Chasing Freedom: Coming of Age at the End of Empire
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
5:15 pm
- Venue
- SOAS, University of London
- Room
- Wolfson Lecture Theatre (Paul Webley Wing)
About this event
Join Simukai Chigudu for a book talk on Chasing Freedom - a story of being born in post-colonial 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.
In my home country, they call me a ‘bornfree’. 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 Speaker
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. His academic monograph, The Political Life of an Epidemic: Cholera, Crisis and Citizenship Zimbabwe (Cambridge University Press, 2020), won the prestigious Theodore J. Lowi First Book Award from the International and American Political Science Associations. He holds a DPhil in International Development from the University of Oxford, for which he was awarded the Audrey Richards Prize 2018, a biennial award from the African Studies Association UK for the best thesis on Africa. Before coming into 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.
Photo credit: Omoniyi David via unsplash
Book Cover
