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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.
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.
352 pages, Hardcover
Published March 24, 2026
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June 26, 2026
Need to think more about this before I comment...
March 26, 2026
1. This is one of the finest memoirs that I have ever read, it's in the same league of quality as 'Educated' by Tara Westover, however, what makes this book truly special is the manner in which it conveys an important Zimbabwean/African history lesson for its readers from the relatable lens of the author's personal history.
2. Beyond the Zimbabwean/African historical context, what is also impressive is how the author manages to tell a story of how such context weaves into global politics, whilst still ensuring that the human experience is at the forefront of the story.
3. Another interesting aspect of the book is how Simukai is able to draw a metaphor between Zimbabwe's decline during the Mugabe Era and his own personal struggles and the various coping mechanisms he deployed, including a stint with Christian fundamentalism.
I hope this book is successful and read by many!
2. Beyond the Zimbabwean/African historical context, what is also impressive is how the author manages to tell a story of how such context weaves into global politics, whilst still ensuring that the human experience is at the forefront of the story.
3. Another interesting aspect of the book is how Simukai is able to draw a metaphor between Zimbabwe's decline during the Mugabe Era and his own personal struggles and the various coping mechanisms he deployed, including a stint with Christian fundamentalism.
I hope this book is successful and read by many!
January 12, 2026
Brilliant
April 17, 2026
If I may be so bold, there is a way in which we can read Chasing Freedom as a Fanon-infused hauntology of the (post)colonial state and its capillaries, right down to the individual ‘bornfree’ who have never lived under direct colonial rule. Chigudu’s account of the promise of a free Zimbabwe, and its precipitous descent over the Mugabe years, is intricately intertwined with a filigree of tense parental relations, a tottering marriage, and a compulsive drive for forward momentum through educational achievement. It is often merely academic to expound on the so-called ‘legacies of colonial rule,’ but Chigudu, in a gripping narrative, furnishes an argument that colonialism suffuses the lives of those who have been set free but who have not found justice nor a channel for emotions that speak no words.
Britain is the clear specter in all of this, but parents do their fair share of haunting as well. The divides are what one might expect—white and black, metropole and colony, Rhodies and the rest—but Chigudu is careful to complicate such rude dichotomies while highlighting an oft underrepresented rift: that of parent and child in the conflict over what it means to be free. Chigudu’s father is a traumatized former freedom fighter who swears fealty to Mugabe’s ZANU(PF), and his mother is a first-generation feminist whose ambitions are often frustrated. In Chigudu’s telling, his appetite for excellence is whetted by a gnawing need to silence the intruding doubts about familial harmony, the state of Zimbabwean and Ugandan (his mother was from Uganda) politics, and the toxic mixture of admiration, envy, and resentment for elite, western-style prep schools and, ultimately, Oxford. These are, indeed, not disparate issues; they issue, in fact, from the same source, which is the unresolved psychological toll from the colonial past. Yet, by emphasizing the familial dimension, Chigudu makes us aware of multiple tonalities and timelines in which these psychic aftershocks are wending their ways through individuals, families, and, indeed, entire nations.
We thus have the startling contrast between Chigudu’s experiences with the white Zimbabweans whom he encountered at Stonyhurst and the intimacy of the friendship they formed as fellow teens bereft of rooted identities and experiencing extreme dislocation in England, and the pained silence of his parents who find it challenging to communicate in the emotional register which, if Chigudu is not exactly (and self-confessedly) adept, he is certainly more fluent. Make no mistake, though: this fluency is articulated through the backbreaking work of confronting oneself and the nature of one’s relationships; it was attained, in other words, via a long journey into the night. Chigudu’s memoir is, in this way, biography, primer, postcolonial polemic, and spiritual handbook, all in one.
The book is assuredly many things, and it is many things well, but though Chigudu is disarmingly—and refreshingly—honest, I am unsure if that honesty is truly unflinching. The one lacuna, I think, is a serious consideration of the role of class. While Chigudu is quick to accede that his family was part of the new Black middle class, I found myself wishing he had interrogated the opportunities that opened up for him vis-à-vis the rest of Zimbabwe. The gap in experiences between Chigudu and those who did not and could not attend schools like Saints or leave the country is barely accounted for. Chigudu acknowledges feelings of “cultural rejection and alienation,” but there is no sustained attention to why Black Zimbabweans called him a ‘salad,’ nor, in a memorable passage, why White Zimbabweans mocked him as a soutpiel (‘salt penis’) “because I have one foot in Africa, one foot in Europe, and my genitals dangle in the Mediterranean Sea, pickling in the brine of cultural confusion” (5). These are issues of race, certainly, and that is more than adequately addressed, but hidden in the derision is a sarcastic inflection of class differences as well, and I think the book would have been better if some of those socioeconomic dynamics had been deconstructed in like manner to the other riveting parts of the book which focus on race, family, politics, gender, desire, ambition, and their imbrication.
That aside, this book is an essential read and a valiant counter to those who might object: colonialism was in the past, why can’t we leave it in the past? We cannot leave it in the past because colonialism won’t leave us alone in the present.
Britain is the clear specter in all of this, but parents do their fair share of haunting as well. The divides are what one might expect—white and black, metropole and colony, Rhodies and the rest—but Chigudu is careful to complicate such rude dichotomies while highlighting an oft underrepresented rift: that of parent and child in the conflict over what it means to be free. Chigudu’s father is a traumatized former freedom fighter who swears fealty to Mugabe’s ZANU(PF), and his mother is a first-generation feminist whose ambitions are often frustrated. In Chigudu’s telling, his appetite for excellence is whetted by a gnawing need to silence the intruding doubts about familial harmony, the state of Zimbabwean and Ugandan (his mother was from Uganda) politics, and the toxic mixture of admiration, envy, and resentment for elite, western-style prep schools and, ultimately, Oxford. These are, indeed, not disparate issues; they issue, in fact, from the same source, which is the unresolved psychological toll from the colonial past. Yet, by emphasizing the familial dimension, Chigudu makes us aware of multiple tonalities and timelines in which these psychic aftershocks are wending their ways through individuals, families, and, indeed, entire nations.
We thus have the startling contrast between Chigudu’s experiences with the white Zimbabweans whom he encountered at Stonyhurst and the intimacy of the friendship they formed as fellow teens bereft of rooted identities and experiencing extreme dislocation in England, and the pained silence of his parents who find it challenging to communicate in the emotional register which, if Chigudu is not exactly (and self-confessedly) adept, he is certainly more fluent. Make no mistake, though: this fluency is articulated through the backbreaking work of confronting oneself and the nature of one’s relationships; it was attained, in other words, via a long journey into the night. Chigudu’s memoir is, in this way, biography, primer, postcolonial polemic, and spiritual handbook, all in one.
The book is assuredly many things, and it is many things well, but though Chigudu is disarmingly—and refreshingly—honest, I am unsure if that honesty is truly unflinching. The one lacuna, I think, is a serious consideration of the role of class. While Chigudu is quick to accede that his family was part of the new Black middle class, I found myself wishing he had interrogated the opportunities that opened up for him vis-à-vis the rest of Zimbabwe. The gap in experiences between Chigudu and those who did not and could not attend schools like Saints or leave the country is barely accounted for. Chigudu acknowledges feelings of “cultural rejection and alienation,” but there is no sustained attention to why Black Zimbabweans called him a ‘salad,’ nor, in a memorable passage, why White Zimbabweans mocked him as a soutpiel (‘salt penis’) “because I have one foot in Africa, one foot in Europe, and my genitals dangle in the Mediterranean Sea, pickling in the brine of cultural confusion” (5). These are issues of race, certainly, and that is more than adequately addressed, but hidden in the derision is a sarcastic inflection of class differences as well, and I think the book would have been better if some of those socioeconomic dynamics had been deconstructed in like manner to the other riveting parts of the book which focus on race, family, politics, gender, desire, ambition, and their imbrication.
That aside, this book is an essential read and a valiant counter to those who might object: colonialism was in the past, why can’t we leave it in the past? We cannot leave it in the past because colonialism won’t leave us alone in the present.
May 15, 2026
4.5/5 - I listened to this memoir. Great narration and strong insights. I chose this book because my knowledge of Zimbabwe is pretty non-existent. This book provided a lot of information on the country's past while also going on a journey with the author. The author was born in 1986, the first of the free generation to be born, but he carried emotional weight of both colonialism and the hopes of parents and society. The drive to succeed, to get validation for academic success while not knowing what you are feeling, captured every immigrant who moved for higher education story. I thoroughly enjoyed this book, highly recommend.
May 15, 2026
An excellent memoir - incisive and nuanced.
June 22, 2026
In some ways, this memoir describes one version of what might happen when an anti-colonial freedom fighter does not commit the class suicide Amilcar Cabral describes as required. The son/author outlines his experiences of the limits of bourgeois nationalism with feeling and morality but no direction as to what might be done differently to win the freedom and material security longed-for.
Before table of contents: "Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all so far as the truth is ascertainable?" -- W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880
48 My father stayed loyal to the government. Loyalty for him was to the ruling party and it was anchored in history, in sacrifice, in his need to believe that the struggle for liberation hadn't been in vain. He held this belief firmly, even as scandal after scandal made it harder to justify.
57 In the eighties, nationalism [...] was, to a great extent, about eliminating dissent from ZANU (PF) rule and consolidating power in what effectively became a one-party state. [...] Nationalism was also about creating a modern and productive economy through bureaucracy and centralized planning -- the work my father did.
58 The potential emigration of white people from Zimbabwe would send a dangerous signal to neighboring South Africa about the changes that could come if white people relinquished too much to black leaders in the negotiated settlement to end Apartheid. In other words, not pursuing land reform before the end of Apartheid was, they said, a shrewd diplomatic move to maintain stability in the region.
63 I had no way of grasping this at the time, but my education was priming me for life outside Zimbabwe. One obvious clue was that Shona wasn't taught in any serious way at Twin Rivers.
64 Education -- especially one oriented to the West -- was both a ticket to a better life and a safety net in case of disaster. [...] What happened to those who were not educated? This prospect haunted my parents.
65 I wasn't just excelling at Twin Rivers, I was being primed to abandon the country of my birth.
70 The essence of this colonial model of education was to normalize a self-perpetuating and rigid social order in which we, as students, moved through rites of passage from terrified to terrifier, to repeat as if by compulsion what we had experienced, to do unto others as had been done unto us.
74 The shame of not speaking my own language was compounded by my simultaneous resentment of white racism and my aspiration to the cultural capital of whiteness.
81 [...] I had failed to notice an important way that colonialism was still operating at the college: we were learning almost nothing about the troubled country that lay beyond the school's black gates.
122 Cecil John Rhodes [....] wrote often to his mother [...] : "There is great satisfaction in having land of your own, horses of your own, and shooting when you like, and a lot of black niggers to do what you like with, apart from the fact of making money."
125 The Maxim gun debuted in the theater of battle in the war against the Ndebele, from 1893 to 1896. In one conflagration, Maxim guns mowed down about six hundred Ndebele fighters in just four hours, while only one white man was killed among the invaders.
"We must go on hammering and hunting them," said Albert Henry George, the 4th Earl Grey and director of the Company, until "we thoroughly convince them that this is to be a country of the white and not the black." That's precisely what they did.
130 1957 [...] "Our independence," Nkrumah said, "is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of the African continent."
143 In this case, a story intended to elicit in me a sense of awe at my father's political coming-of-age and an indebtedness too, a duty to prove myself a worthy heir to his sacrifices, to follow in his footsteps as an unwavering nationalist. Herein lies a strain in our relationship: even moments of vulnerability are freighted with political expectations.
145 The British often created artificial hierarchies by appointing men as "chiefs" where none had existed and then attributing these inventions to tribal traditions. [...] a blend of delegated authority and vacuous spectacle.
158 Henry Kyemba, the cabinet secretary at the time, would later write of Amin's killing spree: "It was impossible to dispose of the bodies in graves. Instead, truckloads of corpses were taken and dumped into the Nile."
165 Lake Edward became Lake Idi Amin Dada. Amin reassured the crowds gathered at the renaming ceremonies that this was "another step in the decolonization of the mind of the people." Amin presented himself to the world as a champion of racial and economic justice against the evils of white imperialism.
199 [...] Lancaster House agreement [...] The shortcomings of this deal would haunt modern Zimbabwe.
203 The story of my parents' courtship -- or rather the story I pieced together when I was young -- was simple and romantic. My parents' relationship as young lovers had been interrupted by war and my father's noble desire to fight for justice. But their love was so abiding, they were pulled back together once the war was over. It was as if the cosmos willed it so. I was satisfied with this story; its moral about the power of true love was soothing and digestible. I retold this story so often that I believed it was true. [...] "It was a big decision. A big and foolish decision," my mother says, looking back.
206 With no friends and nowhere to go, my mother felt a stark loneliness enveloping her. <>
210 About twenty thousand civilians if not more were killed in this operation, known as Gukurahundi -- a Shona word that translates as "the early rain which washes away the chaff before the spring rains." [...] A few years after this massacre, Mugabe was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.
211 Whether he realized it or not, my father's life was overshadowed by the struggle. He had lived in a state of autonomic hyperarousal -- in an almost permanent fight-or-flight mode -- for so long that he had cut a tender part of himself off. He never revealed too much of what was roiling inside him, his tumult of feeling. But buried somewhere deep with him was the sensitive boy who had been forced to toughen up too quickly. He became a survivor who licked his wounds in private and sustained himself through an unshakable sense of duty to the nationalist cause.
215 The South African writer Jonny Steinberg asks, "How does one carry out such a revolution, when there is no linear path from the world of one's parents to the world one wants for one's children?"
216 [...] I had transformed this emotional inheritance into a childish fable about my parents' superhuman strength and endurance. I looked in awe at what they'd built and told myself that since my life was drastically better than theirs, I would have to achieve beyond measure. If nothing else, this knowledge -- this burden -- gave me a sense of mission so deep that it cut through my being, right down to my atoms. If I put enough work in, my successes would prove that all their losses were worth it.
224 If Mugabe liked to claim that colonialism was the cause of all Zimbabwe's problems, then my English classmates were equally simplistic in blaming them entirely on Mugabe, whom they touted as a one-man catastrophe.
225 Little to nothing was said, in the media or elsewhere, of Zimbabwe's colonial legacy or the suffering of black people under Mugabe's regime. [...] the media depicted the white farmers as human beings with rich stories deserving of compassion. But there was no [...] sense that black people in Zimbabwe also had lives and projects and aspirations and culture, that black people were more than mascots in the unfolding tribulations of the white farmer in Africa.
254 [...] at once too emotionally intense and too cerebral. All this made me a disciple in romantic disappointment.
266 [...] my foray into Christian fundamentalism was its latest expression. One doesn't need much psychological insight to see the dark side [...] underlying my inflexible commitment to purity was a desire for control. Perfectionism was how I had learned to survive, to cope with chaos and uncertainty, and to repress my needs when I felt they couldn't be met. But perfectionism is always doomed to fail. It guarantees a constant gnawing disappointment in yourself that, for me, led to a devastating self-loathing. In the words of Michel de Montaigne, "the most barbarous of our maladies is to despair our being."
268 I wrote in my book of motivational quotes: "For we are not cast off by the Lord for ever. Though he brings grief, He will show compassion, so great is His unfailing love. For He does not willingly bring affliction or grief to the children of men." Lamentations 3:31-33.
272 A line from the title track of the Kweli album stuck in my head. In the first verse, he raps about someone repeating a cycle of looking for answers -- first in the church, then political parties, then community organizations -- but coming up short each time, disappointed by lies and broken promises. He then says, "{You're] look' for the remedy but you can't see what's hurtin' you."
275 [...] I needed to understand the historical context for Zimbabwe's political convulsion and I needed some knowledge to defend my home. I looked for accounts of how colonialism had affected Zimbabwe, but I was started by what else I found.
276 2I had grown up among the Shona majority and in a ZANU (PF) household. In my version of Zimbabwe, as I now discovered, there was an omerta when it came to Gukurahundi. This was a double shock, not only at the enormity of the atrocity but at the extent of my ignorance.
288 A rush of relief shot through my body with the horn stabs at the beginning of Distant Relatives , a joint album by Nas and Damian Marley [...] The album sketches hip-hop affinities with dancehall and reggae and traces these genres back to Africa.
298-9 I had absorbed lessons of the past from my father with a childish receptivity. But now, working on my doctorate, I could feel the gap widening between his understanding of Zimbabwe and mine. In my head, I knew he lived with a terrible grief that he processed through total fidelity to the nationalists, and I knew that such a position was a folly.
302 We were the children of the oppressed coming of age in what was supposed to be a better world and now feeling disillusioned with what we'd found there.
304 WE CALLED OUR WORK DECOLONIZATION. It was an absurd idea. Decolonizing Oxford is like "deboning a skeleton," as Nikhil Krishnan perfectly put it. But absurdity is a weak foe against youthful idealism.
307-8 I learned to introduce myself with my pronouns (he/him) and check my privilege as a straight, cisgender, middle-class male, ableit a black immigrant from a troubled country whose history was foundational to Rhodes Must Fall. As I did so, I couldn't tell if this intense focus on individual identity encouraged self-awareness and solidarity or if it slipped into a kind of narcissism of petty differences.
323 In that moment, I saw my father as a courageous war hero and an emotionally absent co\ward. I wanted to know if we were still a family, if we had ever been. I knew that my parents had stayed together for my sake even when they had grown apart. But I wanted him to say it. I wanted him to admit that he had withdrawn from the family, that he had not been there for me when I needed him. Years of repressed anger and feelings of abandonment came out of me.
324 I had asked him to face the collateral damage that comes to everything a man possesses -- his marriage, his family, his loyalties, his sense of self -- when he dares to defy a racist regime and live long enough to watch a victory of liberation turn sour and carnivorous. He laid it on thick with self-righteousness and self-justification, with a litany of grievances about a life riven with hope and bitter disappointment.
"Everything I've done in Zimbabwe, I've done for you," he said at last.
"What?" I screamed. "I didn't want a country. I wanted a father!"
Before table of contents: "Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all so far as the truth is ascertainable?" -- W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880
48 My father stayed loyal to the government. Loyalty for him was to the ruling party and it was anchored in history, in sacrifice, in his need to believe that the struggle for liberation hadn't been in vain. He held this belief firmly, even as scandal after scandal made it harder to justify.
57 In the eighties, nationalism [...] was, to a great extent, about eliminating dissent from ZANU (PF) rule and consolidating power in what effectively became a one-party state. [...] Nationalism was also about creating a modern and productive economy through bureaucracy and centralized planning -- the work my father did.
58 The potential emigration of white people from Zimbabwe would send a dangerous signal to neighboring South Africa about the changes that could come if white people relinquished too much to black leaders in the negotiated settlement to end Apartheid. In other words, not pursuing land reform before the end of Apartheid was, they said, a shrewd diplomatic move to maintain stability in the region.
63 I had no way of grasping this at the time, but my education was priming me for life outside Zimbabwe. One obvious clue was that Shona wasn't taught in any serious way at Twin Rivers.
64 Education -- especially one oriented to the West -- was both a ticket to a better life and a safety net in case of disaster. [...] What happened to those who were not educated? This prospect haunted my parents.
65 I wasn't just excelling at Twin Rivers, I was being primed to abandon the country of my birth.
70 The essence of this colonial model of education was to normalize a self-perpetuating and rigid social order in which we, as students, moved through rites of passage from terrified to terrifier, to repeat as if by compulsion what we had experienced, to do unto others as had been done unto us.
74 The shame of not speaking my own language was compounded by my simultaneous resentment of white racism and my aspiration to the cultural capital of whiteness.
81 [...] I had failed to notice an important way that colonialism was still operating at the college: we were learning almost nothing about the troubled country that lay beyond the school's black gates.
122 Cecil John Rhodes [....] wrote often to his mother [...] : "There is great satisfaction in having land of your own, horses of your own, and shooting when you like, and a lot of black niggers to do what you like with, apart from the fact of making money."
125 The Maxim gun debuted in the theater of battle in the war against the Ndebele, from 1893 to 1896. In one conflagration, Maxim guns mowed down about six hundred Ndebele fighters in just four hours, while only one white man was killed among the invaders.
"We must go on hammering and hunting them," said Albert Henry George, the 4th Earl Grey and director of the Company, until "we thoroughly convince them that this is to be a country of the white and not the black." That's precisely what they did.
130 1957 [...] "Our independence," Nkrumah said, "is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of the African continent."
143 In this case, a story intended to elicit in me a sense of awe at my father's political coming-of-age and an indebtedness too, a duty to prove myself a worthy heir to his sacrifices, to follow in his footsteps as an unwavering nationalist. Herein lies a strain in our relationship: even moments of vulnerability are freighted with political expectations.
145 The British often created artificial hierarchies by appointing men as "chiefs" where none had existed and then attributing these inventions to tribal traditions. [...] a blend of delegated authority and vacuous spectacle.
158 Henry Kyemba, the cabinet secretary at the time, would later write of Amin's killing spree: "It was impossible to dispose of the bodies in graves. Instead, truckloads of corpses were taken and dumped into the Nile."
165 Lake Edward became Lake Idi Amin Dada. Amin reassured the crowds gathered at the renaming ceremonies that this was "another step in the decolonization of the mind of the people." Amin presented himself to the world as a champion of racial and economic justice against the evils of white imperialism.
199 [...] Lancaster House agreement [...] The shortcomings of this deal would haunt modern Zimbabwe.
203 The story of my parents' courtship -- or rather the story I pieced together when I was young -- was simple and romantic. My parents' relationship as young lovers had been interrupted by war and my father's noble desire to fight for justice. But their love was so abiding, they were pulled back together once the war was over. It was as if the cosmos willed it so. I was satisfied with this story; its moral about the power of true love was soothing and digestible. I retold this story so often that I believed it was true. [...] "It was a big decision. A big and foolish decision," my mother says, looking back.
206 With no friends and nowhere to go, my mother felt a stark loneliness enveloping her. <>
210 About twenty thousand civilians if not more were killed in this operation, known as Gukurahundi -- a Shona word that translates as "the early rain which washes away the chaff before the spring rains." [...] A few years after this massacre, Mugabe was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.
211 Whether he realized it or not, my father's life was overshadowed by the struggle. He had lived in a state of autonomic hyperarousal -- in an almost permanent fight-or-flight mode -- for so long that he had cut a tender part of himself off. He never revealed too much of what was roiling inside him, his tumult of feeling. But buried somewhere deep with him was the sensitive boy who had been forced to toughen up too quickly. He became a survivor who licked his wounds in private and sustained himself through an unshakable sense of duty to the nationalist cause.
215 The South African writer Jonny Steinberg asks, "How does one carry out such a revolution, when there is no linear path from the world of one's parents to the world one wants for one's children?"
216 [...] I had transformed this emotional inheritance into a childish fable about my parents' superhuman strength and endurance. I looked in awe at what they'd built and told myself that since my life was drastically better than theirs, I would have to achieve beyond measure. If nothing else, this knowledge -- this burden -- gave me a sense of mission so deep that it cut through my being, right down to my atoms. If I put enough work in, my successes would prove that all their losses were worth it.
224 If Mugabe liked to claim that colonialism was the cause of all Zimbabwe's problems, then my English classmates were equally simplistic in blaming them entirely on Mugabe, whom they touted as a one-man catastrophe.
225 Little to nothing was said, in the media or elsewhere, of Zimbabwe's colonial legacy or the suffering of black people under Mugabe's regime. [...] the media depicted the white farmers as human beings with rich stories deserving of compassion. But there was no [...] sense that black people in Zimbabwe also had lives and projects and aspirations and culture, that black people were more than mascots in the unfolding tribulations of the white farmer in Africa.
254 [...] at once too emotionally intense and too cerebral. All this made me a disciple in romantic disappointment.
266 [...] my foray into Christian fundamentalism was its latest expression. One doesn't need much psychological insight to see the dark side [...] underlying my inflexible commitment to purity was a desire for control. Perfectionism was how I had learned to survive, to cope with chaos and uncertainty, and to repress my needs when I felt they couldn't be met. But perfectionism is always doomed to fail. It guarantees a constant gnawing disappointment in yourself that, for me, led to a devastating self-loathing. In the words of Michel de Montaigne, "the most barbarous of our maladies is to despair our being."
268 I wrote in my book of motivational quotes: "For we are not cast off by the Lord for ever. Though he brings grief, He will show compassion, so great is His unfailing love. For He does not willingly bring affliction or grief to the children of men." Lamentations 3:31-33.
272 A line from the title track of the Kweli album stuck in my head. In the first verse, he raps about someone repeating a cycle of looking for answers -- first in the church, then political parties, then community organizations -- but coming up short each time, disappointed by lies and broken promises. He then says, "{You're] look' for the remedy but you can't see what's hurtin' you."
275 [...] I needed to understand the historical context for Zimbabwe's political convulsion and I needed some knowledge to defend my home. I looked for accounts of how colonialism had affected Zimbabwe, but I was started by what else I found.
276 2I had grown up among the Shona majority and in a ZANU (PF) household. In my version of Zimbabwe, as I now discovered, there was an omerta when it came to Gukurahundi. This was a double shock, not only at the enormity of the atrocity but at the extent of my ignorance.
288 A rush of relief shot through my body with the horn stabs at the beginning of Distant Relatives , a joint album by Nas and Damian Marley [...] The album sketches hip-hop affinities with dancehall and reggae and traces these genres back to Africa.
298-9 I had absorbed lessons of the past from my father with a childish receptivity. But now, working on my doctorate, I could feel the gap widening between his understanding of Zimbabwe and mine. In my head, I knew he lived with a terrible grief that he processed through total fidelity to the nationalists, and I knew that such a position was a folly.
302 We were the children of the oppressed coming of age in what was supposed to be a better world and now feeling disillusioned with what we'd found there.
304 WE CALLED OUR WORK DECOLONIZATION. It was an absurd idea. Decolonizing Oxford is like "deboning a skeleton," as Nikhil Krishnan perfectly put it. But absurdity is a weak foe against youthful idealism.
307-8 I learned to introduce myself with my pronouns (he/him) and check my privilege as a straight, cisgender, middle-class male, ableit a black immigrant from a troubled country whose history was foundational to Rhodes Must Fall. As I did so, I couldn't tell if this intense focus on individual identity encouraged self-awareness and solidarity or if it slipped into a kind of narcissism of petty differences.
323 In that moment, I saw my father as a courageous war hero and an emotionally absent co\ward. I wanted to know if we were still a family, if we had ever been. I knew that my parents had stayed together for my sake even when they had grown apart. But I wanted him to say it. I wanted him to admit that he had withdrawn from the family, that he had not been there for me when I needed him. Years of repressed anger and feelings of abandonment came out of me.
324 I had asked him to face the collateral damage that comes to everything a man possesses -- his marriage, his family, his loyalties, his sense of self -- when he dares to defy a racist regime and live long enough to watch a victory of liberation turn sour and carnivorous. He laid it on thick with self-righteousness and self-justification, with a litany of grievances about a life riven with hope and bitter disappointment.
"Everything I've done in Zimbabwe, I've done for you," he said at last.
"What?" I screamed. "I didn't want a country. I wanted a father!"
February 9, 2026
I received an ARC of this book and have been looking forward to it (took me a bit to get started since I have a huge TBR pile lol).
First off… this book is PACKED with information I never knew or forgot over time. I loved the way the author incorporates his knowledge of events with what he has been told by his parents and then the evolution as he learns the REAL history. This part is universal, I think, to some degree. Especially as children, we want to believe what our parents tell us about themselves and the world. It’s a real experience to find out that they are flawed and have misconceptions and cracks just like everyone else.
Chigudu’s relationship with his parents is both heartbreaking and curious. Even as an adult, they are very secretive about the truth of the status and depth of their relationship and as a child who saw a lot of strife at home, I could empathize with wanting, really NEEDING to know… why they were still (if not why they EVER) together.
Still with the memoir side…. I very strongly relate to the need to be perfect and exceed at everything. My parents’ sacrifices for me weren’t the same kind as the author’s… but between those and my desire to make them proud, good was never quite good enough. I hope he learns to accept his flaws and truly slow his pace. It’s very disheartening to always have to outdo yourself… it’s just not sustainable.
If the author reads this review… I SEE YOU. I may not be Zimbabwean but the struggles of expectations and identity are not unique to you… and your descriptions are vivid and so relatable.
I gave this book 5* knowing, as an ARC, there may be some changes. If this was finished it would be about a 4.9. Having some maps (especially with markings of the various refugee camps and the travels between countries) would be so helpful to better understand the length of travels and the overall geography. I plan on grabbing my Atlas diving back in (once I’ve had some time to think more on this book) for that purpose.
First off… this book is PACKED with information I never knew or forgot over time. I loved the way the author incorporates his knowledge of events with what he has been told by his parents and then the evolution as he learns the REAL history. This part is universal, I think, to some degree. Especially as children, we want to believe what our parents tell us about themselves and the world. It’s a real experience to find out that they are flawed and have misconceptions and cracks just like everyone else.
Chigudu’s relationship with his parents is both heartbreaking and curious. Even as an adult, they are very secretive about the truth of the status and depth of their relationship and as a child who saw a lot of strife at home, I could empathize with wanting, really NEEDING to know… why they were still (if not why they EVER) together.
Still with the memoir side…. I very strongly relate to the need to be perfect and exceed at everything. My parents’ sacrifices for me weren’t the same kind as the author’s… but between those and my desire to make them proud, good was never quite good enough. I hope he learns to accept his flaws and truly slow his pace. It’s very disheartening to always have to outdo yourself… it’s just not sustainable.
If the author reads this review… I SEE YOU. I may not be Zimbabwean but the struggles of expectations and identity are not unique to you… and your descriptions are vivid and so relatable.
I gave this book 5* knowing, as an ARC, there may be some changes. If this was finished it would be about a 4.9. Having some maps (especially with markings of the various refugee camps and the travels between countries) would be so helpful to better understand the length of travels and the overall geography. I plan on grabbing my Atlas diving back in (once I’ve had some time to think more on this book) for that purpose.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 26, 2026
I wanted more of an intellectual memoir perhaps. For the author, you get the feeling that this was very much an exercise in self therapy - moving to a degree but quite exhaustive in the detail. There was an attempt to say that the personal history speaks of the national/international (colonial) history, and clearly this is true to an extent, but I’d now like to read something by him that sets out his current intellectual stall a bit more clearly.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
An incredible memoir and analysis of the turmoil within Zimbabwe during the fight for freedom and the legacy of colonialism that Chigudu was faced with at every corner.
Coming into this with virtually no knowledge of Zimbabwe I was fearful I would get lost in names, regimes, and geography - but Chigudu was able to craft a immensely personal but yet sweeping narrative of Zimbabwe during the years of his and his parents youth & young adulthood. I learned so much while also remaining centered in Chigudu' journey, mostly surrounding his education, but also his struggles with mental health, religion, and relationships.
Excellently paced & deeply moving - don't miss this memoir.
Coming into this with virtually no knowledge of Zimbabwe I was fearful I would get lost in names, regimes, and geography - but Chigudu was able to craft a immensely personal but yet sweeping narrative of Zimbabwe during the years of his and his parents youth & young adulthood. I learned so much while also remaining centered in Chigudu' journey, mostly surrounding his education, but also his struggles with mental health, religion, and relationships.
Excellently paced & deeply moving - don't miss this memoir.
June 17, 2026
This is one of the most brilliant books I have ever read. I was totally immersed in its world and felt like
I was travelling alongside the characters for the entire journey, chapter by chapter. It was the history teacher I never had but needed. I hope it has wide reach because it’s a gift. It has enriched my life and made me want to read more about Africa and understand more about the books themes. It doesn’t just tell you how colonisation and the theme of belonging affects children and young people, it shows you and you feel it. Now I can’t help thinking about all the professionals working with young people globally, who haven’t read this book but should.
I was travelling alongside the characters for the entire journey, chapter by chapter. It was the history teacher I never had but needed. I hope it has wide reach because it’s a gift. It has enriched my life and made me want to read more about Africa and understand more about the books themes. It doesn’t just tell you how colonisation and the theme of belonging affects children and young people, it shows you and you feel it. Now I can’t help thinking about all the professionals working with young people globally, who haven’t read this book but should.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
This is a captivating memoir. Knowing little about Rhodesia or Zimbabwe, I read with a ferocity trying to gather as much information as possible in this brilliant book. What I learned about growing up in Africa is the powerful effects of colonialism that still linger today.
Simukai Chigudu traces his journey from Zimbabwe to Oxford with simple language but in a powerful voice. His mother left Uganda and met Simukai’s father in Zimbabwe. She is a force in this book. I loved her strength. His father is a cloaked figure in a way because he suppressed so much emotion - though as the author notes both his parents did which is what makes his stay in Ireland with a friend of his mother fascinating - here he learned a whole other way of living.
I liked how this memoir fleshes out the hypocrisy of colonialism. Simukai becomes a first, an only black among whites in many situations. And the irony of going to Oxford and seeing the Cecil Rhodes stature on campus illustrates this. As Simukai seeks to trace the impact of decolonization on him and his country, I think he finds that the trauma endures (PS: he is working to get the statute removed).
This was an excellent read. Highly recommend.
I’d like to thank NetGalley and Crown Publishing for allowing me to read this ARC.
Simukai Chigudu traces his journey from Zimbabwe to Oxford with simple language but in a powerful voice. His mother left Uganda and met Simukai’s father in Zimbabwe. She is a force in this book. I loved her strength. His father is a cloaked figure in a way because he suppressed so much emotion - though as the author notes both his parents did which is what makes his stay in Ireland with a friend of his mother fascinating - here he learned a whole other way of living.
I liked how this memoir fleshes out the hypocrisy of colonialism. Simukai becomes a first, an only black among whites in many situations. And the irony of going to Oxford and seeing the Cecil Rhodes stature on campus illustrates this. As Simukai seeks to trace the impact of decolonization on him and his country, I think he finds that the trauma endures (PS: he is working to get the statute removed).
This was an excellent read. Highly recommend.
I’d like to thank NetGalley and Crown Publishing for allowing me to read this ARC.
April 8, 2026
I loved this, this is exactly what I want from a memoir wrapped up in a place and a culture I'm not familiar with. The writing and examining of feels and reasons for actions taken by his parents and himself, and the way the microaggressions followed him everywhere were really well done.
March 26, 2026
5⭐️
Fascinating mix of history and memoir
Fascinating mix of history and memoir
May 3, 2026
Highly recommend. Did not realize it was a memoir until I started reading.
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