We Are All Zimbabweans

James Kilgore wrote "We Are All Zimbabweans Now" during his six and a half years in prison in California. The book is based on his experiences living in Zimbabwe in the early 1980s. At that time Kilgore was a fugitive from American justice for his involvement with the activities of the Symbionese Liberation Army.

During his time on the run, Kilgore rejected the politics of small group violence, building a career as an educator, researcher and activist in Zimbabwe and South Africa. He wrote a number of books and academic articles during that period under the pseudonym John Pape.

After his arrest in Cape Town in 2002, he received letters of support from Nobel Peace Prize laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Nelson Mandela Foundation and more than a hundred other individuals and organizations.

South African activist Trevor Ngwane wrote that Kilgore's time in South Africa
" showed that he had broken with terrorism as a method of struggle, preferring the hard patient slog of building among ordinary workers, in the trade unions and among working-class youth. He exchanged his guns and masks for pen and paper. He stopped living between the cracks and in the night; he built a new life, took care of his family and contributed to the struggle of the workers."

We Are All Zimbabweans Now was sent out of prison as a 595 page handwritten manuscript which was entered onto computer by a team of Kilgore's friends and family. The author currently resides in Illinois, U.S. with his wife and two sons. He's busy tranferring several other novels he penned in prison to computer.