics at the University of Oxford and a fellow of St Antony’s College. He was previously a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. His academic monograph, The Political Life of an Epidemic: Cholera, Crisis and Citizenship in Zimbabwe (Cambridge University Press, 2020), received the 2021 APSA-IPSA Theodore J. Lowi First Book Award. He holds a DPhil in International Development from the University of Oxford, and his doctoral thesis received the 2018 Audrey Richards Prize, a biennial award presented by the African Studies Association of the United Kingdom for the best doctoral thesis in African Studies examined at a UK institution. Before entering academia, he worked as a medical doctor in the NHS for three years. He was also one of the founding members of Rhodes Must Fall in Oxford, and has become a leading voice in public debates on the cultural politics of colonialism and racism. Chasing Freedom is his first trade book.