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To be part of Zimbabwe’s “Born Free” generation was to be handed a promise: that your life would no longer be shaped by colonial rule. Skin colour would not dictate the right to vote, learn or work. For Simukai Chigudu, born in 1986, six years after independence, that promise was stamped on him from the very beginning: “Your name, Simukai, it means to stand up,” his father, a former liberation fighter, tells him.
Yet, as Chigudu reflects in his compelling memoir, the end of colonial rule does not mean freedom from historical events and how they reverberate in everyday life. He tells two interlinked stories: Zimbabwe’s brutal war of independence, and his own search for belonging in the years that followed. It is a wide-ranging, restless book, passing through Uganda, Rwanda, Ireland and Mexico City. Yet at its centre are Zimbabwe and Britain, “former colony and metropole”, and the unfinished business between them.
Chigudu’s parents, who became part of the growing post-independence black middle class, enrol him in elite private schools. There, he acquires what he calls a “delicate, papery accent”, plays “white people’s sports” and learns the codes of respectability that promise safety but not belonging.
He comes to appreciate early on that to be black is to be defined by others. Black Zimbabweans dismiss him as a “salad” for his adopted white habits (such as eating salad). White Zimbabweans call him a soutpiel, or “salt penis”; for having one foot in Africa, one in Europe, his genitals “[dangling] in the Mediterranean Sea”. In Britain, a student labels him “the whitest black man” they know.
The burden of his generation’s inheritance is expressed most powerfully in descriptions of his grandfather’s murder – “they shot him in cold blood and jettisoned his remains in a shallow pit” – and his father Tafi’s torture under the racist Rhodesian government. Tafi joined the armed struggle and spent years in exile. “I felt the weight of history, my life as the gift of his having survived colossal violence,” Chigudu writes.
After independence, Tafi returned to a country that was “at once familiar and different”. Though “now a free man”, he was “poor as a dung beetle”. Chigudu’s mother, Hope, a feminist activist, worked to improve the lives of women in the new nation. Against their sacrifice, Chigudu’s academic struggles felt small to him. “I had a legacy to honour, but here I was: undone by an exam,” he admits.
He becomes obsessed with the need to be perfect: “to be faultless, to transcend everything, including the limits of my very being”. It is a dangerous, fickle pursuit that leads to his unravelling, an internal collapse that mirrors Zimbabwe’s economic decline and growing disillusionment with Robert Mugabe’s rule. He begins to question rigid, anti-colonial dogma, asking what state violence and forced evictions have to do with liberation. It is possible, Chigudu concludes, to be “anti-colonial and anti-neo-colonial” while also recognising that “our leadership has failed us”.
Later chapters explore his arrival in Oxford, where he eventually becomes one of about seven Black professors. His private education has equipped him to perform well there, and for a time he does. But after the Rhodes Must Fall movement (which demanded the removal of statues of British imperialist Cecil Rhodes) reaches Oxford, he abandons the role of the compliant academic. His politics harden after he takes part in a farcical debate on colonialism on local news, during which he was accused of spouting “victimhood drivel”. “This was my turning point.” Of the Oxford statue of Rhodes targeted by protesters, he declares: “I now wanted that motherfucker taken down.”
Chasing Freedom is an elegant exploration of how political liberation does not always bring freedom for oneself. Chigudu is a Zimbabwean Briton who writes with clarity and authority about the entangled histories of the two nations, his account all the more poignant because it speaks directly to a generation of Africans, on the continent and in the diaspora, weary of inherited dogma but unwilling to surrender history to colonial revisionism. It asks what it means to stand up to the past without being trapped by it, and whether a different kind of freedom might still be possible.
