Eldred Durosimi Jones describes the "unnecessary cruelty and viciousness of the conditions of Soyinka's... imprisonment, much of it in solitary confinement, deprived of books, both his mental and his bodily health massively assaulted ." Yet he emphasises that in writing about his prison experiences in The Man Died (1973), Soyinka is "concerned to put this in perspective against the backdrop of a larger evil" and to regard his own case as "an item, albeit a prominent one, in a catalogue."

Clearly writing is a vital tool for Soyinka in his fight against tyrannical brutality. In his introduction to Prisonnettes, (in 1972's A Shuttle in the Crypt) he explains how he managed to continue to create poems during his imprisonment:

'The form was quite arbitrary, something short enough and as self-containing as possible to remain in the head until, at night-time or in a slack moment of surveillance I could transfer it to the inside of a cigarette packet or an equally precious scrap of salvage.'

These poems obviously helped Soyinka to resist the mental assault of his imprisonment, and in particular those he refers to as 'the "cursifying" or letting-out-rage genre, of whose efficacy let no man stand in doubt', and those he calls the 'Animystic spells', which "induced a state of self-hypnosis (by constant repetition, accompanied by a mental pacing of the images.)" Soyinka says that both rage and hypnosis were a necessary counter to each other, since during imprisonment "it is easy to be self-destructively violent (internally)" and equally easy "to be self-destructively quiescent and forgiving."

A number of African writers imprisoned by tyrannical regimes have stated the absolute necessity of finding a way to write. For example, in his prison diary Detained, the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o describes writing a novel on toilet paper during his imprisonment without trial in Kamiti Maximum Security Prison. (This is the novel that appeared in 1981 in an English translation as Devil on the Cross):

'Toilet-paper: when in the sixties I first read in Kwame Nkrumah's autobiography, Ghana, how he used to hoard toilet-paper in his cell at James Fort Prison to write on, I thought it was romantic and a little unreal despite the photographic evidence reproduced in the book. Writing on toilet-paper?

Now, I know: paper, any paper, is about the most precious article for a political prisoner, more so for one like me, who was in political detention because of his writing.'

    next > Page 1 of 3

Content last updated: 07/07/2004

About the author

Lynda Morgan completed her Ph.D thesis on South African settler fiction at the School of Oriental and African Studies (the University of London), and her main literary interests continue to be in African literature and colonial/postcolonial studies. She publishes papers in these areas, and regularly contributes to national and international conferences. In August she will deliver a paper on South African and Australian settler fiction at the ICLA Congress in Hong Kong. She is also a published poet.

Comments