This extraordinary story portrays the historical roots of the service delivery revolts that have swept South Africa in recent years. 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 a loving wife and mother of his children who now 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 and sometimes humorously drawn, Monwabisi and a host of other intriguing and compelling characters pull us into the moral and economic dilemmas of street level organization and force us to confront the complexity of democracy in our country.

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. The idea for this book emerged from his observation that as a prisoner in the U.S. he enjoyed unlimited access to free water, something which remained out of the reach for so many people in South Africa. 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 and Prudence Couldn't Swim.