The Malawian poet, Jack Mapanje, who was held in Mikuyu Prison, also speaks of this imperative to write. Now resident in the North of England, in York, Mapanje regularly gave poetry readings at Open University Summer Schools held there for the course Literature in the Modern World. I vividly remember him amusing a delighted audience of OU students with his tale of the benefits of having African hair: it is apparently very useful to hide a pencil in!

Continuing to find ways to write clearly helps the writer to resist the appropriation of part of the Self that Soyinka referred to in his first lecture. In Detained, Ngũgĩ quotes a poem by the South African poet Dennis Brutus, who was imprisoned on Robben Island. The poem makes a powerful statement about the imperative to write in order to resist the collapse of the self:

'A flicker, pulse, mere vital hint
which speaks of the stubborn will
the grim assertion of some sense of worth
in the teeth of the wind
on a stony beach, or among rocks
where the brute hammers fall unceasingly
on the mind.'

But writing is not just about maintaining self-esteem. It is also about finding ways of continuing to speak out against tyranny, and about bearing witness to atrocity so that tyrannical regimes cannot maintain secrecy about their brutalities. Using his characteristic irony, Soyinka says that the Prisonettes "are dedicated to all who participated in the two-year experiment on how to break down the human mind." Ngũgĩ describes the urge to write as:

'Picking the jagged bits embedded in my mind,
Partly to wrench some ease for my own mind,
And partly that some world sometime may know.'

This, he says, is "almost irresistible to a political prisoner."

That writers should use words to resist and protest is hardly surprising, since it is usually because of words that they have been imprisoned. Ngũgĩ describes what led to his own detention:

'I am told ... that some time in December 1977, two gentlemen very highly placed in the government flew to Mombasa and demanded an urgent audience with Jomo Kenyatta. They each held a copy of 'Petals of Blood' in one hand, and in the other, a copy of Ngaahika Ndeenda. The audience granted, they then proceeded to read him, out of context of course, passages and lines and words allegedly subversive as evidence of highly suspicious intentions. The only way to thwart those intentions - whatever they were - was to detain him who harboured such dangerous intentions, they pleaded. Some others had sought outright and permanent silencing, in the manner of J.M. Kari u ki, but on second thoughts this was quashed for "national stability". And so to detention I was sent!'

Such events leave us in no doubt as to the power of the pen, and the threat it poses to those who are engaged in the destruction of justice. But of course words can be used just as readily to promote tyranny as to resist it. In one of his Prisonettes Soyinka, by taking on the voice of his captors, and through ironic play on the idea of a writer's poetic licence, deftly satirises the manner in which tyrannical regimes distort truth:

'Confession
Fiction? Is truth not essence
Of Art, and fiction Art?
Lest it rust
We kindly borrowed his poetic licence.'

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