Mau Mau Author in Detention: The Subversive ‘We’ in a Colonial Era Detention Diary

ABSTRACT

In seeking an answer to the question as to why Kenyan author Gakaara wa Wanjau penned Mau Mau Author in Detention, we may consider the fact that he wrote other works as well — before, during, and after his detention. The facticity of his authorship is foregrounded in the title. In other words, Wanjau did what writers do, what was natural for him to do, in prison and outside: write. Yet to say he wrote the diary because he was a writer is a rather facile explanation of the impetus for writing it. Although his prior experience in writing would have been to his advantage in lightening the challenge of writing, he was writing in a detention context, where writing itself constituted defiance of the colonial dispensation. Thus, his diary-writing was clandestine because it was pestilential, replete with risk and danger. In attempting to account for his motivation for writing, one is bound to encounter a curious contest between the individualised ‘I’ and the collectivised ‘we’ as well as subversion of the conventions of diary as a Western literary genre.

KEYWORDS:

• diary
• I
• we
• incarceration
• detention
• colonial rule
• community
• self
• Mau Mau
• subversion

Notes

1. The translation from Gakaara wa Wanjau’s Gikuyu original Mwandı̃ki wa Mau Mau ithaamı̃rio-inı̃ to English was undertaken by Ngigi Njoroge.