91Ö±²¥

IGSD Annual Lecture 2025: Simukai Chigudu 'When will we be free? On Hard Histories, Decolonisation, and Rethinking Development'

In this lecture, Simukai Chigudu previews a chapter from the book he is currently writing, When Will We Be Free?. The book is a work of literary nonfiction that combines memoir, political history, and cultural criticism. Chigudu interweaves his personal and family story with the history of Africa’s anti-colonial struggles from the 1950s to the present, with the hopes and frustrations of African independence, and with the parallel erasures of parts of Britain’s colonial history. In doing so, he provides an intimate and nuanced account of colonisation not merely as a historical or political phenomenon but as something that inescapably affects a person’s heart and mind, a person’s sense of identity and home. From this, Chigudu shows how these insights have shaped his engagement with development as a field, opening up new ways of thinking about what the ethos of decolonizing development could be.

Lecture: 4.00-5.15

Drinks reception from 5.15

91Ö±²¥ the speaker

Simukai Chigudu is an associate professor of African politics at the University of Oxford and a fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford. In 2022-23, he was a fellow at Stanford University. His monograph, The Political Life of an Epidemic: Cholera, Crisis and Citizenship in Zimbabwe (Cambridge University Press, 2020), won the prestigious Theodore J. Lowi First Book Award from the International and American Political Science Associations. His doctorate won the Audrey Richards Prize. Before coming to academia, he worked as a junior doctor in the UK’s National Health Service. He holds a medical degree from Newcastle University, a master of public health from Imperial College London, an MSc in African Studies and a DPhil in International Development from the University of Oxford. He was a founding member of the Rhodes Must Fall movement in Oxford.