Narrating Prison Experience: Human Rights, Self, Society, and Political Incarceration in Africa

Contents:Africa and political incarceration --Human rights and narratives of incarceration in the colonial Kenya --Political incarceration and the postcolonial period in Kenya --Chapter 1: A tale of two prison tales --Who are the Babukusu? --The Sela and Mwambu tale and incarceration --Power dynamics and belly politics --Gender prison and gender politics --Songs as subversion --The Waswahili people --The Liyongo epic as a prison narrative --The question of gender --The I-pronoun, truth, and trauma --Chapter 2: Articulating human rights violations in the pioneer prison memoir --A martyr in the making --The narrative imperative --Torture as human rights violation --The 'I' and the 'we' --Truth claims --Issues of style --Chapter 3: The tenor and genre of Ngugi's prison narrative --Narrator as harbinger of truth --Torture and trauma --Political manifesto and art manifesto --Foreshortened history of oppression --List of grievances --Calling audience to action --Chapter 4: Doing things with words in prison poetry --The multiple is and speaking in tongues --Why write? --Swahili prosody and poetry as autobiography --Resistance and truth --Masking the message --A range of miscellaneous voices --The journey motif --Voice of the unborn --Chapter 5: The quest for the right to be human in prison poetry --Where and why? --Dissipation and disappearance of hope --The female and parental selves --Disavowal of ideology --Trauma and tragedy --Comparing Mazrui's and Abdalla's prison poetry.