Nicholas Nyachega is a historian of Africa, born and raised in Zimbabwe’s rural Honde Valley borderlands. He graduated from the University of Zimbabwe in 2013 with a B.A. Honors degree, majoring in History. After working at the University of Zimbabwe as a Teaching Assistant in the History Department, he earned a master’s in African History from Rhodes University, South Africa in 2017. His master's research explores everyday life in Zimbabwe’s Honde Valley borderlands, examining people’s wartime experiences beyond the narratives of violence and suffering.
He is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Minnesota, majoring in African History and minoring in Development Studies and Social Change. His doctoral research examines a history from below by highlighting the local quotidian experiences of borderlanders — indigenous Africans who live(d) in adjacent Honde Valley and Inyanga areas along the Zimbabwe-Mozambique border. He brings borderlanders’ everyday lives and local sovereignties to the center of analysis to understand how people’s everyday life goals and desires have changed over time and space, sometimes working in harmony or defiance to nation-state organizing principles and apparatuses of control. He examines how borderlanders’ local ideas of space and mobilities to critique state-centered perspectives to African borderlands.