[Please note: The word “Featured” on the left side above was NOT inserted by this blogger, but apparently was inserted by WordPress, and it cannot be removed. NO post in this blog is sponsored.]
The Book of the Week is “Chasing Freedom, Coming of Age at the End of Empire” by Simukai Chigudu, published in 2025.
Born around 1986, the author told the life stories of his parents and himself (all three were dark-skinned), and conveyed some history of Zimbabwe and other African countries. The two takeaways are these: It is impossible for anyone to escape irony and hypocrisy, regardless of one’s time and place, due to biases formed during one’s lifetime; there are similarities in political behavior the world over.
Chigudu’s parents both believed in sending him to the best schools, first in Rhodesia, where they lived, and then elsewhere. The Rhodies (whites) at his rich kids’ school were racists and bullies.
The 1970’s saw the trend of James Bond wannabes planning to foment revolution in many countries of the world; including the United States, a few of whose political groups were: the Symbionese Liberation Army, MOVE, Weathermen, and the Black Panthers. In Africa, it was the alphabet soup of ANC, MPLA, SWAPO, ZAPU and ZANU.
By 1971, Rhodesia’s whites constituted less than five percent of its population: about six million. But whites ruled the country. In 1974, Chigudu’s political-dissident father moved to Uganda to attend university, having been exiled by Zimbabwe. He had been inspired to join the armed struggle for his country’s liberation. He studied Marxism, Pan-Africanism, and white supremacy of Zimbabwe’s white leader, Ian Smith. Chigudu’s mother initially found religion when searching for her place in the world. After she met Chigudu’s father at university, she began to question why Christianity was paternalistic.
Beginning in 1980, Robert Mugabe (dark-skinned), who ruled by fear and force in Rhodesia (renamed Zimbabwe), actively consolidated his power by inciting his base of dark-skinned, dissatisfied, poor, angry young men who were desperate for social belonging– to fight for the decolonization of their homeland. He whitewashed history, blaming colonialism rather than his own corruption, for the country’s problems.
By the turn of the twenty-first century, Zimbabwe’s government was imposing land reform– seizing farmland owned by whites and giving it to blacks. Whites fled the country amid the political violence. The blacks who had previously been workers on the whites’ farms stayed, even when they didn’t get to own the land, because they had nowhere else to go. Kind of like after the American Civil War, when freed slaves remained where they were– it was the only life with which they were familiar.
The United States expressed phony outrage at the land reform, claiming Mugabe was undemocratic. But as usual, the United States was cherry-picking a country to punish for ulterior political motives. Its plan was allegedly going to usher in “peaceful democratic change and equitable growth.”
The ultimate irony is that the author ended up doing graduate studies at Oxford– the institution of his homeland’s colonizer. Read the book to learn a boatload more about the author’s quest to allay his emotional trouble, and find himself.