Simukai Chigudu

Simukai Chigudu is associate professor of African politics at the University of Oxford and fellow of St. Antony’s College. Originally from Zimbabwe, he moved to the UK to complete his secondary and university education. He has an eclectic professional and academic background, having studied African history and politics, public health and medicine. Before coming into academia, he worked in the NHS for three years. He is also one of the founding members of Rhodes Must Fall in Oxford, and has become a leading voice in public debates on the cultural politics of colonialism and racism.

His academic monograph, The Political Life of an Epidemic: Cholera, Crisis and Citizenship Zimbabwe (Cambridge University Press, 2020), won the prestigious Theodore J. Lowi First Book Award. He is now writing his first trade book Chasing Freedom: Coming of Age at the End of Empire, which will be published by The Bodley Head in the UK and Crown in the US. It combines memoir, political history and cultural criticism to show how colonialism continues to shape politics, society and culture in Africa and in Britain and to explore what it really means to decolonise.

Photo courtesy of Binta Zahra Diop