Surveillance, policing, and
political prisoners then and now:
an introduction to the prison world through freedom papers in 21st century Kenya
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| Former Mau Mau custodian, Maina wa Macharia, in his home archive holding a binder containing documents of his imprisonment in Manyani, Mackinon Rd., and Saiyusi Detention Camps. | NelsonMandela sewing clothes in Pretoria prison before being transferred to Robben Island, Long Walk to Freedom. |
Kenyan prison systems suffer from post-colonial effects in governmental surveillance, autocracy, and overall discrimination. These problems have rolled over into the twenty-first century, continuing to silences voices in the marginalized communities of Kenya today. According to the World Prison Brief database,[1][open endnotes in new window] the number of prisoners in Kenya has increased almost 300% since 1972 with silenced voices still prevalent within today’s prison population of over 58,800. While Kenyan prisoners have created spaces, or rather histories, of perseverance, mutual aid, and identity, these spaces are often destructively interfered with or further marginalized by the current police state that brought them into prison in the first place. Therefore, as an academic, I ask the questions:
- How has the current police state in Kenya affected the social and economic lives of Kenyans and Kenyan prisoners in Nairobi?
- How can we study and historicize the police state and its feature of prisons considering Kenya’s long-lived epistemological surveillance and policing?
- What methodologies are available to us and what new methodologies must we utilize?
To answer these questions, I will introduce a concept of the “prison world” to interpret archival history within the prison. My goal is to historicize the lives of police-targeted communities and prisoners through understanding their environment and interactions with police, guards, other prisoners, and the outside world. To borrow an idea from Historian Nidhi Mahajan, a prison is a world unto itself, a world within a world.[2] Within this world, the experiences and activism of today’s Kenyan prisoners, including political prisoners, has been expressed through freedom papers, which play a significant role in letting those outside hear their voices. Such freedom papers, in fact, include many things—memoirs, music, textiles, wood carvings, academic publications, and political manifestos. In them prisoners creatively reveal political and social awareness, while also advocating for social justice, feminism, LGBTQ+ activism, and freedom of expression.
Silences and oral histories in the archive
Silenced voices: Before delving into the case studies of political prisoners and their carceral experiences, I want to first elaborate on the prison itself and why it acts not only as an institution of power and has a longevity in its effects, but it also functions as an archive of silenced voices as well.
Silences, according to Haitian historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot, are often created in the process of historical archival production. In this process, facts are created from the primary sources and are then given authenticity only after deemed adequate enough to be incorporated within the archive.[3] Since facts are not equitably created in this process, silences that can be and should be considered facts, are overshadowed and deemed less significant than other sources.[4] As a result, as Congolese historian Jacques Depelchin argues,
“facts do not speak for themselves and silenced facts cannot speak for themselves.”[5]
Therefore, in order for silenced voices to be recovered or at least acknowledged, they must be understood historically to the greatest extent that we can, no matter how many inaccuracies might exist in our recuperation of these facts. For example, prisoners are often disregarded in history because of their presumably hyperbolized testimonies. From their telling of torture to describing their uncomfortable spaces and endangering encounters within prison walls, what they say can be perceived as untruthful or inaccurate. However, this is how silences are created. In order for the oppressed to be unsilenced, their “inaccuracies” must also be granted validity and reliability. As historian Luise White[6] diligently puts it,
“the inaccuracy in these stories make them exceptionally reliable historical sources… they offer historians a way to see the world the way the storytellers did, as a world of vulnerability and unreasonable relationships.”[7]
History itself is a culmination of ever-changing stories and testimonies; it is always interpreted and will continue to be interpreted anew as more sources become present in the archive. This speaks both to a useful practice of sometimes valuing quantity over quality, and understand how quantity aids in making quality judgments. In this case, because prison accounts are minimal in the archive, their quality as a reliable source is underestimated and underappreciated. In regards to African history as well as African prison history, voices are often silenced in the archive when history and its quality are solely developed upon the quantity of writings. This kind of prioritization especially occurs when an overall collection of writings is accumulated and organized by the archivists. Of course, once again we see the archive as an example of hegemonic power, a power that is produced and continues to structure sources in the archive. Oral history may, in this context, become a special passage for voice to remain alive and heard.
Oral histories: Oral tradition is one of the defining features of African history; however, acquiring the skill to utilize that tradition in its rawest form and produce an oral history is not an easy feat. Many modern historians depend on critically acclaimed written sources, which are both abundant and easy to access. But when they encounter oral tradition, a challenge ensues. According to anthropologist Jan Vansina, oral tradition is full of spoken words that breathe and exist inside time. In order to comprehend the fullness of these vivacious words and their meanings, historians will have to first slow down and reevaluate their methodologies.[8] I do not wish to demean or exclude the use of written sources. On the contrary, many oral traditions themselves utilize written data, archeological material, ethnography, and scientific methods to prove the credibility of spoken words.[9] More simply, I ask modern historians to really hear oral tradition and to take it more seriously, especially when oral histories of prisoner experiences have much to teach about cultural practices. In particular, in the context of Fort Jesus[10] (Kenya’s first modern prison), its oral histories have now become oral tradition, or stories passed down by generation and told by the walimu[11] of Mombasa. When oral tradition is taken into account alongside written sources, a fuller history can be written, engaged with, and brought to life.
How to navigate prison studies
Freedom papers: Because the history of Kenyan prisons is limited in scholarship, I have turned to what I call “freedom papers.” This concept is defined as the prisoner’s form of writing that unlocks their spatial entitlement to communication, awareness, and individuality within the prison system.[12] Inspired by political prisoners Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʼo, Maina wa Kinyatti, and Nelson Mandela, freedom papers originated from writing and drawing on toilet paper. According to Thiong’o in his autobiography Detained: A writer’s prison diary, for any Kenyan political prisoner, whether incarcerated in the colonial or postcolonial period, writing was their main voice in prison. He argued,
“paper, any paper, is about the most precious article for a political prisoner… These prisoners have mostly written on toilet paper.”[13]
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Right: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o at the Index office during his visit to London, December 1980, Sage Journals. Above: Detained: A writer's prison diary by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. |
Interestingly enough, toilet paper was and currently is often conveniently accessible to political prisoners. Inspired by political prisoners Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʼo, Maina wa Kinyatti, and Nelson Mandela, freedom papers originated from toilet paper as it became more than just a supply for hygiene, but a tool for writing with expression and resilience. It became… a freedom paper. Now, although that be its origin and inspiration, toilet paper is just one example of the tools used to create freedom papers—it does not delimit freedom papers. In fact, freedom papers are prisoners’ form of writing for self-expression on any platform and material used for writing. And such activity can even be expressed through oral sources, objects, and spaces. For example, an oral history, in the context of prison studies, can be studied as freedom paper and can be utilized to uncover realisms and fallacies about the prison system. I found that freedom papers of Kenyan prisoners included oral histories and musical rhythms, using self-expression for defiance, feminism, and mobilization. The voices here were strong and unsilenced. No matter how much torture prisoners endured, the power of voice through words, actions, and writing permitted their minds to prevail. Additionally, these freedom papers help reveal the realities of prisons and the society that surrounds them. I believe that the only way prisons and prisoner experiences can be fully analyzed and realized is through utilizing the primary sources of freedom papers.
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| Maina wa Kinyatti arrested and charged with possession of seditious literature, front cover of Kenya: A Prison Notebook. | A Season of Blood: Poems from Kenyan Prisons by Maina wa Kinyatti. |
Above: Jomo Kenyatta guarded by British (with white guard’s face blotted out), Getty Images. [Click here to see large]. Right: Suffering Without Bitterness: The Founding of the Kenyan Nation by Jomo Kenyatta. |
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The prison world: The concept of freedom papers also alludes to what I am currently developing about the “prison world.” The prison world I refer to is not only a place, but it is also as an archive in itself that can be unveiled through the freedom papers of political prisoners and other prisoners. To define the first part of this concept, I want to return to historian Mahajan and her idea of the ship being a world unto itself. Through her method of archipelagic ethnographies, she argues that dhows (a wooden sailing vessel) docked in ports are not merely static pieces of floating material, but they are rather mobile productions of memories and histories interconnected by spaces and temporalities across the Indian Ocean.[14] She adds that archipelagoes hold the same characteristics as the dhow since they establish a moving space through its geography and social interactions. She argues:
“In tracing relationality, archipelagic thinking provides an apt ground for imagining multi-sitedness where relationality is centered, where the place is not lost in the relational scale but, in fact, made through relations with other spaces and places. This relationality is formed not only through networks of trade, or the movement of people, but also through social interactions, traces of past movements, and mnemonic traces.”[15]
An island can thus be just as mobile as a dhow, whether it is setting sail across the sea or stationed in its port. With this in mind, let us turn to islands that were once considered prisons. Historically, islands made great geographical locations for imprisoning war criminals, undesirables, and dissidents. From the British overseas territory of St. Helena to Robben Island offshore from Cape Town, South Africa to Alcatraz in San Francisco, California, these islands were home to some of the most infamous maximum-security prisons that held political prisoners such as Nelson Mandela and tyrannical figures such as Napoleon Bonaparte. Even the continent of Australia was used as a penal colony from the end of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century for keeping the majority of Britain’s convicts. Each island and colony carried out its own carceral laws and procedures; they were each their own prison world.
The prison island of Ustica, where Antonio Gramsci was imprisoned and famously wrote Prison Notebooks, is another great example of a world unto itself. I argue that Gramsci’s accounts can be considered both an archipelagic ethnography and a freedom paper. Based on his experiences as a political prisoner, the island of Ustica was not only “so finely-wrought a file” with its high surveillance, censorship, and torture, but it was also a space for intellectual thought, self-awareness, and perseverance, which at times, felt unreal.[16] Gramsci’s imprisonment lasted eleven years, and his cell became his new world until his death in 1937. His life-in-prison on an island exemplifies how a prison, just like the dhow, is a specific place, or a world, that is both existent and nonexistent since prisoners were incarcerated for large spans of time, spending their life temporarily or permanently behind steel bars, fenced gates, and concrete walls. And these break all ties with the nation that built, facilitated, and controls them. These conditions are the same for the prisoners of any modern prison, earlier under colonial occupation and later under autocratic regimes. However, accompanying the power of the governmental sword also comes the power of the imprisoned pen.
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Left: Portrait of Antonio Gramsci, 1920.. |
