Bio

Nyasha Blessed Bushu is a third-year PhD student in African Studies in the International Studies Group at the University of the Free State in South Africa. He is working on a socio-legal history of Zimbabwe in a thesis provisionally titled, Beyond chiefly courts: African grassroots justice practices in Southern Rhodesia c.1890-1937. This project has received Proposal and Research fellowship awards from NextGen. Nyasha holds a BA Honours Degree in Economic History and an MA in African Economic History from the University of Zimbabwe. His research interests are conflict, violence, and justice in colonial and postcolonial Africa. Notably, in 2022, he interfaced with the National Peace and Reconciliation Commission of Zimbabwe on issues related to conflict and justice through his participation in the Spirits of Peace: Recovering Zimbabwe’s Heritage of Traditional Reconciliation for Today’s Peacemakers Project that the University of Liverpool organised in conjunction with the British Academy. His latest publication is titled “The Zimbabwean Economic Crisis” in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History 2024.