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The Bodley Head has won a 12-way auction for Simukai Chigudu’s "dramatic and moving" literary memoir.
UK and Commonwealth rights for When Will We Be Free? were sold to Will Hammond, deputy publishing director, by Carrie Plitt of Felicity Bryan Associates. It will be published in 2024.
The memoir will tell the “dramatic and moving story of a family and a son in search of the end of empire", The Bodley Head said. “Chigudu will recount his parents’ involvement with the African nationalist movements and, specifically, their liberation struggle as freedom-fighters against Rhodesia’s white minority rule, as well as his own quest to understand and escape the legacy of empire as an immigrant to Britain."
Born in 1986 in Harare, Chigudu was raised during the early years of Zimbabwe’s independence but moved to Britain as a teenager during "the violent political reckoning with colonial history that marked Mugabe’s presidency and abetted the country’s economic implosion". Almost 30 years later when he arrived at Oxford University, he was “in the shadow of Cecil Rhodes, founder of the Rhodesian state once more”.
Chigudu is associate professor of African Politics at the university and one of the founding members of Rhodes Must Fall, which aims to decolonise Oxford as an institution and remove the statue of Rhodes at Oriel College. Previously he trained as a doctor at Newcastle University and undertook a placement as a medic in South Africa before pivoting to study the effects of politics on health in the global South. He has written for the Guardian and given interviews to the BBC, the Financial Times, the New York Times, the New Statesman, the Economist and other publications.
The blurb reads: “When Will We Be Free? will interweave his family’s and his own story with the history of Africa’s anti-colonial struggles from the 1950s to the present in order to provide an intimate and nuanced account of colonisation not merely as a historical or political phenomenon but as something that inescapably affects one’s heart and mind, one’s sense of identity and home – and an investigation of what it would mean to be truly free of it.”
Hammond said: “Simukai Chigudu is the inheritor of extraordinarily dramatic family history. In his hands, its twists and turns become a way to illuminate every aspect of a subject that is too often buried in heated rhetoric or made distant and abstract. He is also a wonderfully gifted storyteller whose writing is infused with empathy, patience and a will to understand. And he combines this with deep expertise in African politics. I believe that this will be one of the most insightful, constructive and beautifully written books on this subject by a writer of his generation.”