I considered in my third essay how the act of writing itself is an important element in the maintenance of dignity for the imprisoned writer. Soyinka says that it saved his sanity. He also tells of how mathematics, a subject that he had detested at school, helped him to get through. "I found myself going back and recollecting those mathematical formulas, geometric and algebraic, which I'd loathed in school, and now reworking them, reinventing them, rediscovering them and finding a logic to them; even sometimes a beauty which I did not appreciate when I was in school." Clearly using the mind is essential if self-esteem and sanity are to be retained.

But knowing that the outside world is aware of your situation is also an important feature. Amnesty International, the organisation dedicated to fighting for the release of victims of tyrannical regimes, is built on a core belief that letters from its members help prisoners to retain a sense of self-worth and to believe in a positive future. Mapanje's poem 'To the Unknown Dutch Postcard-Sender (1988)' is a powerful testimony to the truth of this. The poem relates how a postcard from Holland, which "should not have arrived here," got through to him in Mikuyu Prison, and offered him hope:

'But however these colours slipped through
The sorters, your Groeten uit Holland,
My dear, has sent waves of hope and reason
To hang-on to the fetid walls of these
Cold cells; today the midnight centipedes
Shriller than howling hyenas will dissolve;
We will not feel those rats nibbling at
The rotting corns of our toes; and that
Midnight piss from those blotched lizards
Won't stink; and if that scorpion stings
Again tonight, the stampede in D4 will jump
In jubilation of our Groeten uit Holland.'

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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.