Includes bibliographical references (pages 114-121).

Africa and political incarceration -- Human rights and narratives of incarceration in the colonial Kenya -- Political incarceration and the postcolonial period in Kenya -- Chapter 1: A tale of two prison tales -- Who are the Babukusu? -- The Sela and Mwambu tale and incarceration -- Power dynamics and belly politics -- Gender prison and gender politics -- Songs as subversion -- The Waswahili people -- The Liyongo epic as a prison narrative -- The question of gender -- The I-pronoun, truth, and trauma -- Chapter 2: Articulating human rights violations in the pioneer prison memoir -- A martyr in the making -- The narrative imperative -- Torture as human rights violation -- The 'I' and the 'we' -- Truth claims -- Issues of style -- Chapter 3: The tenor and genre of Ngugi's prison narrative -- Narrator as harbinger of truth -- Torture and trauma -- Political manifesto and art manifesto -- Foreshortened history of oppression -- List of grievances -- Calling audience to action -- Chapter 4: Doing things with words in prison poetry -- The multiple is and speaking in tongues -- Why write? -- Swahili prosody and poetry as autobiography -- Resistance and truth -- Masking the message -- A range of miscellaneous voices -- The journey motif -- Voice of the unborn -- Chapter 5: The quest for the right to be human in prison poetry -- Where and why? -- Dissipation and disappearance of hope -- The female and parental selves -- Disavowal of ideology -- Trauma and tragedy -- Comparing Mazrui's and Abdalla's prison poetry.