About the Author

The author, James Kilgore, lived as a fugitive in South Africa from 1991 to 2002 under the name John Pape.  He was an educator, researcher and activist. In 2002, authorities extradited him to the United States where he served six and a half years in prison for political offenses committed in the 1970s. The idea for this book emerged from his observation that as a prisoner in the U.S. he enjoyed unlimited access to free water, something which remained out of the reach for so many people in South Africa.

Kilgore currently lives in the U.S. where he is a research scholar at the Centre for African Studies at the University of Illinois.  He is the author of We Are All Zimbabweans Now, described by the Natal Witness as one of the “three best reads” of 2009, and Prudence Couldn’t Swim (forthcoming, May, 2012).  We Are All Zimbabweans Now was e published in the United States by Ohio University Press in September, 2011.

To order We Are All Zimbabweans Now, click here. If you are in southern Africa, click here. 

Praise for We Are All Zimbabweans Now:

“Too few writers have Kilgore’s wide-angle vision. This promising first book, vividly rooted in his own experience, leaves me eager to read more by him.”

Adam Hochschild — author of King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

In We Are All Zimbabweans Now, James Kilgore has given us an intimate view of one man's journey into Zimbabwe's often horrific recent past. I'm so pleased the book will now be available to American readers. Not only is the novel an essential contribution to our understanding of what went so wrong in Zimbabwe (as well as allowing us to see what went right in the early days), We Are All Zimbabweans Now is wonderfully written, humane, and mysterious from start to finish.”

Peter Orner — author of The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo

"James Kilgore is a novelist, scholar, and longtime activist. His riveting political mystery captures the dashed hopes, abuses, and ongoing struggles of the Zimbabwean people in the post-independence period. For those interested in a moving personalized account of the betrayal of the Zimbabwean revolution, We Are All Zimbabweans Now is essential reading."

Allen Isaacman — Regents Professor of African History, University of Minnesota

“The book is fast-paced and funny, extolling two literary virtues often missing on the Left. It is a good read—the work of a great storyteller. But it is also an invaluable object lesson—the work of a committed activist.”

Frank B. Wilderson III — author of Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid, winner of the 2008 American Book Award

“Countries and crises, like individuals, can be cast as crude outlines from a distance, in the wide shot; getting up close is the way to reveal nuance and complexity. Kilgore’s novel zooms in on post-Independence 1980s Zimbabwe in just this enlightening fashion, through the eyes and experiences of an American history student, Ben Dabney, who flies in with a study grant and a believer’s heart to witness a settler colony transformed into an independent nation. Kilgore’s evocation of that exhilarating era of hope and change is superb, as those of us who lived through it can confirm. But what the novel does—beyond bringing place and time alive—is to onion-peel some layers of history, opening old and new assumptions to the air with stinging effect.”

Annie Holmes — coauthor, Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives