(James Kilgore lived in South Africa from 1991-2002. During that time he was a fugitive from U.S....

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(James Kilgore lived in South Africa from 1991-2002. During that time he was a fugitive from U.S. justice living under the pseudonym " John Pape ". He worked as an educator and researcher for unions and social movements. In 2002 he was arrested on the streets of Cape Town, then extradited to the U.S. where he served six and a half years in prison. In July 2012 he returned to South Africa for the first time since his arrest. Here he presents his reflections on the journey.) My connections to the " land of Mandela " and his African National Congress (ANC) sustained me during my years of incarceration. Part of it was maintaining the links to my wife Terri and our two sons who still lived there. But it was more than that. While the democratic South Africa may not lived up to our expectations, the flow of letters, postcards, books and pictures from Cape Town and Johannesburg was a constant and much needed reminder that the entire planet did not function with the misanthropy and racial hatred of a California state prison. A better world was possible. Once I paroled in 2009, I was determined to go back for a visit. It took me two years to get a passport. Then the South African government declared me an " undesirable immigrant " because I had lived there under a false name. A mini-campaign by my friends and lawyer convinced the Minister of Home Affairs that I was a desirable after all. Once I had the green light, I wasn't quite sure what South Africa would hold for me. Would it feel like the wonderful, comforting, engaging and complicated home that it once was? Would I have anything to talk about with old friends and comrades? They, after all, had been carrying on with their normal lives during the intervening period. They hadn't climbed up onto a steel bunk every night and wondered if they would ever see life again outside a concrete box. They had been drinking their Rooibos tea, eating samoosas and pap, taking their kids to school and watching them grow up. We had travelled down very different paths. Even Terri, who would be coming with me and had spent five years there with our children after my arrest, wasn't sure how this visit would all turn out. The travel itself went smoothly. I wasn't on any hit lists, didn't get pulled into any dark rooms by men in suits and sunglasses asking who I was visiting or if I planned to return to the United States. Laura and Rick, our most stalwart friends were waiting at the airport. We shared hugs, smiles, laughter, followed by the tedium of retrieving bags, getting a sim card for the cellphone. As we headed down the freeway toward Cape Town, everything looked at once totally familiar and foreign. The shacks were still there, by their thousands. At least they hadn't built walls to hide them. I began to recall that part of the psyche of South Africa is living with the intensity of the contradictions. Poverty is in your face, even in the suburbs. At every traffic light, around every corner someone lurks, flaunting their desperation-selling combs and sculptures that no one really wants, slapping water on your windshield before you have time to tell them not to bother, diving into a dumpster to sort through the day's pickings. Then there is the ample cohort of " tsotsis " ready to simply jump on you and implement their own vision of democracy. Unlike the U.S., South Africa has not yet perfected the art of tucking poverty away so thoroughly.