BOOK REVIEW
We Are All Zimbabweans Now
James Kilgore
Umuzi

A RADICAL activist in the late sixties and early seventies with links to the Symbion­ese Liberation Army (SLA), American-born James Kilgore was indicted for possession of explosives in 1975 but managed to elude the law for 27 years, hiding out in Zimbabwe, Australia and South Africa. ­Living in Cape Town under the ­assumed name of Dr John Pape he became a respected academic but was finally arrested in 2002 and ­extradited to California where he served six-and-a-half years in ­prison.

While incarcerated he wrote his first novel, We Are All Zimbabweans Now, a book which takes its title from a speech made by President Robert Mugabe.

An intriguing blend of fact and ­fiction, its central character, Ben Dabney, is an idealistic young American doctoral student who, hugely ­impressed by Mugabe’s seeming magnanimity at the time of independence, decides he wants to write the definitive history of Zimbabwe’s struggle for liberation and reconciliation. By his reckoning Mugabe will emerge as the hero of the book.

Arriving in Harare, Dabney ingratiates himself with various members of the new ruling elite as well as forming a romantic attachment with a former female combatant. In the course of his research Dabney hears about the mysterious death of Elias Tichasara (obviously based, in part, on Josiah Tongarara, the popular head of Zanu’s military wing, Zanla, who died in similarly strange circumstances in a car crash on the eve of independence) and decides to try and uncover what really happened.

As his investigations lead him across the country Dabney starts to find things under stones he wished he had not turned and is eventually faced with the realisation that the man he had seen as the great hope of post-independent Africa was not the benign force for change he had believed him to be. He also discovers that his activities have attracted the interest of the authorities.

Kilgore writes well, the plainness of his style concealing a considerable artistry of pace and construction. In a sense, though, Kilgore lets Mugabe off relatively easy, the book ending long before his more recent excesses — the stolen elections, Operation Clean Up The Filth in which 700 000 people had their homes demolished, the ­destruction of the country’s agricultural and mining sectors (and the Zimbabwe dollar), the endemic ­corruption and cronyism, as well as the old despot’s continuing efforts to thwart meaningful reform.

Anthony Stidolph