Abstract
We Are All Zimbabweans Now and Freedom Never Rests, James Kilgore’s first two published novels, frame, in critically historical perspective, their author’s own extended southern African sojourn in the late twentieth century – and propose just as critically intersecting historical/fictional perspectives on that same geopolitical context. Such perspectives, however, are narratively complicated by the designated American protagonists of the two novels: Ben, an ardent PhD history student, keen to write a dissertation extolling the past virtues and future of Zimbabwe’s independence struggle in the early 1980s; and Peter and Joanna, whose once romantic past in the anti-apartheid days of protest has since discovered very different circumstances in a neoliberalising post-apartheid South Africa. From the early days of euphoric independence (Zimbabwe, early 1980s) to post-apartheid nation rebuilding (South Africa, mid- to late 1990s), Kilgore’s two novels offer informed chronicles, at once intimate and ideologically inflected, of the complexities posed for both local populations and their presumed and pretended international supporters, from erstwhile solidarity movements to now donor-driven NGOs and multinational corporations. Kilgore himself spent those same transformative late millennial decades in southern Africa, as a fugitive on the run and an activist on the ground, pursuant to his conviction in the US for alleged criminal activities in the Symbionese Liberation Army and following his own political convictions on behalf of national liberation and global resistance to imperial predation. He was eventually extradited from South Africa back to the US in 2002. We Are All Zimbabweans Now and Freedom Never Rests were both written in the course of Kilgore’s ensuing incarceration in US prisons, and, published subsequent to his release, also anticipate a forthcoming sequence of further narratives that the author’s history of commitment, exile and prison have variously generated.
‘I’ve always loved history’, notes Ben Dabney, citing as examples of that fervour Tiberias, Caligula, Thucydides, the Spanish Armada, the Battle of Hastings and the assassination of James Garfield, in the opening chapter of his account of his dissertation research project. Ben, the narrator and protagonist of We Are All Zimbabweans Now, is a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee and is en route to Zimbabwe in the early years of Robert Mugabe’s regnum over the newly independent Rhodesia. The dissertation proposal has promised an academic, if somewhat exuberant, interpretation of the independence struggle; after all, as Ben further notes, ‘I choose my heroes carefully’. The hopeful (and not so careful, as it turns out) would-be dissertation writer arrives in Harare with a generous supply of blank 3x5-inch index cards and a choice list of prospective interviewees, only to find that his scholastic agenda will be seriously refigured when he is assigned a new supervisor, who demands that the youthful liberation enthusiast revise his interview roster to include representatives of ex-Prime Minister Ian Smith’s Rhodesia. Then Zimbabwean historian Dlamini invites Ben to look into the still-suspicious circumstances surrounding the death in Mozambique of Zanu military leader ‘Tichasara’ (based on the real-life assassinations of Herbert Chitepo and/or Joshua Tongogara?) on the eve of the Lancaster House negotiations. And his very first interviewee, Florence, a wounded former freedom fighter, invites him to accompany her to a party. As Ben initially reflects, however, ‘I’m not really dressed for a party and I’m supposed to be doing research. How can I write objectively about people who feed me, give me beer and take me to parties. Maybe I’m overthinking.’
But Ben, who goes to the party after all, further reflects: ‘All of a sudden I’ve moved from novice historian into the deep waters of intrigues of the past.’ Those very intrigues unfold on several riveting registers in the course of We Are All Zimbabweans Now: a bildungsroman of Ben’s dubious maturation as a student/historian of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe; a whodunit, as Ben seeks to solve the mystery of Tichasara’s violent demise; an interracial, intercontinental romance, as Ben’s relationship with Florence unfolds and he is introduced (by Mugabe and his minions) to Zimbabwean ‘dissidents’; and a critically historicopolitical retrospective (Kilgore’s own?) on post-independence Zimbabwe one quarter of a century later.
Zimbabwe intrudes again, although rather more insidiously and all too briefly, into Kilgore’s Freedom Never Rests, when Madeline Moyo, a Zimbabwean exile in South Africa and a nursery school teacher, is invited to take lodgings by Constantia, only to be turned away by Monwabisi, Constantia’s husband. ‘How do we explain’, Monwabisi protests, ‘that we’re keeping a foreigner here? People will talk about makwerekwere and all that?’ It is the late 1990s, ‘dissidents’ have become ‘indigents’, and South Africa is well (and not so well) into its famed, but fast-fading, ‘transition to democracy’. Monwabisi, a former shop steward and ANC activist afflicted with the accursed ‘three-letter disease’, is now unemployed, and his wife Constantia, who once worked at the same nursery that now employs Madeline Moyo, has been elected to the city council in her impoverished area of the Eastern Cape, representing the township of Sivuyile. Constantia wants another wardrobe to accessorise her new public position and Monwabisi needs his expensive medications. Taking advantage, meanwhile, of South Africa’s neoliberal turn under the presidency of Thabo Mbeki, and the controversial move from the political economies ordered by the Reconstruction and Development Program (RDP) to those orchestrated by GEAR (or ‘growth, employment and redistribution’ plan), the international community has sent its own representatives (Ben’s latest counterparts?) to South Africa. There is Joanna, who brings the good- (but futile) will and charitable well-wishes of US church congregations/NGOs, and her former partner Peter from the divestment heydays, now representing the more profiteering corporate interests of Pellmar in peddling pre-paid water meters under the campaign slogan ‘Water for freedom’. The ‘connections’ here are all-important: getting connected to a water supply turns out (and off and on) to be connected to what connections can be tapped within the governing bureaucracy manorially housed in Johannesburg, Pretoria and Cape Town. Township residents, however, like the informal trader Mrs Mehlo or the youthful HIV+ protester Slim, who diverts the charitable donation collected by Joanna from medication for himself to water for his compatriots, represent the emergent roster of a South African ‘civil society’, still spurned by global corporate interests and their national entrepreneurial partners. As Peter contemptuously comments to Susan, his new ‘girlfriend’, an anti-apartheid Afrikaner now working in government administration, ‘Where else do people still wear T-shirts with a hammer and sickle on the front? Jesus.’
‘We are all Zimbabweans now’ and ‘Freedom never rests’, James Kilgore’s titles, were already popular slogans used (and abused) in the two struggles narrated retrospectively in Kilgore’s critical accounts, and they each recur as refrains in the respective (if hardly respectful) texts. Emitted from the mouths of protagonists and antagonists alike in the two post-liberation engagements, whether resolving a suspected assassination in Zimbabwe or fighting to connect to water delivery in South Africa’s townships, they suggest that it’s not only a question of ‘now’ or ‘never’, but a longer and more critical historical – even novel – narrative instead. Indeed, Kilgore is now out of prison and a research scholar in African Studies at the University of Illinois. His latest volume, Prudence Couldn’t Swim (Switchblade, 2012), the first in a series of police procedurals set (mostly) this time in southern California, rather than southern Africa, has just been published.