I thank my friends, former colleagues and students in Harare. I must also thank the comrades from my former organisations in South Africa: International Labour Research and Information Group (ilrig), Khanya College, Workers’ World Radio, as well as Labour Research Services, all of whom kept me abreast of events in the region.
Four more debts of gratitude remain:
My legal team in California and Cape Town without whose efforts I would never have dreamed of enjoying freedom with loved ones again, let alone writing a novel. They are: Dayle Carlson, Mike Evans, Anton Katz, Gregor Guy-Smith, Stuart Hanlon and above all, Louis Freeman.
The late Farayi Munyuki and his family who introduced me to Zimbabwe, the Shona language, and the complexities of African liberation.
Those I met in prison who encouraged my writing: fellow convicts Freddy Trainor, Jose Razo-Bravo and Bryan Baldridge; my long-time cellmates Mike Harris and Bob Anderson who tolerated lights on late at night and papers floating throughout the cell; and my prison ‘boss’ Jody Kirch, one of the few caring educators in the world of ‘corrections’.
Lastly, I thank Umuzi Publishers, particularly Annari van der Merwe, Jeanne Hromnik and Frederik de Jager for taking a chance on this first-time novelist and for being willing to scale the prison walls to get the job done.
I offer We Are All Zimbabweans Now as a small giving back to all those who were there along the way. In prison we are down, but not out.
A luta continua.
James Kilgore
High Desert State Prison
California, usa
December 2007
Introduction
I spent most of the 1980s in Zimbabwe, a time of great hope. Thousands of people like myself and the protagonist in this novel, Ben Dabney, flocked to Zimbabwe in a spirit of solidarity. We wanted to lend whatever support we could to the government of the heroic Robert Mugabe and his party, the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU). Zimbabwe seemed a morality play for the ages. Mugabe and his forces, in conjunction with Joshua Nkomo and the fighters of the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU), had driven a racist white minority regime and its arch villain leader, Ian Smith, from power. Nearly a century of racial oppression had ended.
As Ben Dabney would put it, at that moment Mugabe appeared a combination of Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King, an almost saintly figure who had spent ten years in a colonial prison only to come into power preaching forgiveness of his oppressors.
Perhaps my clearest memories of those days are of the eager pupils I taught at Mabvuku High School, a cohort for whom education held future salvation. Jammed two or three to a desk, they sat wide-eyed, always pleading for more homework. “Can’t you come and give us extra lessons on Saturdays and during school vacations?” they’d ask. And they meant it. I could never provide enough material or assignments to quench their thirst for knowledge. They were convinced that once they completed their schooling, their own futures and that of the nation would be in their hands.
More than two decades later as I reflected on those times, the optimism of that period felt like a remote childhood memory. By the early 2000s Zimbabwe was descending into economic chaos. The once iconic Robert Mugabe had transformed into a megalomaniac, bent on retaining power by any means necessary. For the media, Zimbabwe, that beacon of our hopes, had become but another “African basket case.”
As I was reflecting on those times, I wrote a short poem, a remembrance of one of my Mabvuku students, which brought some of my feelings to the fore:
For Nikiwe
1984
A time of meat and bread
A bus to town for 16 cents
Nikiwe sat in the middle of the class
She sparkled
As she sharpened her tiny pencil with half an old razor blade
And solved her simultaneous linear equations
X was equal to three, y was four
No problem.
Today she can’t find x
There is no y
Pencils are no longer in the equation
The rich have eaten Zimbabwe
And left Nikiwe
Only a razor to swallow
As I wrote those lines I wanted to weep but also I wanted to understand, to unpack why Zimbabwe’s liberation unraveled and why so many of us solidarity-minded “expatriates” got so much of it wrong.
So I created this Ben Dabney character and began to explore 1980s Zimbabwe through his eyes. On one level We Are All Zimbabweans Now is a story about the rise and fall of a once heroic leader and the disillusionment of one of his followers. But Zimbabwe can tell us more. As we follow Ben Dabney through the streets of Harare and along the dusty rural roads to Kuzvitonga Cooperative and Vukani Secondary School, three critical aspects of the history of this time become apparent. The first is that Zimbabwe never fully escaped white supremacy. Though the whites had lost political power and their legal rights to superiority, they clung to their assets and their attitudes. This set in motion a buildup of justifiable racial resentment that Mugabe quite cleverly manipulated later on to serve his own ends.
The second is that amidst all our excitement about the advances Zimbabwe was making—new schools, new clinics, assistance to black farmers, equity for women—we refused to accept, let alone criticize, the faults of the new regime. Too often criticism was taken as siding with the enemy, whether it was Ian Smith, the still menacing apartheid state of South Africa, old imperialists like Cecil Rhodes, or new ones like Margaret Thatcher. As Ben Dabney would learn, in politics there are always many good reasons to justify doing the wrong thing.
Such sentiments were never more apparent than during the government’s military repression of the civilian population in the Matabeleland region. From 1982 to 1985, the security forces killed some twenty thousand people while the media, the citizens in other parts of the country, and most of the expatriate population kept quiet. The official pretext for the killings was that members of ZAPU had defected from allegiance to the new government and with South African support were seeking to overthrow Mugabe. On the one hand, this was a plausible claim. At that very time the apartheid state was visiting indiscriminate death and destruction on the neighboring countries of Mozambique, Namibia, and Angola. Yet the hard lesson was that plausible doesn’t always equate with true. Far too many supposedly well-meaning and progressive people like myself accepted the Zimbabwean government’s denial of wrongdoing in Matabeleland at face value. We heard the horror stories from friends and colleagues who witnessed the atrocities, but their tales were too unsettling to believe. We clung to our paradigm of triumph and liberation. We had many good reasons for doing the wrong thing.
Ben Dabney did a little bit better than most of us. Flawed character that he was, he still attempted to speak out and paid some price for it, though nothing like the terrible price paid by those thousands in Matabeleland.
The third aspect of Zimbabwe’s history that informed this novel is the role and definition of heroes. Coming from an American society where individualism and celebrity