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Chasing Freedom

Coming of Age at the End of Empire

In my home country, they call me a 'bornfree'.

Simukai Chigudu was born in Zimbabwe, two years after the end of its bitter war of liberation - a war in which his father had fought. This is the story of his childhood journey through the chaos of that new country's birth to Britain, where he arrived alone, a teenager, burning with ambition but utterly lost in ways he had yet even to discover.

Told with astonishing insight, his memoir describes the drama of his quest to belong and to succeed, and how his worldview was both shaped and shattered by Britain, ultimately setting him on a quest to uncover the truth of his parents' past.

In excavating their story alongside his own, he brings us closer than ever before to understanding one of the greatest upheavals in modern times - the freeing of a continent from colonial rule - not as history or politics but as a psychological and emotional force, one that divides families from within, even while those same divisions bind them fiercely together across time.

About Simukai Chigudu

Simukai Chigudu was born and educated in newly independent Zimbabwe, the son of a freedom fighter and women’s rights campaigner, before moving to the UK in his late teens. He is now Associate Professor of African Politics at the University of Oxford. Previously he graduated from medical school at University of Newcastle and worked as an NHS doctor in the northeast of England and then in South Africa before winning a Weidenfeld scholarship to study the effects of politics on health in the Global South. He has since been awarded numerous prizes for his academic work. In 2014 he was one of the founding members of ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ at the University of Oxford. He has written for the Guardian and been interviewed by the BBC, Financial Times, New York Times, New Statesman, Economist and various other programmes.
Details
  • Imprint: Bodley Head
  • ISBN: 9781847927194
  • Length: 288 pages
  • Price: £20.00
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