notes from fallow

a prison bibliography (for MK)

The grandfather for whom I’m named was imprisoned by the colonial government for 7-8 years. My mother ensured I knew about his imprisonment. Based on historical narratives, it’s very likely that he was tortured while imprisoned. I wonder if he ever disclosed what happened to him or if it remained part of the unspoken, not from shame, but because freedom provided a space where repair was possible, and declining to recount harm may have been part of that repair. I open this way to refuse the shame that attaches to the disclosure that one’s intimates have been or are imprisoned.¹ I also open this way to try to map how prisons became part of my political vernaculars, as spaces and practices to think with. I am not a scholar of African prisons, but I am curious. Let’s call this a caveat for the random assortment of texts I offer here.

I had read Maina wa Kinyatti’s Kenya: A Prison Diary and I knew Dennis Brutus’s Letters to Martha and in thinking about Kenyatta I read J.M. Kariuki’s Mau Mau Detainee. Across all three, I noticed the authors distinguished between political prisoners and criminal prisoners; among the criminal prisoners, the worst examples were the homosexual prisoners.

For some authors, the crime of the homosexual prisoners was that they violated others, either through force or seduction. Other homosexual prisoners were detestable because they were feminine or had allowed themselves to be feminized. Whether as aggressors or seducers, homosexual prisoners lacked the capacity to be political prisoners. In an important way, the homosexual prisoner was the antithesis of the political prisoner.

Based on those examples, I tried to track the figure of the homosexual prisoner across African writing, and came up with a partial bibliography of African prison writing.

Another caveat. Prior to colonial modernity, African societies did not have prisons.²

Prisons in Africa develop from two main sites of confinement: (i) military forts established by colonial forces to secure trading rights and often used to detain and punish resisting Africans and (ii) fortresses whose main purpose was to hold enslaved Africans prior to transportation. Often, forts served multiple purposes, but I think the distinction is useful. We cannot think about the history of prisons in Africa without considering slavery and colonialism. Needless to say, a true anticolonial politics must also be anticarceral.

In ways I cannot map yet, carcerality shapes African geographies. Across settler colonial spaces, Africans were pushed into “reserves,” as their land was stolen; African workforces were pushed into slums to provide an exploited workforce for colonial employers and the post-independence professional class; detention camps were established across anticolonial Africa to restrain armed and resisting Africans; and work villages—places of forced labour—were also a key part of anticolonial Africa.

If we account for the slum, the work village, the reserves, and similar sites of confinement, and how these sites are modified in the present, then we must revise the relatively low number of imprisoned Africans in official statistics.³

We must not think of prisons as the dominant forms of carcerality in Africa.

Still, we must start somewhere.

Here are works I’ve found useful to think with. And many which I have not read, but found while researching.⁴

Also, a quick note to say that most of what I’ve found is writing by and about men. Certain practices of confinement (the prison, the detention camp, the torture chambers) focused on men while others (the work village, the reserve, the slum) are dominated by women. I believe there’s scholarship that builds conceptual bridges between these gendered and gendering practices of confinement, but I’m not familiar with it. If you are, please mention in the comments.

Please feel free to add more resources in the comments. (I’ve left out fiction.)

Poetry

• Dennis Brutus, Letters to Martha

• Jack Mapanje, The Chattering Wagtails of Mikuyu Prison

• Wole Soyinka, A Shuttle in the Crypt

• Okot p’Bitek, Song of Prisoner

• Jeremy Cronin, Inside

• Mongane Wally Serote, No Baby Must Weep

• Stella Nyanzi, No Roses from My Mouth

Non-fiction

• Ruth First, 117 Days

• Ellen Kuzwayo, Call Me Woman

• Wambui Otieno, Mau Mau’s Daughter

• Fatima Meer, Prison Diary: One Hundred and Thirteen Days

• Jean Middleton, Convictions: A Woman Political Prisoner Remembers

• Emma Mashinini, Strikes Have Followed Me All My Life

• Barbara Schreiner, A Snake with Ice Water: Prison Writings by South African Women

• J.M. Kariuki, Mau Mau Detainee

• Maina wa Kinyatta, Kenya: A Prison Diary

• Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Detained

• Kenneth Kaunda, Zambia Will be Free

• Wole Soyinka, The Man Died

• Ken Saro-Wiwa, A Month and a Day

• Citizens for Justice, We Lived to Tell: The Nyayo House Story

• S. Abdi Sheikh, Blood on the Runway: The Wagalla Massacre of 1984

• Jonny Steinberg, Nongoloza’s Children

• Jack Mapanje, editor, Gathering Seaweed: African Prison Writing

Academic Stuff

• Barbara Harlow, Barred: Women, Writing, and Political Detention

• Florence Bernault, editor, History of Prison and Confinement in Africa

• Jeremy Sarkin, editor, Human Rights in African Prisons

• Isaac Ndlovu, An Examination of Prison, Criminality, and Power in Selected Contemporary Kenyan and South African Narratives (dissertation)

• Frank Dikötter and Ian Brown, editors, Cultures of Confinement: A History of the Prison in Africa, Asia, and Latin America

• Marie Morelle et al., Confinement, Punishment, and Prisons in Africa

1. Within African histories, this shame is managed by distinguishing between political prisoners and criminal prisoners. The former group inspire pride while the latter create shame. Given that colonial laws were explicitly designed to criminalize African practices, I find the distinction between political and criminal disingenuous. Too, it must be said that shame attaches to class: as one born into the professional class, I am supposed to distance myself from the kind of criminality that leads to imprisonment, as opposed to the other kind of criminality that impoverishes Kenyans. More to be said, but not now.

2. In future work, I hope to draw on African justice practices to think with abolition work today.

3. Kenyan students have long described boarding schools as prisons. Given that some boarding schools were former detention camps used to hold anticolonial fighters, the comparison is more than apt. For more on boarding schools and their prison genealogies, see Lutivini Majanja.

4. The South African bibliography is large, and I’ve excluded most of it, as it’s easy to track. Also, linguistic constraints mean that Arabic, French, and Portuguese sources are absent, as are those in Kiswahili and other African languages.