'Likeable' Kilgore an outspoken leftist

Published Nov 11, 2002

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One of America's most elusive fugitives, James Kilgore, took delivery on Sunday of a razor and a spare shirt.

But included in the two Pick 'n Pay bags brought by his distraught wife were also a pile of books and a foolscap writing pad.

For it was no ordinary thug behind bars in Bellville on Sunday night.

This was a man of whom Tony Ehrenreich, Western Cape Cosatu leader, told the Cape Argus: "Dr John Pape is an important activist who made a huge contribution towards the workers' struggle in South Africa."

The man wanted for an alleged reign of terror in California 27 years ago has become a leading light in his adopted country's left-wing labour community.

Pape is the co-director of the International Labour Resource and Information Group at the University of Cape Town.

But until Friday, Kilgore was all but incognito. Instead, under his new Pape alias, he has been described as an outspoken champion of the poor.

His arrest comes just months after he and a co-author launched an influential new book.

Cost Recovery And The Crisis of Service Delivery In South Africa is a damning indictment of how the government's insistence on balancing the national budget is allegedly making the poor suffer - a view held by Cosatu and the SA Communist Party.

The book's publishers, the Human Sciences Research Council, describe it as "a groundbreaking publication, providing a theoretical and empirical view of the dramatic shift from welfare municipalism to a neoliberal vision of balanced budgets and fiscal restraint".

The book is the last of a string of publications under the Pape name and it was featured recently during prime time on SABC's SAfm radio.

The author's note on his latest book reads: "He has written widely on economic and political issues, including local government and service delivery. Pape has also produced a number of publications on issues such as globalisation, economic policy, privatisation, gender and labour history."

And Pape has not restricted himself to the world of academia. Instead of keeping his head down, he has been a regular contributor to newspaper letters pages.

Writing in the Mail & Guardian recently, Pape attracted passionate responses for his damning of Zimbabwe's white commercial farmers.

Offering more clues into his secret past 27 years, he wrote: "I find it an extraordinary turn of history when Rhodesian farmers receive international sympathy. As someone who lived in Zimbabwe through most of the 1980s, I can say with certainty that most white commercial farmers showed little compassion for farmworkers and contested at virtually every turn the efforts to redistribute land."

But, writing jointly with his wife Terri Barnes, a respected researcher, he accused Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe of "turning the war veterans, once a voice of progressive reform, into a reactionary vigilante force by buying them off".

And Pape insisted on drawing a distinction between "genuine war veterans" and the "present brigade of impostors".

Pape was also outspoken on the education system, deriding the matric exam as producing citizens who were "compliant, narrow-minded and promoters of Eurocentric traditions". He said the exam should be scrapped.

Ehrenreich and others described Kilgore as "sincere and very likeable" - a man who had given his life to improving the lot of workers.

Part of this had been a prolific critique of the Western economic model, while the other side of his activism involved nurturing South Africa's trade unions and running workers' educational programmes.

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