Simukai Chigudu: elucidating the politics of global health

Abstract

In 2003, aged 16 years, Simukai Chigudu came to the UK as a student from Zimbabwe, a country in political upheaval as opposition to the then President Robert Mugabe grew. A year later, Chigudu began a medical degree at Newcastle University. It was, he recalls, an unsettling time: “I felt this sense of being caught between worlds, where I was really struggling to be at one with my new setting in Newcastle, and yet I could never feel disencumbered of home. The more that things in Zimbabwe had deteriorated, the more powerless I felt…It was as if my own sense of identity was being fragmented as much as the country was being fragmented.