Why so many find creative muse in prison

By ANTONY GITONGA

Many inmates have found their muse in prison, and created compelling readings.

The departed Naivasha businessman Fai Amario, who served several years in jail, wrote the Kamiti Notebook while awaiting judgement there.

John Kigia Kimani wrote about the drudgery of prison life in Prison is Not a Holiday Camp, while John Kiriamiti found commercial success in his autobiographical My Life in Crime and its sequel, My Life After Crime, all inspired by his criminal activities and subsequent jailing.

More recently, Judith Akinyi wrote The Deadly Moneymaker under the penname, Saga McOdongo, while serving time at the Lang’ata Women’s Prison.

The former lecturer at the Kenya Polytechnic was serving nine years for drug trafficking, and dedicated her book to exposing the underworld.

Paroled ahead of time, Akinyi was released on presidential amnesty. But in April this year, she was arrested in Rome after she was found unconscious in one of the city’s backstreets.

She had swallowed narcotics that burst in her belly.

Others prison writers include Benjamin Garth Bundeh’s Birds of Kamiti, where the former journalist had been consigned on murder charges that were later cleared.

The departed journalist and satirist Wahome Mutahi’s Three Days on the Cross chronicled Nyayo House torture and subsequent jailing on trumped up charges, as does Maina Kinyatti’s poetry collection composed in prison, Season of Blood

Detention without trial

The most famous of these prison memoirs is Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Detained that he composed in Kamiti, as well as the novel, Devil on The Cross, when he was detained without trial for over a year.

Although he was ultimately released due to international pressure (Amnesty International adopted him as a prisoner of conscience in 1979), his detention was never explained by authorities.

However, there is general consensus that his troubles may have stemmed from his dalliance with community theatre in his home village of Kamiirithu in Limuru.