Hostile Witnesses and Queer Life in Kenyan Prison Writing

Abstract

This article explores three Kenyan political prison narratives, J. M. Kariuki's Mau Mau Detainee (1963), Ngugi wa Thiong'o’s Detained: A Writer's Prison Diary (1981), and Maina wa Kĩnyatti's Kenya: A Prison Notebook (2009), as archives of anxious disputes over alternative sexual intimacies in Kenya at the very moment in which politicians formulated visions for a future after colonization. Situating prison writing within emerging queer historicisms, the author argues that since representations of homosexuality have frequently emerged through denial or negative exemplification, the task is to examine the functions of such denial and negativity within the gender politics of political struggle. The debates over homosexuality in these narratives preserve intra-African conversations, which readers now revisit in the context of demands for political recognition and transformations in cultural representation of alternative sexualities.

Keywords:

• Queer
• prison homosexuality
• anti-colonialism
• Ngugi wa Thiong'o
• sexual freedoms
• sexual commons