James Kilgore

James William Kilgore (born July 30, 1947) was a student activist at UC Santa Barbara in the 1960s who later became involved with the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). After the arrest of the core SLA members in 1975, Kilgore went underground for 27 years. He lived most of that time in Southern Africa. During his time on the run, Kilgore rejected the politics of 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. He was arrested in Cape Town, South Africa, in November 2002, extradited to the United States and subsequently served six and a half years in prison in California. During his incarceration he wrote several novels. The first of these, We Are All Zimbabweans Now, was published a month after his release in 2009 by Umuzi Publishers of Cape Town. He now lives in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, and teaches at the Center for African Studies. In 2015, he published a non-fiction book, Understanding Mass Incarceration: A Peoples Guide to the Key Civil Rights Struggle of Our Time.

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