James Kilgore Talks on We are All Zimbabweans Now, Mugabe and Reconciliation

by Amanda on Mar 10th, 2010

James Kilgore, author of We are All Zimbabweans Now, recently presented a paper at the University of Illinois’ Centre for African Studies, at which he is a research scholar. Kilgore discussed the background to We are All Zimbabweans Now, including his former hopes for racial reconciliation under Mugabe:

Good afternoon. I’d like to thank the Center for African Studies for inviting me here this afternoon and particularly Merle Bowen for organising this session. This is the first time that I’ve spoken publicly to a group about my book and I’m quite excited about it. I’ll try to keep my excitement in check. I had in mind to do three things. First, I’d like to talk a little bit about the background of the writing of the book. It’s somewhat unusual as I wrote it during my period of incarceration from 2002 to 2009. Second, I assume most people haven’t read the book, so I thought I would give a brief plot summary of the novel. Third, I wanted to discuss what the novel means, what it is I actually wanted to say in this story which I’ve titled ’We Are All Zimbabweans Now’.

There are three forces that drove me to write this book. The first one was a simple factor of the lack of activity options when you’re incarcerated. Since I’m not a big fan of the major social activities in prison – dominoes, weightlifting, card games, and I’m a little bit too old for the daily grind on the basketball court – I needed to find an activity that would keep my mind alive and fill a lot of time. Writing was a good choice.