Archive for the ‘Zimbabwe’ Category
by Amanda on Aug 10th, 2011
James Kilgore, author of We Are All Zimbabweans Now, says that there has been an increase in detentions of immigrants in the United States since 9/11.
Kilgore is no stranger to prison life, having served six and a half years in jail for his activities as a member of the left-wing militant group, the Symbionese Liberation Army. Kilgore had been living as a fugitive in South Africa since 1978 and was on the FBI’s Most Wanted list for years before he was arrested and extradited to the US in 2002. His novel, We Are All Zimbabweans Now, was completed while in prison.
Kilgore says heightened security since 9/11 has led to the incarceration of Latinos living without legal documentation, creating a boom in business for private prisons. He compares today’s staggering deportation statistics to the “Repatriation” campaign of the 1930s and Operation Wetback of 1954, “both of which resulted in the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Latinos”:
Last week Representative Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) joined a demonstration in Washington D.C. to protest the refusal of President Obama to use his executive powers to halt the deportations of the undocumented. Gutierrez’ arrest came only two days after Obama had addressed a conference of the National Council of La Raza. Conveniently forgetting the history of the civil right struggles that made his Presidency a possibility, Obama reminded those attending that he was bound to “uphold the laws on the books.”
With over 392,000 deportations in 2010, more than in any of the Bush years, many activists fear we are in the midst of a repeat of notorious episodes of the past such as the “Repatriation” campaign of the 1930s and the infamous Operation Wetback of 1954, both of which resulted in the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Latinos.
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by Amanda on Mar 18th, 2011
Random House Struik is pleased to present The Cry of the Go-Away Bird by Andrea Eames.
Elise loves the farm that is her home; she loves playing with beetles and chameleons in the garden, buying sweets from the village shop and listening to the stories of spirits and charms told by her nanny, Beauty. As a young white girl in 1990s Zimbabwe, her life is idyllic. Her clothes are always clean and ironed, there is always tea in the silver teapot, gin and tonics are served on the veranda, and, in theory at least, black and white live in harmony.
However this dream-world of her childhood cannot last. As Elise gets older, her eyes are opened to the complexities of adult existence, both through the changes wrought in her family by the arrival of her step-father Steve, and through her growing understanding of the tensions in Zimbabwean society. As Mugabe’s presidency turns sour, the privileged world of the white farmers begins to crumble into anarchy.
The Cry of the Go-Away Bird follows Elise as she attempts to make sense of her place in the world while her family struggle to stay afloat in the collapsing economy and escalating horror that surrounds them. As the violence intensifies and the farm invasions begin, Elise and her family are forced to confront difficult choices and the ancient unforgiving ghosts of the past.
About the author
Andrea Eames was brought up in Zimbabwe, where she attended a Jewish school for six years, a Hindu school for one, a Catholic convent school for two and a half, and then the American International School in Harare for two years. Andrea’s family moved to New Zealand in 2002. Andrea has worked as a bookseller and editor and lives in Christchurch with her husband. The Cry of the Go-Away Bird is her first novel.
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by Amanda on Aug 16th, 2010
Those Who Love Night is a riveting political thriller, which sees the return of Abigail Bukula, the brilliant young lawyer who teamed up with Yudel Gordon, veteran criminologist of Ebersohn’s oeuvre in The October Killings (2009).
When ten activists go missing in Zimbabwe, Abigail’s help is sought. Among the missing ten, believed to be held at the notorious Chikurubi prison, is Abigail’s cousin – a gifted writer and the child of an aunt who died in the Gukuruhandi massacres of the early 1980s. Reading her cousin’s work and trying to understand him, Abigail turns to Yudel, whom she hasn’t seen in four years.
Yudel follows Abigail to Zimbabwe where she wins the court battle for their release, but at Chikurubi there is no trace of the ten prisoners. In the days to follow, Abigail and Yudel search for the missing activists in a race against time. They uncover a relationship that no one could have anticipated in the complex power web in a country struggling to throw off the dictatorship of the past, and where success and tragedy are like Siamese twins.
From Those Who Love Night
She had heard the sound made by engines for at least five minutes now. By her reckoning, they should already have arrived in the village.
On most evenings, especially on Fridays, someone would arrive from Bulawayo or Plumtree, and you could hear their approach from the time they came round the low hill on the far side of the open stretch of savannah where the cattle grazed. The sound would start as a soft humming, then gradually grow louder. It would be perhaps two or three minutes before the vehicle arrived in the village.
Tonight was different. The sound was clearly that of more than one vehicle, and she had been hearing it for longer than she would have expected on other nights. It also had a deeper note. She knew the sound made by diesel engines and thought that must be the reason for the sound’s rumbling nature. It was much louder than that made by just a single car or even a truck.
About the author
Wessel Ebersohn lives in Johannesburg. Most of his nine books have been international successes.
They include A Lonely Place to Die, Divide the Night, Store up the Anger and Closed Circle.
He stopped writing fiction to create,Succeed, a magazine for entrepreneurs, with his wife Miriam. The October Killings (Umuzi, 2009) was his first new novel to appear in more than 14 years. For this title he has been offered a publising contract in the US.
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by Amanda on May 3rd, 2010
A major profile on James Kilgore, author of We Are All Zimbabweans Now, appeared in this weeks Mail & Guardian. Read Gavin Evans’ notes on Kilgore’s amazing life:
He might have remained undetected had it not been for the arrest of Kathy Soliah (living in Minnesota as “soccer mom” Sara Jane Olson) — which prompted her to join three of her former SLA comrades in cutting a plea-bargained deal. Kilgore decided to follow suit and in April 2002 retained lawyers for this purpose.
“This involved secret calls to my lawyer in the States,” he explains. “I’d sneak off to find a payphone so I’d have a non-traceable line. I also went to fancy hotels and phoned from their desk, and I’d go to the UCT library and surf the internet to see if there were any leads to me from the Sara Jane Olson case. I don’t know who my lawyer spoke with as we were trying to be careful, but obviously the careful part didn’t quite work out.”
He’d been planning to hand himself in by January 2003, but received his first and only hint of trouble on November 7 2002 when two South Africans arrived for a “survey on the shape of wine bottles”. They held up two bottles and said: “Which one do you like better? Here, just touch it and feel it.” Kilgore held the bottles and realised: “These people are getting my finger prints — and they were.”
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Photo courtesy the Mail & Guardian
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by Amanda on Apr 8th, 2010
This week, a James Kilgore bonanza. First, we bring you the speech Kilgore made at the Center for African Studies, University of Illinois, entitled Mugabe and reconciliation: The genesis and meaning of We Are All Zimbabweans Now. Secondly there’s an in-depth interview with the author, conducted by Gavin Evans, in which they discuss the circumstances that led to the writing of We Are All Zimbabweans Now:
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 Ilve 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.
* * *
It’s a perfect early winter’s afternoon in the American Midwest and James Kilgore seems very much at home in a suburban study that opens on to a leafy garden. He also comes across as surprisingly well-adjusted for a man wearing a parole ankle bracelet after nearly seven years in jail — and 27 years on the run before that.
Kilgore was one of the FBI’s “most wanted” fugitives for the part he played in the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), a militant organisation that caused terror in 1970s America, carrying out bank robberies, murder — and kidnapping 19-year-old Patty Hearst, the granddaughter of the newspaper magnate, William Randolph Hearst.
Clues to the unusual trajectory of his life on the run come from the pictures on his study wall. There’s a huge “Mandela for President” poster, a framed bill from the Cape Argus of November 11, 2002, saying “Kilgore: Hero of Poor”, and several pinboards packed with photographs and postcards he has received from African friends while in prison. Then there’s the old Zimbabwe T-shirt he’s wearing, set-off by cut-off blue denims, which the 62-year-old happily acknowledges “make me look like I’m trying to be 20 years old”.
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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.
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by Amanda on Jan 20th, 2010
Random House Struik and Umuzi are delighted to announce that We Are All Zimbabweans Now by James Kilgore (Umuzi, 2009) has been shortlisted for potential screen adaptation at the Berlin International Film Festival.
The work is one of 10 pre-selected novels chosen by Books at Berlinale, the co-production arm of the festival, taking place this February. Each novel will be pitched to international arthouse producers by the representatives holding the film rights.
We Are All Zimbabweans Now occupies an important place amongst the fictional chronicles of post-independence Zimbabwe. It is an accomplished and compelling novel and deftly analyzes the complex struggles for power in post-independence Africa.
The Berlin International Film Festival is one of the world’s top international film events, where approximately 20,000 filmmakers, industry professionals and film buffs from over 100 countries, come together for 11 days in February. With more than 270,000 tickets sold to the public, the ‘Berlinale’ is the largest audience festival in the world.
“Books at Berlinale” was introduced in 2006 in conjunction with the Frankfurt Book Fair with the goal of bringing the book and film worlds closer together. The programme also includes an information session for publishers and literary agents into the “film producing and financing world” as well as a case study on a literary adaptation screening.
About the Author
James Kilgore first made news in South Africa when he was arrested in Cape Town in 2002. He had been living under the alias Dr. John Pape and had become a respected academic at the University of Cape Town. US authorities extradited him to California where he served six and a half years in prison for his involvement in political activities in the volatile San Francisco Bay Area in the 1970s. He was released on the 10th of May 2009.
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Image courtesy Screen Australia.
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by Emily on Sep 28th, 2009
James Kilgore first made news in South Africa when he was arrested in Cape Town in 2002. He had been living under the alias Dr. John Pape and become a respected academic at the University of Cape Town. U.S. authorities extradited him to California where he served six and a half years in prison. He was released 10 May 2009. (See Remembering James Kilgore in Cape Town.)
Kilgore grew up in California and lived in the volatile San Francisco Bay Area during the late 60s and early 70s. He became immersed in left-wing politics, eventually linking up with the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). His involvement with the SLA led to an indictment for possession of explosives in 1975. Kilgore then fled the law for 27 years, living in Zimbabwe, Australia and South Africa. He abandoned the politics violence, focusing on a career as an educator. He resided in Harare, the site of his novel, We Are All Zimbabweans Now, from 1982-91. There he met his wife, Terri and also wrote a doctoral dissertation on the history of domestic workers in Zimbabwe.
Here’s the first print interview with the author to appear since the book’s release, conducted by the Sunday Times‘ Aubrey Paton:
Q: You were a revolutionary, an academic fugitive, a prisoner and, finally, a published author: did you ever dream you would have such an eventful life?
A: When I was a child, I dreamed of becoming a famous baseball or basketball player. Obviously those dreams didn’t quite pan out. Dream of becoming a writer? Never. If I even had even a faint inkling of a future as a writer, it would have been as a sports journalist.
Q: The main character, Ben Dabney, is naive, politically blinkered and idealistic: how much of your youthful self do you see in him?
A: There’s a certain naiveté in all political activism, a certain naive belief in the ability that your actions can change the world, regardless of the odds. I had that naiveté, still have some of it. But my naiveté was very different to Ben’s. I was an activist, a person of action. He was a scholar, a person of reflection. And I never believed in Mugabe the way Ben did, though I also never dreamed Mugabe could descend to his current depths.
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by Emily on Jun 3rd, 2009
Umuzi proudly announces the release of We Are All Zimbabweans Now by James Kilgore. Written from a California prison cell by this one-time fugitive author, the book occupies an important place amongst the fictional chronicles of post-independence Zimbabwe.
We are All Zimbabweans Now tells the story of young American historian Ben Dabney who arrives in Harare in 1981, full of admiration for Robert Mugabe and Zimbabwe’s policy of reconciliation. His euphoria in this country he calls the “Land of Forgiveness” heightens when he becomes involved with disabled ex-freedom fighter Florence Matshaka who connects him with the emerging black elite.
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by Emily on Jul 8th, 2008
Cheescutters and Gymslips, compiled by Robin Malan, is a delightful collection of short pieces about southern African writers’ experiences of boarding school.
“Boarding school” – the words in themselves conjure up various images and emotions: being a “newbie”, initiation, homesickness, living by rules and reacting to bells, hunger between mealtimes, midnight feasts … all the way through to punishment, miserable unhappiness, even running away. Such experiences, and many more, are reflected in this book – which includes a foreword by that master of boarding school adventure-and-folly fiction, John van de Ruit.
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