Chained letters: African prison diaries and 'national allegory'

Abstract

Books and all forms of writing have always been objects of terror to those who seek to suppress truth, writes Wole Soyinka in the Preface to The Man Died (8). Out of the discourses of African colonialism and neocolonialism arises the prison diary, which allegorizes the structuring of national histories. It is one of the encoding genres of certain African literatures and of some neocolonial African nation states. The colonial prison was the school for national leaders from Kwame Nkrumah and Kenneth Kaunda to Jomo