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    We Are All Zimbabweans Now
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    We Are All Zimbabweans Now
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    We Are All Zimbabweans Now
    Ebook359 pages6 hours

    We Are All Zimbabweans Now

    By James Kilgore

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    We Are All Zimbabweans Now is a political thriller set in Zimbabwe in the hopeful, early days of Robert Mugabe’s rise to power in the late 1980s. When Ben Dabney, a Wisconsin graduate student, arrives in the country, he is enamored with Mugabe and the promises of his government’s model of racial reconciliation. But as Ben begins his research and delves more deeply into his hero’s life, he finds fatal flaws. Ultimately Ben reconsiders not only his understanding of Mugabe, but his own professional and personal life.

    James Kilgore brings an authentic voice to a work of youthful hope, disillusionment, and unsettling resolution.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOhio University Press
    Release dateSep 12, 2011
    ISBN9780821443958
    Unavailable
    We Are All Zimbabweans Now
    Author

    James Kilgore

    James Kilgore is a researcher and activist based in Urbana, Illinois. He is the author of six books, including the National Book Foundation Award-winning A People’s Guide to Mass Incarceration. He drafted four of those volumes during his six and a half years in California prisons. He is a research fellow at MediaJustice, where he founded the Challenging E-Carceration project and is director of advocacy and outreach for FirstFollowers Reentry Program in Champaign, Illinois.

    Read more from James Kilgore

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    Reviews for We Are All Zimbabweans Now

    3.5/5

    17 ratings6 reviews

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    • 4/5
      James Kilgore's novel, 'We Are All Zimbabweans Now' is a very solid outing. The book went very quickly and was easy to become interested in.Ben Dabney is a likeable character and his journey is developed nicely. As a reader I could sympathize with his hesitation to let go of his fantasy notion of Mugabe and the appreciation he develops for the unseen fighters in the liberation.I also enjoyed the character of Florence. I found her take on revolution to be refreshing: knowing when to fight her battles and knowing when she had to let injustice go because fighting just wasn't worth it.There were two things that really bothered me: I felt that the high-level Zimbabwean revolutionary and goverment official acceptance of Ben was a bit far-fetched. It didn't seem plausible that all these people (including Florence) would take such an interest in an American research student with nothing to recommend him. I also thought the end came about too abruptly. 3 pages of Epilogue to wind up 2 years did not really do the ending any justice.Overall, a very enjoyable story with important lesssions about the people who make history, the importance of history in our lives and the responsibilities that come with recording historical stories.
    • 4/5
      In WAAZN, Author creates a character who is wholly believable and a portrait of a country that he loves despite its flaws. Ben is a historian who has traveled to Zimbabwe to research his dissertation. His relationship with that country reflects the course of so many relationships. At the beginning he is infatuated with the idea of Zimbabwe and its prime minister Robert Mugabe. As he meets the people of the country, he learns that the newly free country has many faults and secrets.As he meets the heroes of the war, he is forced to reexamine what it means to be a hero and in turn what it means to be a historian. In the characters that Ben meets and gets to know, we see the same passions, mistakes, loves and losses that each of us are part of in our own lives.My one complaint about the book is that I feel that the secondary characters are more interesting and more fleshed out than the main character. Ben is, in the end, the character I care least about. I think if the secondary characters had been fleshed out more, the book would have been much longer, but equally enjoyable.
    • 3/5
      The idea behind this novel, and the storyline, is very interesting. The moments of personal connection are highly engaging, but the problems come with the in-between. There needed to be more of a storyline to make the history palatable. When the moments of story are not proportional to the moments of history the average reader is lost. I found myself wishing for the next scene to begin instead of wondering what was going to happen next. I learned a lot of information about a part of the world that I knew nothing about before reading this book, but I only feel comfortable recommending this book to history buffs.
    • 4/5
      Though this was a somewhat difficult book to get into, I found my efforts to be more than rewarded by the time I completed this novel. Kilgore's protagonist, Ben Dabney, is not a very likable character from the get-go, but he isn't supposed to be. Dabney expands as a character as his knowledge of Zimbabwe grows. I found this to be a very effective tool used by Kilgore to drive home the importance, and sometimes unbelievably cruel nature of, Zimbabwean history and politics in the 1980s. As Ben's eyes are opened, the reader understands the magnitude of what the character is seeing.I read this book without having much of a background in terms of other publications - fiction or non - related to Zimbabwe. Kilgore has, through this novel, encouraged me to look into more reading material about this time and about this place.And, of course, I would love to read anything else that he has to write- about Zimbabwe or not.
    • 4/5
      An excellent debut novel, this is the poignant story of Ben Dabney, who [in the early ‘80s] is dazzled by Robert Mugabe’s policy of reconciliation and determined to write his thesis on Zimbabwean liberation. Armed with a list of subjects to interview, Ben arrives in Harare in 1982, and is delighted by the helpful friendliness of the black Zimbabweans, awestruck by the capacity to forgive their former suppressers. The few whites he encounters are, in the main, indolent, racist and unpleasant – in total contrasts to the blacks he befriends who are uniformly honest, generous, caring, good natured, polite, welcoming, appreciative – and colour-blind.Before long, Ben has moved in with Florence, a former guerilla who lost a leg to a landmine, meets and is charmed by his hero Mugabe and other highly-placed Zanu PF politicians, and is offering regular tutorials at a farm school for war veterans. Inspired and blinded by his enormous admiration for Mugabe and the Zanu slogan ‘We are all Zimbabweans now’, Ben is passionate about his now country and risks losing his academic grant so determined is he to describe what he sees as a miracle. But then Florence, his mistress, recommends he visit Matabeleland…Mugabe was a Shona and distrusted the Matabele, most of whom belonged to the more reconciliatory Zapu party: by 1982 he was terrorizing Matabeleland, waging a campaign of virtual genocide in the guise of suppressing ‘Dissidents’.While rumours of the slaughter had reached the capital, they were dismissed as “Boer Propaganda” and Ben is shocked to experience the gratuitous terrorism and barbarity waged against the Matabele first hand. His admiration for Mugabe is, just slightly, shaken, but he convinces himself the leader has no idea of what is being perpetrated in his name.Quite rapidly, Ben’s life turns into while not a nightmare exactly certainly a deeply unpleasant dream with several bad and some tragic episodes as he is forced not only to re-assess Mugabe, and the Zanu PF, but also the entire idea of a United Zimbabwean nation. Not a feel-good story but certainly a convincing one – most especially considering the identity of the author who, while definitely not a naïve Yankee fan of third world revolutionary leaders, once shared Dabney’s idealism. Ben is no poster-boy for professional historical objectivity: blinkered and someone cowardly, he is easily led into blindly espousing certain causes while neglecting his moral and intellectual responsibilities. For those who have forgotten, James Kilgore, along with heiress Patricia Hearst, was a member of the outlawed Symbionese Liberation Army in the early 70s, and one of the few who avoided capture by the authorities. South Africa was probably the last place in which one could expect to find an anti-capitalistic anarchist and revolutionary – which might be why Kilgore fled here, escaping detection for nearly 30 years. Is Dabney’s credulous enthusiasm, for Mugabe and his Zimbabwe perhaps a reflection of the strongly held beliefs Kilgore had as a young man? He lived in Zimbabwe himself in the 1980s so his impressions and observations are first hand. Does Dabney’s rude awakening in Matabeleland reflect some shocking experience in Kilgore’s exile, or is it an immediately symbolic incident reflecting perhaps the author’s long disillusionment with the socialist revolutionary anarchistic ideal?Ultimately, the suppositions are irrelevant: an impressive debut and a first-rate politico-historical literary thriller, this book is informative, thought-provoking, well-written and, best of all, entertaining.
    • 4/5
      The back cover describes this as a thriller, but I think that really doesn't apply. Instead it's a look at Zimbabwe after independence through the eyes of a white American history student who visits and tries to understand it. As the book starts he's an idealist who doesn't want to believe anything back about Mugabe, but as the political becomes personal and he gets involved with Zimbabweans his understanding becomes more nuanced.