CHASING FREEDOM

Political scientist Chigudu recounts his early years in newly independent Zimbabwe.

“I belong to the first generation in the modern history of my native land that never lived under direct colonial rule,” writes Chigudu, now a professor of politics at Oxford. That generation lived under the rule of Robert Mugabe, who retained power for 37 years, and who transformed in that time from a revolutionary democrat, held up as an example by the likes of President Ronald Reagan, to the most corrupt of dictators. His successor, Emmerson Mnangagwa, was no better. Still, Chigudu suggests, homegrown despotism was to be preferred to the antecedent proto-apartheid rule of white Rhodesia, with white Zimbabweans nursing their attitudes long after independence: “Rhodie parents passed on their racism to their Rhodie children with near-genetic efficiency, like a dominant allele on an X chromosome.” As a gifted student, Chigudu was placed in elite schools, where he was bullied by those white settlers. That experience, though scarring, was nothing compared to the travails of his father a generation earlier, savagely beaten by police and, on becoming a guerrilla fighter, hunted by the Rhodesian army; for her part, Chigudu’s Uganda-born mother survived the worst excesses of the Idi Amin regime: “She did not anticipate that the hope and optimism she held for her future would soon be engulfed by the chaotic rule of one of Africa’s most notorious tyrants.” With detours into fundamentalist Christianity and medical school, driven by the self-imposed demands of perfectionism and “devastating self-loathing,” Chigudu finally finds his path as an “anticolonial and anti-neocolonial” scholar committed to “investigating…how political liberation from oppressive rule is not the same as freedom of the self from the burdens of the past.”

A well-crafted blend of personal and political history.