Ngugi wa Thiong'o's year of detention in Kenya has been described in previous issues of Index on Censorship (3/1978, 2/1979). So too have the attempts by lecturers and students at the University of Nairobi to ensure his reinstatement as Head of the Department of Literature (6/1979, 6/1980). In interviews since his release, one of which appeared in Index (3/1980), Ngugi has commented on his detention: what led to it, what resulted from it.

With the publication of Detained: A Writer's Prison Diary, full documentation is made available. Also, some of the contradictory consequences of Ngugi's detention become evident.

Detained records the exact circumstances of Ngugi's arrest; the nature of his detention; his attempts to present his case to the Detainees' Review Tribunal; conditions for prisoners at Kamiti Maximum Security Jail; how news of Kenyatta's death came through. Events and conditions in Kenya during 1977–8, at the end of the Jomo Kenyatta regime, are now past history. No political prisoners are currently in prison. Even the excesses of brutality during the first months of Ngugi's detention were, as he records, due to a particularly harsh Senior Superintendent of Prisons, and eased under his successor.

But Detained is not only a record of the past. The Prison Notes are preceded by Ngugi's account of his treatment since his release. He has met hostility from part of the local press; the question of his reinstatement has received blurred replies in Parliament, and evasive answers from the University authorities. The final section of Detained provides a fully-documented chronicle of Ngugi's own efforts, those of the Academic Staff Union (since banned), and of at least one MP, to effect his return. Being barred from his job at the University is the principal sense in which Ngugi's troubles continue. He is excluded from his key role in the formal educational structure of Kenya.

Is such exclusion finally of greater harm to Ngugi or to Kenya? Of good or harm to Ngugi and his work in Kenyan society? During his years as a lecturer at the University, Ngugi was a powerful, even a revolutionary force. In 1968 he led protests which caused the former English Department to be changed to the Department of Literature, with an Africa-centred syllabus of texts and critical approaches. In 1974, he spearheaded a Conference on the Teaching of Literature in Kenyan Schools, which sought to bring similar changes to the literature taught and the way it was taught throughout the school system. After many delays these changes are at last about to be implemented: thanks largely to the efforts of Ngugi's former colleague in the Department of Literature, Dr Micere Githæ Mugo, elected Dean of the Faculty of Arts in March 1980 after much controversy. The extent of Ngugi's influence on his colleagues and students cannot be overestimated. Evidence of his approach to literature, his concept of literature in society, appears in every aspect of Kenyan cultural and intellectual life: in the outlook of recently graduated teachers, in book reviews in the local press, in the choice of language for plays put on by schools and adults alike.

Partly as a result of his present exclusion, Ngugi is now proving a force at levels of Kenyan society other than those reached by the formal educational structure. He had begun such activities before his detention; his involvement with building a local community centre at Kamirithu, with an adult literacy programme, resulted in the Gikuyu play, Ngaahika Ndeenda - and this led to his detention. The spell in prison provided a chance to deepen and develop such activity. Ngugi was able systematically to trace the effect of ‘the culture of colonialism’ in Kenya's history, and the corresponding counter-assertion of the Kenyan people's culture.

When asked in a BBC interview, broadcast in January 1981, whether his prison experiences had radically altered his way of writing, Ngugi replied: ‘I think in a more basic sense, yes. In the sense that it was really in prison that I started writing a novel in Gikuyu, the first modern novel in Gikuyu language’. This novel, Caitaani Mutharaba-ini, was published in Nairobi in April 1980, and reprinted a month later. Ngugi's English translation of the novel will be published in London (Heinemann African Writers series) later this year with the title Devil on the Cross. Ngugi told an audience at the Africa Centre, London, during his visit in December 1980, of the excitement of this discovery of a new audience, of new communal ways in which books can be used, discoveries which, he said, ‘shattered all my previous assumptions about literature’. The extract from Detained which we reprint here is concerned with the writing of that novel in prison.

Detained records the consistent and courageous evolvement of a writer at work within society: a writer who - as Ngugi stressed in his Africa Centre talk - sees himself clearly as in turn a product and a reflector of the material world, and first and foremost a human being.

Free thoughts on toilet paper

Abstract