He helped me survive high school | Simukai Chigudu

Holly Newson  00:00

How bad can it be?

Simukai Chigudu  00:01

How bad can it be? Well, I was about to find out.

Holly Newson  00:08

Oh, hey, welcome to kind I am so glad you're here. I'm Holly, and I'll be chatting to guests about the times people were kind to them and how that changed things. In this episode, you'll hear how the people that we're conditioned to dislike or mistrust can actually become the friends we need. By the way, I like your style. Right, let's drop you straight in. You're about to hear from Simukai Chigudu, who's associate professor of African politics at the University of Oxford. He was born in Zimbabwe as one of the first generation after the end of colonial rule, and he's the author of his beautiful memoir Chasing Freedom, which tells his coming of age story. Simukai, welcome.

Simukai Chigudu  00:51

Thank you so much for having me, Holly. I'm, like, really excited to be here.

Holly Newson  00:54

I am so excited to have you here. So to start off with, what does being kind mean to you?

Simukai Chigudu  01:02

Gosh, you know, it's a it's a small world with huge connotations. I think partly kindness is care and empathy seeing other people. And I think very closely tied into that, for me is it's about a quality of attention, a quality of really being present and engaging with someone, trying to see them for who they are, maybe trying to see things in them that they don't see yet. And that might be identifying a need and attending to it. It might be calmness and a gentleness in moments of mania and frantic exchange. It might be patience, but I think all of those things come together by saying I am paying a particular quality of attention to this person or to this issue or to this cause. And I think for me, that's what brings kindness together.

Holly Newson  01:58

I love that. I really like as well what you said about seeing something in someone that maybe they've not seen in themselves.

Simukai Chigudu  02:04

Yeah

Holly Newson  02:04

That's the sort of kindness that I don't think I'd really thought of, but it it can make such a difference to someone's life. When you identify something and they go, "Oh, I'm capable of that," or "Oh, and I didn't see myself as that."

Simukai Chigudu  02:19

Absolutely.

Holly Newson  02:20

I love that. And is there an everyday sort of act of kindness that means a lot to you?

Simukai Chigudu  02:24

So I work in Oxford, and I live in London, and so partly that means I am commuting back and forth to go and teach my students or have meetings with my colleagues, or I'm working from home. But there's a lot of movement in my life, and I think I'm highly attuned to how people conduct themselves in public space, surrendering a seat for somebody who might need it a bit more than you do, being mindful about how much space you're occupying, both physically, but also, let's say, in terms of noise or whatever it might be, I think a kind of sensitivity to one's surroundings, and I'd say day to day, that's something that's constantly on my mind and that I try to practice for other people. And I think that just is a kind of reminder that the world doesn't revolve around me and my needs or you and your needs, and it's about how we all live together, and kindness becomes a kind of social lubricant for daily life.

Holly Newson  03:24

Yeah, that really resonates with me. So I have to ask, what do you think about arm swingers? People who in crowded public spaces, maybe they're holding an umbrella, and they're just wildly swinging an arm.

Simukai Chigudu  03:38

Arm Swingers, man spreaders. My pet hate is people who who are, like, blasting music from their phone or taking phone calls in the quiet carriage. I mean, just the whole- they all belong in the same particular box for me that I find incredibly grating.

Holly Newson  03:55

Yeah, yeah. If I was ever on room 101, I would one of those things would have to go.

Simukai Chigudu  03:59

Yeah.

Holly Newson  04:00

That would have to go in 100%. So each time a guest comes on the show, I ask them to think of three times people have done something kind for them, and we're lucky enough that your stories are going to give us little teasers, maybe of your book.

Simukai Chigudu  04:13

Yes.

Holly Newson  04:14

So to start with you, would you introduce me to Andrew's family and how you came to be spending time with them?

Simukai Chigudu  04:21

Sure. So I grew up in Zimbabwe, as you mentioned, and I got to build up the world for you a little bit. So my parents, my dad is from Zimbabwe, and my mother is from Uganda, and they actually met in the 1970s when Zimbabwe was still the colony of Rhodesia, and my father, at that moment in time, was a political exile, and he went to seek refuge in Uganda, and that's where he met my mother, while they were at university together. And so when I was growing up in Zimbabwe. With my Zimbabwean dad and my Ugandan mother. My mum was adamant that I had to go and spend as much time as possible back in Uganda during the school break so I could get to know that side of my heritage and that aspect of my culture and family. And there was another Ugandan family living in Zimbabwe who were making a similar back and forth journey now in the book, I refer to their youngest son as Andrew. It's not his real name, but Andrew was, when I was probably around 11 or 12 years old, and he was a teenager about to finish high school. He was probably the coolest person I had ever met. And he was at boarding school in Zimbabwe, and he would go back to his family in Uganda, and I would stay with his family. It was big family, and they were an interesting and quite intense group. They were very, very religious at time. They took their creeds to an almost frightening extreme, with intense all night prayer vigils and so on. Yeah, I was very conscious of how I was inhabiting their home. And Andrew was kind of this broker. He was somebody who understood Zimbabwe and the world that I was in, and he just found different ways of making me feel welcomed and accepted. Now, because Andrew was my role model, I wanted to go to the same high school in Zimbabwe that he went to. Okay, and this was one of the most, you know, elite private schools in Zimbabwe. But it was a weird place to arrive at at age 12, going on 13, because, you know, it's this old school that was over a century old, founded by Jesuit missionaries, modeled on schools like Eton and Oxbridge colleges, Catholic strict and almost like a military academy. And my first year at the school was harrowing. We arrived on the first day these like little boys wearing our red blazers, our khaki shirt and shorts, our gray knee socks and black shoes, and we're told at our assembly on the first day that we had a two week grace period to master all of the school's peculiar rules and traditions. As a new pupil, you're not allowed to walk on any of the grass. There's an elaborate system of punishment that includes manual labor and corporal punishment that was known as cuts. There were prefects who could stop you and quiz you on anything at any moment. So they could ask you to name all the prefects or all the captains of sport, and if you failed, you were punished. And so, you know, it was just this kind of nervous system hyper activation, terrifying. But every day I was at the school, I felt, I felt like I was lost in a strange and dangerous forest, entirely mindful of my surroundings all the time, not knowing what danger was lurking around the corner. And so I, you know, I made a fool of myself in sport because all the kids were tougher than I was. I wasn't particularly strong academically my first year because I was incredibly intimidated by everything I would get home feeling very overwhelmed. And, you know, this was before we talked about anxiety or panic or any of those things. And so at the end of that first year, feeling utterly defeated by high school, I'd gone back to Uganda for Christmas and New Year, and I got to spend some time with Andrew. Yeah, and Andrew listened to me talking about how tough High School was. He listened patiently, and he'd have this, you know, mischievous smile on his face and a slight shake of his head as I told him how I just didn't think I could keep up with the other kids, and how I wasn't very smart. And he was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. And he said, and I won't forget this. He said, When you go back to Zimbabwe, when you go back to that school, I want you to punish the books. I want you to say no. My name is Simukai. And you know, it was a little cheesy, and it was a little cool having I kind of took that with me. I was like, Yeah, I'm gonna go back and I'm gonna punish the books. And he was just saying to me, you know, you have so much more intelligence and ability and depth of thought than you realize, and in this place that's trying to swallow you up. That's, you know, putting forward a version of what it means to be a young man that feels intimidating. You actually have what it takes. And it was just, it was this hugely inspiring thing. And even the way he said it, you must punish the books.

Holly Newson  09:38

Yeah, that phrase is so specific.

Simukai Chigudu  09:41

And partly was because, you know, Andrew used to code switch constantly, and so he was the first person who taught me how to how to do the same thing and how to incorporate more slang into my everyday speech. So when we were with our parents, with teachers and so on, Andrew was the model of the perfect. gentleman, always polite, always gentle with everyone he spoke to deferential and who spoke in a very crisp and polished English. And then, when it was the two of us, he taught me how to speak in what we called verus. Okay, so verus, the word verus, is an anagram of reverse, yeah. And in the rules of varusa, you kind of flip the consonant sounds on a word so you know, you wouldn't say funny, you would say nuffy, you wouldn't say silly, you'd say listen, you wouldn't say backwards. You'd say cab words, right?

Holly Newson  10:30

I can see how many of these you got still stored in your head, absolutely.

Simukai Chigudu  10:34

And so Andrew would just flip it on me all the time. And he'd be like, Hey, Simu, what's cutting bru, oging cab to The Miz, and I'd be like, Whoa. Like, what are you saying? Then he'd say, you don't say what's going on or how are you You say what's cutting. That means what's going on. And to say, I'm oging cab to The Miz is I'm going back to Zimbabwe. I'm oging, I'm going, cab back. And then Zim, Zimbabwe to Zim to The Miz. And so in all of this, there was another subtle lesson I was picking up from Andrew, and it was to kind of embrace my blackness, to be at a school that was run mostly by white teachers in an African country that was 50% white when less than 1% of the population was white, that was steeped in Englishness and British colonialism, and to say, okay, all of that's there, but there are all of these ways that you can subvert those kinds of hierarchies, and these ways that you can speak to the other black kids who look like you and are trying to make their way through the world, and that you can be cool, but you can also have punish like you know, so punish the book and Take pride in your work, yeah. And so I think that was something that I took from Andrew, that for me was just extraordinary.

Holly Newson  11:45

Yeah, what is it about that particular, like, pep talk that he gave you that you think, God, that was a really kind thing that he did.

Simukai Chigudu  11:57

You know? I mean, my mother had been telling me to study hard, but

Simukai Chigudu  12:05

kind of lands differently from different people.

Simukai Chigudu  12:09

And, you know, and again, she was a cheerleader of my but, you know, it's my mom, right? Yeah. So I think with Andrew was a couple of things. One was he was paying attention to me, and he was allowing me to say what was on my mind, what was bothering me. And at the same time, I think, you know, as we sort of talked about already, he was saying, I see things in you that you don't yet see in yourself, and I want to listen to you, and I want to hold space for this fear. And there is a time when we need to affirm people's fears and anxieties and legitimate them. And then there are times, I think, in friendship, where those fears can overwhelm us, and what we need to do is face up to them. And I think there was something about paying this attention that was alive to what it was I needed to hear in that moment. And I think the kindness came from the fact that he had enough patience to just sit there and take this all in and then try to inhabit the world, from my point of view, while simultaneously saying that, like I can see other things that you can't see from your point of view. And it was holding those two things together. And that takes time, that takes attentiveness, that takes attunement. It's not an easy thing to do.

Holly Newson  13:36

Yeah, it's I see where you are and I see where you could go. I see where you're going.

Simukai Chigudu  13:41

You know, it's something that I continue to think about in my daily life. You know, am I really listening when I'm talking to people? And, you know, listening is hard. It takes a huge amount of effort, and we're all stressed and rushed off our feet, and it's much more tempting to perform the act of listening while really waiting to say what it is you need to say, and bringing closure to an interaction. And you know, Lord knows, I do it all the time when I speak to my students, and I'm trying to rush through my office hours, but every now and then, I think of Andrew's example, and I'm kind of reminded to slow down and to try to pay attention in these different ways to what is the person in front of me actually saying, and are there things in them that I see, that I can offer, that might be helpful to hear.

Holly Newson  14:32

And so how did it change your your second year when you went back to school, like, what happened? What did it change?

Simukai Chigudu  14:40

It was nothing short of a paradigm shift.

Holly Newson  14:42

Okay?

Simukai Chigudu  14:42

I mean, I got back to the school and I was like, okay, you know, I'm gonna walk with a little bit more strut. I'm gonna wear my hat with a little bit more swagger, but more than anything, I'm gonna start applying myself. And I started to study. And I started to study in a serious way. I didn't give up at the first sign of friction. And that could be anything. I mean, it was, you know, sitting there struggling over the difference between ionic and covalent bonds, or being confronted with Thomas Hardy and the stance prose. And I just started to think, okay, if I'm here and I'm trying to punish the books, what that means is that the difficulties I face are not diagnostic of my ability. They're just built into the nature of the task that I will struggle. And struggling is is just part of the process of learning. And I think prior to that chat with with Andrew, I hadn't quite got to that point yet, and instead, I just, you know, assumed the worst about myself that, oh, if it doesn't come naturally, that means I can't do it. And that was a huge that was a huge change.

Holly Newson  15:49

Yeah, it's such a good example of kindness, because he's a he's a teenage boy like and I think we as a society can sometimes not expect much in terms of kindness and empathy and really like hearing and listening to their friends from teenage boys, but to go like, no, like, there are plenty of teenage boys that have that, like, innate in them, and they create this incredible, like ripple effect in someone else's life,

Simukai Chigudu  16:20

Absolutely. And, you know, I've been thinking a lot about masculinity and how to inhabit it in a healthy way, and how we learn what it means to be a boy, what it means to be a man. And, yeah, you know, certainly the school I was at with its incredibly hierarchical nature and its intense valorization of sport. I mean, it was very, very traditionally masculine. And then, you know, as as conversations about gender and gender identity become much more commonplace today, and more people talk a lot about toxic masculinity, which you know, obviously is a is a real social a real and important social phenomenon, it's rarely, we rarely have strong examples of the opposite. And I guess that was that was something else in Andrew's demeanor, was that he was a gentle presence, but a confident one in how I saw him. And that was kind of saying, like, it's okay to to to be a boy, it's okay to be a man and it's and it's and to have some self confidence and takes up space in the world. But that doesn't mean taking or embodying the particular version of hyper masculine, Incorrigible, patriarchal manhood that was coming to me in all sorts of other ways. And I think there's also something else here about language too, right, which is, boys can talk to each other, and certain messages are just easier to take in from older male role models. Yeah.

Holly Newson  17:59

Yeah, completely, yeah. I like that, that like they boys can talk to each other. And I think it's what you said about masculinity as well, and how Andrew was you said the gentleness, with the confidence, with a lot of masculinity. I don't know. I've read a lot around how people say that we teach boys not to be girls, but we don't teach them what they can be, yeah? So anything that's feminine is rejected when actually, like, the gentleness plus the confidence, is a way, yeah, to have that masculinity,

Simukai Chigudu  18:31

Absolutely and yeah, and it's that, that positive articulation of of being a boy and of coming of age as a young man, yeah, I couldn't put it better.

Holly Newson  18:45

So question is, can you think of a time that someone did something kind for you?

Tanya  18:51

Oh, there was a time where a lady saw me rushing for the bus, and I was quite far away, and she stood in front of the bus for me, but she wasn't even getting on the bus. And then she waited for me until I got to the bus and then she went away.

Tanya  19:01

So she she made it so that you could make your bus?

Tanya  19:05

Yeah, that was so kind. I was so surprised, because I didn't think people do that. I feel like I would do it, but I didn't think someone else would do it, which was, it was really nice.

Holly Newson  19:23

And what did that mean for the rest of your day?

Holly Newson  19:25

Tanya, thank you.

Tanya  19:27

I just felt like in a really positive mood. I told everyone about it. I was like, Oh my God, this happened today! Yeah, it was really, I was really happy.

Holly Newson  19:31

That's amazing. What's your name?

Tanya  19:31

Tanya.

Holly Newson  19:31

So moving on to your second story of kindness. Will you tell me where you were at this time and also how old you were at the time?

Simukai Chigudu  19:39

Yeah. So as I mentioned, you know, I was going to the school in in this high school in Zimbabwe, and I'd started at the high school in 1999 by 2000 Zimbabwe started to enter a major political crisis, a convulsion of absolutely epic proportions. All the details don't matter, but suffice. To say that our government took a very authoritarian turn. They were seizing the white owned commercial farmland, and so what happened was sanctions were applied on the country. Businesses shut down. Various human rights violations were committed, and people started to leave the country en masse. We entered a period in Zimbabwe that was that's come to be known as the period of hyperinflation. To make the point starkly, in the late 90s, or in the sort of early to mid 90s, the Zimbabwean dollar was trading at nearly one to one with the US dollar in the early 90s, probably about one to 10 in the mid 90s, one to 16 in the late 90s, by 2008 an individual egg in Zimbabwe had come to cost $3 trillion people were carrying bank notes in wheelbarrows because the currency had become had become useless. It was miserable. And so I was part of a cohort of people who had the opportunity to leave the country. My parents themselves, anti colonial nationalists who wouldn't leave Zimbabwe, but wanted me to have the best I could get in my education. And so I left, and I left and arrived at a boarding school in England, in rural Lancashire, again, Catholic Jesuit boarding school. I'm neither Catholic nor Jesuit, and it's out in the middle of nowhere. And you arrive at this school, there's this long driveway. It's nearly, you know, a mile long, and it's flanked on either side, initially, by these pristine rugby fields. And as you keep going down the driveway, there are these two huge ponds. And then what faces you is this kind of mammoth structure, and it's got these two brooding towers that I kind of looked down on you. And I had started at the school around the time that the Lord of the Rings films had come up, so they looked like the two talents. Anyway. So I was at the school, and there were a number of other Zimbabweans who had arrived at the same time as me, partly because of the Jesuit length. So this school was kind of recruiting or welcoming schools from my school in Zimbabwe, students from my school in Zimbabwe. And the thing is that I was the one of the only black Zimbabweans who had arrived in the school as part of this cohort. There was one in the year above me. Then in my year group, there was just me and a large group of white Zimbabweans who had all gone to the same school in Zimbabwe that I had right? Okay, now I was deeply suspicious of white Zimbabweans because growing up, white Zimbabweans were frequently racist that they held on to the attitudes and dispositions of the Rhodesian colonial era and were not quite willing to share the country on an equal footing with black Zimbabweans after the country gained independence. So there was this kind of residue from the past of old colonial attitudes that we experienced as kids, and they would make all kinds of terribly offensive racist jokes and things like that. So I was always deeply wary of this crowd. And I arrived at this school, and there was a group of them, and I didn't quite know how to read them. I knew them all by reputation from Zimbabwe, but I wasn't friends with any of them. Okay. Anyway, over time, you know, inevitably, we spent time together, and we started to slowly get to know each other, I think, bound by the sense that we all felt unmoored, yeah, that we had left,

Holly Newson  23:38

yeah, you've left Zimbabwe, you're in England, you're like, what's going on?

Simukai Chigudu  23:41

Yeah. And it was in England too, where there was some xenophobia. I mean, one of the one of the English Kids, had said to me, you know, if I could take all the asylum seekers in this country, I would put them on a boat, send it out to sea for detonation.

Holly Newson  23:54

Wow, that's a view.

Simukai Chigudu  23:56

That is a view. Zimbabwe was getting, you know, terrible press coverage in the UK, accused of committing a white genocide against white Zimbabweans. And so being a black Zimbabwe in this country, everyone assumes that, Oh, you must be the nephew of the dictator there, or your country must be implicated in the corruption. I mean, really offensive stuff. So one of the one of the white kids who I got to know is a guy who, in the book, I call him Liam. It's not his real name. And, you know, I totally got Liam wrong, just because I thought he was a dummy, I kind of He just had a slightly glazed over look at his face. And I was like, this guy doesn't know he's not punishing the books. We had maths class together. We're doing a level maths, and because the Zimbabwean school year runs in a different way to the British school year, I arrived about a term of study behind my classmates, right? And so I was doing this calculus module, and we were being taught integral calculus, more advanced form of calculus, and I hadn't even done. The basics, the basic introduction into, like, differential calculus. Okay, I'm drowning here, and I'm like, I have no idea what's going on. You know, they might as well be speaking in tongues when I'm in these maths lessons. And then it's Liam, who starts to explain all the fundamental theories and starts to talk me through how you, how you make sense of, you know, what it is that we're we're learning. And I was like, Huh, okay, I've kind of misread you.

Holly Newson  25:28

Yeah, this Liam kid's got a brain.

Simukai Chigudu  25:32

And then towards the, you know, once we got to upper six, the school encouraged us to apply to Oxford and Cambridge. In my particular year group, loads of us applied. And by this time, I had found my footing academically, and I had come away with a string of A's at as and, you know, I was kind of feeling myself, and I was like, okay, cool, like I put in my application, yeah, and I applied to study medicine at Oxford, as did Liam and several of the other Zimbabwean kids. But also, you know, a lot of the English Kids applied, and almost all of us were rejected. Okay, two kids eventually got to Cambridge, but were all rejected from Oxford. And at that time, I took it really hard, yeah, took it incredibly hard. And I took it hard because, in ways, I didn't realize that I had started to stake so much of my identity on my academic performance. So since I started punishing the books at my school in Zimbabwe and started winning various awards for academic merit and so on, I felt this is who I am. The other thing was that, you know, I was in a country that was falling apart, and so I'd arrived to England, not quite realizing that I was carrying this deep sense of mission. I had this this feeling that if I was smart enough, if I was bright enough, if I went to the best university and studied medicine and became a doctor, I could somehow heal the broken land from which I came. That the key to healing all these fractures and this division, this violence lay in me in some way, which was, you know, an almost obscene amount of pressure,

Holly Newson  27:15

yeah, so much to put on yourself, yeah,

Simukai Chigudu  27:17

yeah. And the rejection then felt existential. It didn't feel like, Oh, well, you know, I applied for a place at this university that hasn't worked out. Something else will work out. It cut to almost the core of who I am, destabilizing my sense of what am I doing in this country. What am I doing with all of the privilege and opportunity? And also one of the only black students who had made it, you know, there who had come from Zim, I felt this added pressure that was I was getting the opportunity that many of the other black kids I grew up with didn't have, yeah, and so we had an Oxford rejects party in the dorms, because we were all licking our wounds and, you know, trying to rewrite what our futures would be. And being a compulsive rule follower, having really internalized the strictures of my Jesuit education, I never really broke any rules, and I decided that I wanted to get drunk for the first time. And so, you know, we, we, the school was also, you know, crazily relaxed about alcohol,

Holly Newson  28:27

Really, so you decided to get drunk, but actually, like, it's not all that difficult?

Simukai Chigudu  28:33

Not at all. I mean, it was, you know, somebody went out and bought a stash of booze, brought it into the dorms. Yeah, the teacher who was on duty that night knew what was going on, but took the sort of attitude that they're all there in their rooms. They're not sneaking out to get to a club in the nearest town. You know, they're not doing anything reckless, and as long as they're here, it can be monitored.

Holly Newson  28:54

How bad can it be?

Simukai Chigudu  28:56

How bad can it be? Well, I was about to find out. So, you know, I think I had maybe four tinnies or something like that, which was just way too much for a total newbie. I was also, like a really tiny kid. I was very, very scrawny, and I used to run all the time, so I incredibly lanky, and I was knocking these back, and I was messy and all over the place. And the teacher on duty that night, you know, told some of the other kids to put me to bed. I went and lay down on my bed. My head was spinning, and I felt this gut wrenching dizziness and all of this bile and everything else coming from my inside rising up and just bursting out of my mouth, and I threw up all over my my bedspread, or all over my pillows, and then I turned over, and I did the same thing, and then I passed out. I woke up a few hours late. I must have been around three or four in the morning, and. In the room stank, of course, and it was wet and messy, and I felt horrible. I felt, you know, I was still drunk, but I was starting to get a headache, and I felt such shame, you know, because it wasn't just the mess I had created, but it was the idea that I'd lost control in this way, and I was I felt such terrible, crushing shame, and then I felt physically awful. So I went to go use the toilet, and on my way back, I noticed a dim light coming from one of the rooms, and it was Liam's room, so I knocked on his door and gently opened, and Liam was at his desk, kind of wide awake, just in shorts on a rugby jersey, writing notes for people, because he wanted to tell them what they meant to him. Yeah, Liam's like a rugby lad, and he used to pump iron, and he was like and he was white Zimbabwean. These are not the archetypes of sentimentality. We tried to read his note but, but he was too drunk a nd his score was we couldn't really make sense of it, but I told him what had happened and how I'd thrown up all over my room, and it was just a mess, and I was gonna be in trouble the next day, and so on. And before I could even finish what I was saying, he even grabbed one of the towels off the hook on his wall, drenched it in the sink and water, and said, Come, let's go to your room. And he charged to my room, opened the door, and he just started scrubbing away, um, all of the mess. And he basically cleaned it up. And I tried to stop him, and he said, simu, we're going to be doctors. We need to get used to stuff like this. And then he just, he just, he just cleaned it up, and I felt this incredible swelling of tenderness and gratitude toward him. I I felt held. I felt in this moment of shame and vulnerability, I felt rescued. You know, even thinking about it now, just Yeah, it really still moves me, yeah.

Holly Newson  32:09

I mean, it's, there's like, few things that feel more like viscerally kind than like, I've made this huge mess, and someone goes, I'll clear it up. No, like, whatever the mess, whatever, you know, like, whether it's a little rural mess or a figurative mess. And obviously you and Liam, you know, presumably you'd built this friendship up over, over these years, realizing that, you know, he's not this glazed over kid. He's a smart kid, and then he's actually this very sentimental kind kid. How do you feel remembering that now, remembering this kid that just went like, No, I've got you

Simukai Chigudu  32:50

Yeah, yeah. So I think there's a couple of things, you know, because I had had really close friends in Zimbabwe, but so much of my life in Zim was defined by race, and so I was friends with, you know, mostly black circle of white friends, usually, kind of the more white liberal friends whose parents were from Eastern Europe, the Eastern European expats, or some of the Jewish kids, whereas the kind of the white Somalians, the roadies, that's what we used to call them, because they came from Rhodesia, as we call them the roadies. They were kind of, you know, our equivalents of rednecks. And so there was this, you know, hinterland of assumption and of prejudice that I carried, I mean, his act of kindness, I should say doesn't, didn't change my political views on the historic injustices perpetuated in Zimbabwe, but they did temper something about the assumptions I make about individual people and who I think they are, and who they think I am, and somehow I think I'm not sure that we would have ever become friends in Zim, but being out in England and feeling the same homesickness, the same peculiar sickness of the spirit that comes from leaving home and feeling unmoored, but also knowing that that the home that you left is changing irrevocably. It's becoming something new. That's a lot to process at you know, 16 or 17, as we were at that time, and for him to clean up that mess was cutting across all of these walls around masculinity, around race and racial identity, and of course, showing up the inadequacy of some of our sociological categories for How we make sense about our interactions as people. So I think for me, that was, that was profound, and is one of the things that stayed with me. And, you know, I mean, partly why I've been thinking about these examples, you've asked me, I've been thinking about people who are, maybe, you know, are not currently in my life, or don't play a big role in my life at the moment, and who are there? Very specific moments for me, and marked a kind of inflection point, some turning in how I understood myself or how I understood the world. And I would say that was probably one of the most profound things that had happened with me and Liam at that moment.

Holly Newson  35:20

So can you think of a time that someone did something in kind for you?

Owen  35:24

Yeah, I when I had covid, it was about 2021. Was off the big wave. I was chatting to my flat for two weeks, and someone just dropped around some food, actually sent some stuff over, left at the door, didn't have to do that went out of their way. Yeah, that's really kind.

Holly Newson  35:41

What did that mean to you that day?

Owen  35:44

It meant I didn't have to- it meant I got some food. Nice. It made a practical thing. We live in quite a world where we're quite sort of atomistic, aren't we, some ways. So when someone does that to you, you sort of go, that was just, you know, it didn't happen. Some of those things don't have to do. For me, that's, that's kindness, right? And I just thought, so, yeah, it was nice. Made me feel better.

Holly Newson  36:01

Perfect. Thank you so much. What's your name?

Owen  36:03

My name is Owen.

Holly Newson  36:04

Owen, thank you.

Holly Newson  36:11

So moving on to your third story of kindness, when you were writing this book, when you were researching it, what was it like to talk to your parents about it and to try and find out about their own lives and experiences?

Simukai Chigudu  36:26

Yeah. So to give you a bit of context for this, you know, I'd mentioned elements of my dad's story and how my parents met. But you know, my dad grew up when Zimbabwe was Rhodesia, and he was becoming an adolescent at around the time that the Rhodesian government was executing a massive crackdown on black people agitating for freedom. He was the youngest of seven siblings. His parents and all but two of his siblings were all arrested. They were all political prisoners. My dad himself went to prison for the first time for taking part in protests against the government when he was in sixth form, and he was arrested and flogged by Rhodesian security officers. He went to prison again when he was a university student at the University of Rhodesia, which was in the capital city that was then known as Salisbury, and is now Harare. He had taken part in a protest, was arrested, served nearly four months in prison, including hard labor, sleeping in a prison cell with 19 other people. They're all parched. They're in a tiny box. There's no water. The only way that they can get a drink is when they flush the toilet and they try to drink the water that flows out of the system before it goes down the bowl. And so anybody who used the toilet overnight and soiled the bowl was beaten to a pulp because then it made it hard to drink. I mean, these were really brutal conditions. He ended up leaving the country as a refugee, initially to Botswana, where the UN got him a refugee scholarship to go to Uganda. And he was in Uganda for three years, where he met my mom. Then he went to go fight in they called it the bush war, or the liberation struggle as a guerrilla soldier. Meanwhile, my mother had stayed in Uganda, which itself was not an easy country at that time, because the tyrant Idi Amin had come to power, and she got caught up in the civil war that brought Amin's government down. And just to give a sense of the scale of the intensity of the violence under Amin's rule in the order of 200 to 250,000 Ugandans were killed. And then in the regime that followed, another 300,000 were killed. So both of my parents grew up surrounded by death at a colossal scale. And so this was the history that I was trying to understand, because I when I was growing up, I think this history haunted my family in ways that I couldn't understand as a child. What often happens for children of parents who have survived terrible violence or displacement or genocide, things of that nature is that they start understanding the emotional experience first, before they understand the worldly shape of events, so an ambient sense that there is this back story that's mysterious and difficult that comes out in these like fragments of information. So my dad would speak frequently about my grandfather before he told me that my grandfather was violently executed by Rhodesian security officers, but he wouldn't tell me very precisely, or in a coherent or single story, who my grandfather was. You know, my mother would tell me about how she became a feminist and organized her entire work. Working life around women's rights, but I didn't know that part of that came from her disillusionment with how she saw men exercising political and religious power growing up in Uganda. So, you know, I had these like hints as to who they were, and in this sense, my parents were, you know, utterly fascinating, complicated people, and it shaped their emotional availability to me, because they were grieving, they were mourning, they were also dealing with all kinds of shame and loss that I didn't understand, and part of my motivation for writing the book was to try to tell their story and trace its reverberations in my life, because this would be like a capsule of what colonial violence does to people and how it ramifies across generations. Yeah, and I interviewed both my parents. They were not in easy interviews. To do it meant revisiting very difficult periods from the past, and at certain points I found that their accounts didn't quite match up. And of course, they didn't count on having a professor son growing up. And then I would go around, you know, tracing back stories and speaking to people in my university to say, you know, does this sound plausible? And what should I be reading here? And there was just all of these different bits that I couldn't quite make make sense of and it forced a number of confrontations with them, some of which got pretty ugly as I became sort of angry and desperate to really understand some of the choices that they had made. And so the act of kindness actually came from a friend of my parents, a woman that they had been at university with called Florence, who had actually studied medicine and had taken an interest in me since I was a kid, and when I had initially gone to medical school, she was very interested in that before I left my medical career and retrained as a social scientist. And so I emailed Florence, hadn't spoken to her for years, and I emailed her and told her about the book project and asked if she could spare me some time to have a conversation about what my parents were like before I was born. We spoke, and the crucial thing was she took the kinds of things that I've been telling you about, you know, the violence my parents had grown up with, and kind of talked a bit about how this shaped their entire generation. She started telling me these stories about how much pain my parents had been in when they when they came out of their these two different wars, my father and the liberation struggle my mother and the wars against Idi Amin, and how difficult it was to talk to each other and there was no mental health or counseling support, no vocabulary to discuss this particular form of trauma, no mechanisms for restitution, just a lot of loss that gets buried and buried and buried.

Holly Newson  42:53

And how did she then contextualize where you fit into all of this?

Simukai Chigudu  42:57

Yeah, so she used a phrase, and I won't forget it. She said, The reason I'm telling you all of this is I want you to understand that you are a child of this complexity. You know, that's where you came into the world. The child of this complexity, we like to romanticize the liberation struggle, but it had a lot of ugly parts, too. We had these commitments to these political causes that we deeply believed in, and some of them have gone awry. All of that complexity was what was there before you came into the world? That's what you were a child of. And she was urging me to empathize with my parents, to understand that maybe when they're being withholding, or when they're emotionally absent when I was growing up, or when they were fighting with each other, or whatever, that a lot of this had nothing to do with me, but was to do with everything else that they were carrying with them, and that being a child of that complexity was a way of situating my experience in some kind of broader historical framework. And in many ways, it changed the trajectory of the book, because then, wow, yeah, I became so much more interested in reading more widely about experiences of second and third generation people who've come after, you know, these episodes of violence or displacement or what have you I read books. You're from El Salvador, or from Vietnam, from South Africa, from Palestine, you know, all of these contexts where we know, you know, horrendous things have happened, and children are born trying to make sense of the world that preceded them, and not really knowing it. And you know, of course, Holly cost survivors and so on, and so it unlocked something. But I would also say that just at an interpersonal level, Florence didn't speak like many of the people from my parents' generation. You know, because many of them don't talk about mistakes in parenting. Yes, you know, many of them don't talk about. About the ways that they mess up their kids. Yeah, many of them don't know how to own and to say up front like, you know, I was these bad things happen, and they've become a part of me, and I didn't know what to do with that, and then I had a child I was mumbling and muddling my way through.

Holly Newson  45:20

Has this changed, maybe not your relationship with your parents, but maybe the grace you give them?

Simukai Chigudu  45:27

It absolutely has. I mean, these things you know, as as you're alluding to, are complicated, but I think it, it allows for a kind of grace, I hope, and a degree of compassion, and I'd also have a bit of kindness too, you know, because it's, it's invited me into paying a quality of attention to the shape of their lives and the and their emotional worlds.

Holly Newson  45:53

Yeah. And so my final question to you, what is the kindest thing you have ever done for yourself?

Simukai Chigudu  46:02

Uh, so when I- last year, as I was trying to finish the book, I was also directing a crazy complicated master's program at Oxford, supervising lots of doctoral students, just generally, doing a million things. And, you know, I punish the books. I work hard. I keep pushing myself. I try to achieve excellence in everything I do. And I just became so overwhelmed, and I felt like I was working myself silly and couldn't, you know, got to the point where I couldn't concentrate, I couldn't think. I could barely get through a night of sleep without waking up in a kind of panic attack. And I did something that I hadn't done, literally, since 2007 which is I went to go see a doctor. And the doctor pointed out that, you know, in all of the stuff that I was doing a medical degree, then a PhD in record time, and then becoming a professor, super young, then, you know, writing academic books and articles and mentoring people, and doing all of this stuff that I was just burnt out, yeah, and it was and I was in really bad shape, and I didn't know how to take that seriously. And eventually I took time off. I took time off work, and I'd saved a bit of money at that point, and I moved out of Oxford, where I was living at the time, and bought myself a small flat here in London, and to move and to take time off work and to put a pause on everything, to say, I don't need to be producing all the time. I don't need to be the best all the time. I don't need to be justifying my existence to the world, that what I need to do is just take care of myself and create a home that's fully my own, and that, I think is the kindest thing I've ever done for myself.

Holly Newson  48:00

Thank you so much. That is such a beautiful way to be kind to yourself. Thank you for all your stories and for your brilliant book chasing freedom and for spending time with me today.

Simukai Chigudu  48:11

Thank you so much for having me. It's been such a pleasure.

Music  48:14

Hey, hold on. I'll stay here till it goes.

Holly Newson  48:21

Thank you so much for listening. You being here and your support means so much to me. Give Sima Kai's book chasing freedom a read, you won't regret it. I like the way he looks at the world, and I think he'd agree that he has given it a lot of thought. This episode is dedicated to anyone who gave us the pep talk we needed. Maybe share the episode with one of those people in your life or someone else who might enjoy it. I would also love to hear from you about a time someone was kind to you. So send me a voice note at kind podcast.com or you can email me Holly at kind podcast.com and I will feature some of the stories on the show. If you like the show, hit, subscribe, hit, follow, give it a rating, a review, it all helps me so much. It was great to spend time with you. Speak soon.

Music  49:22

Hey, hang dream on and let your heart unfold.