Freedom Never Rests is the much-awaited second novel from James Kilgore. It is an extraordinary novel which portrays the historical roots of the service delivery revolts that have swept South Africa in recent years. With a precise and at times humorous eye for the details of backroom politics and street-level organisation, Freedom Never Rests centres around an engaging and tragic couple: unemployed ex-shop steward revolutionary Monwabisi Radebe and his wife, Constantia, a former nursery school aide turned local councillor in the fictional Eastern Cape township of Sivuyile. Their relationship is a metaphor for the new democratic order. As the council implements an American-financed project of prepaid meters, water cut-offs are visited upon dozens of households in Sivuyile. The idealistic Monwabisi faces the most difficult of choices: to remain loyal to his wife, the mother of his children, who represents an increasingly discredited council, or take to the streets with disenchanted residents. Avoiding simplistic analyses and triumphant rhetoric,
Freedom Never Rests lays bare the political and personal
intricacies of community struggles. On a grand political canvas artfully drawn, Monwabisi and a host of other intriguing and compelling characters pull us into their moral and economic dilemmas and force us to confront the complexity of democracy in our country through a sensitive and insightful lens.
The author, James Kilgore, lived as a fugitive in South Africa from 1991 to 2002 under the name John Pape. He was an educator, researcher and activist. In 2002, authorities extradited him to the United States where he served six and a half years in prison for political offenses committed in the 1970s. Kilgore currently lives in the U.S. where he is a research scholar at the Centre for African Studies at the University of Illinois. He is the author of We Are All Zimbabweans Now, described by the Natal Witness as one of the “three best reads� of 2009. "This exciting read is true to life in countless ways, with 'water the new oil', with class apartheid smothering South African democracy, and with a world-leading protest rate now the logical outcome. If you want to understand the new grassroots politics here, I can't think of a better introduction than Freedom Never Rests." – Patrick Bond, Director of the University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society
freedom never rests cover.indd 1
9 781431 401192
ISBN 978-1-4314-0119-2 www.jacana.co.za
2011/08/15 9:54 AM