Simukai Chigudu 'When will we be free?'

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.