A season of blood by Maina Wa Kinyatti

Description

Prison conditions in Kenya are extremely barbaric. Every morning at 5 o’clock, prisoners are ordered out of the cells stark naked for internal body searches. The prison guards order them to face the walls with their legs spread apart to examine their anuses for concealed weapons, money, cigarettes and other contraband articles.

The guards use sharp sticks to probe the prisoners’ rectums. After the skin-searches the prisoners, still naked, are ordered to squat in the hallway holding their ears with their fingers while the ruthless guards search the cells. When this search is complete, the guards begin insulting, beating and kicking the prisoners. The beatings and psychological assaults continue until prisoners are locked up in their cells for the night at 5 p.m.

The common-law prisoners are held in communal cells, and they are allowed books, pens, writing paper and “freedom” of movement between the cell blocks. The political prisoners are held together with the psychiatric prisoners or in a special security block, isolated from the main population. They are prohibited from having books, newspapers, pens or writing paper in theor cells unless these items are officially approved by the prison authorities. To write poems or a book, to be caught with a piece of paper, a pen or pencil, is a punishable offense. Furthermore, passing on information (oral or written) about prison conditions to the outside world is deemed to be in violation of prison regulations. One is severely punished. Even private conversation between a prisoner and his family on the subject is illegal. All prison-related issues are considered a matter of national security by the State.

Despite the brutal isolation and censorship, Maina wa Kinaytti made friends with a few prison guards who supplied him writing paper and pens and smuggled everything he wrote out of prison and took it to his wife.

Maina wa Kinyatti is a progressive Kenyan historian who was arrested in 1982 and imprisoned for six and a half years for his writing on the Mau Mau Movement. In 1983, he was adapted by Amnesty International as a prisoner of conscience.

Among his well-known publications are Thunder From The Moun-tains; Mau Mau Patriotic Songs (1980), Kenya’s Freedom Struggle (198) which has also been translated into Japanese, and Mau Mau: A Revoltuion Betrayed (1991). His forthcoming books include Mother Kenya: Letters From Prison, 1982-1988, Mwaki Utangihoreka: Rugano Rwa Kioho Wathanini Wa Moi and Kenya: A Prison Notebook.

Maina currently lives in exile in the United States. He is a professor of African and African-American history at Hunter College of the City University of New York. He has also taught at Bard College as a visiting projessor. At the time of his arrest, Maina was teaching at Kenyatta University in Kenya.