Last week, I finally managed to snatch one read out of the jaws of a hectic summer. On a series of very long-haul flights (highly recommended as a way to break reading droughts), I fell into the world of Simukai Chigudu’s Chasing Freedom: Coming of Age at the End of Empire. I finished the book just as I was landing in Nairobi, Kenya. In a daze, I stepped on to the tarmac in the chill of equatorial winter.
The book was about growing up in post-colonial Zimbabwe and navigating life between the ex-colonised and the ex-colonial power. But the account of Chigudu’s life also captured, in ways that sometimes left me breathless with the shock of recognition, what felt like a broader shared experience for those of us born to parents whose traumas we never understood. This week, I reflected on how Chigudu’s experience connects to that of a wider post-colonial African generation.
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An invisible generation
Chasing Freedom is Simukai Chigudu’s own personal story, but like all great memoirs, it is somewhat uncategorisable. His account of his life (soundtracked by this Spotify playlist) is layered with a story of Zimbabwe: its struggles for freedom, its bitter disappointments, and the lives broken in the process of both. It is also the first rendering I have seen of a generation of Africans born to parents of a certain class, who were bequeathed the contradictory burdens of anti-imperialism and the expectation that their children must achieve outside the continent. That small class is an illegible one to outsiders in the west; neither wealthy nor poor, educated enough to take civil service or academic jobs, but never affluent. Its members had the means to provide their children with private English language education and “exposure”, as Chigudu’s mother calls it, but were not comparable in lifestyle and status to, say, British elites with children in private schooling. Their politics is also a mess: many of them ushered their children away from their local cultures towards the west, while always holding on to a wholesale denouncement of that world, which they fought in liberation struggles.
They are also – and here is where Chigudu delivers a devastating portrait that is profoundly familiar to me – cut off and unreliable witnesses to their own lives, ones marked by disorienting and painful political events. This makes them unreliable guides to the path their children are treading after them, a faded blueprint that leaves you to fill in the gaps. Chigudu describes the moment that conversations between these adults turned into anything intimate as “moistureless, even frightened, the result of generation upon generation of repression”. I recalled the long salon evenings during which my father sat with his many brothers, and how even to a child it was jarring to see how awkward and formal they were with each other. It was as if they sought a kind of adolescent safety in talk about sport and politics, sprinkled with some boyish banter that was full of avoidance and devoid of genuine humour. In our household, deaths, illnesses, political detentions and torture passed by without proportional remark. “Emotionally weighty things happened in my life that were never talked about,” Chigudu writes. “Whatever was difficult or painful lay dormant in the dark shadows of my soul.”
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School as a way out
That painful and dormant material became metabolised through the only coping mechanism Chigudu had access to – academic excellence, or “punishing the books”. Chigudu paints a chilling and definitive portrait of how school became the high stakes ground for so many of us who did not have the privilege of walking into family businesses, or parents who had the money that made academic scholarships unnecessary. English-language schooling was an oasis and an isolated island in the middle of political turmoil. A place where pride in achievement jostled with shame that it was an achievement on the terms of white colonisers, who in the case of Zimbabwe still owned the lion’s share of assets and land, and still looked down on Black Zimbabweans.
School was also not just a rite of passage, a milestone for white counterparts whose lives are plotted neatly to end in university abroad – it was the passage. While reading, I felt my chest tighten each time Chigudu approached a landmark exam, that sense of a school year being the pivot of your entire life, the crushing weight of academic pressure, the understanding, too heavy for a child to bear, that failure in grades meant a failure to launch into another good school, another good university in the west, and therefore a good life. Escape being an actualisation of yourself, and a validation of your parent’s trajectory and hopes which were never made explicit, but still overbearing.
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Turmoil, regret - and eventual stillness?
Chigudu plots his way to “freedom” as Zimbabwe unravels around him. The plots and personalities in his school all exist against a backdrop of Robert Mugabe’s land repossessions, a failing government, power cuts, corruption, bribery, nepotism, embezzlement. So many personal journeys took place in the choppy waters of coups, protests, shortages, and the ever-present threat these events would encroach upon you and slow down or terminate your trajectory. Mine was indeed terminated (thankfully in hindsight), after high school. I ended up in higher education in Sudan that was poorly resourced and volatile, but infinitely bountiful in other ways. Chigudu goes on to leave Zimbabwe for the UK, landing straight into a bruising experience in public school and university. But in many ways, he never escapes what was always a mental location, rather than a physical one.
It’s a turbulent ride, marked by rejection and success, the latter a restless kind. Chigudu goes on to become a doctor, and then changes lanes to become an associate professor of African politics at Oxford University. He heads up the Rhodes Must Fall movement at Oxford, and is met with the realisation that “the heated rhetoric of the culture wars could never do justice to what decolonisation has meant in my life”. All that promises certainty melts away into ambivalence. At the end, which I will not spoil, the reader is left with a vivid sense of how history bears down on us in ways that are effacing and propulsive. And to those of us from similar backgrounds, who made more elliptical journeys but were still drawn to the imperial metropole, a crushing too-late realisation that we had choices. We just didn’t know we could make them.
The book is full of arresting and poignant reflections, potent and often funny – Chigudu is a diversely gifted writer. One thing still lingers in my mind, a question that he asks himself: “I wondered what life I might live if the choice were entirely mine, free of pressure and expectation.”
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