Maina wa Kinyatti

Maina wa Kinyatti is a Kenyan Marxist historian and former political prisoner under Daniel arap Moi's dictatorship. He is considered the foremost researcher on the Mau Mau in Kenya, one of the primary reasons that Kinyatti was arrested and imprisoned.After being released from prison on 17 October 1988 (after serving six and a half years, mostly in solitary confinement), he fled the country to Tanzania, fearing a re-arrest by Moi's government. After a month in Dar es Salaam, Kinyatti was forced to apply for political asylum in the US.Kinyatti was awarded the PEN Freedom to Write Award in 1988. Quotes The conditions that prisoners in Kenya endure are extremely barbaric. Every morning at 5 a.m., male prisoners are ordered out of the cells stark naked for internal body searches. The guards search their mouths and armpits, ears and nostrils. They pull, twist and squeeze their genitals. They order the prisoners to face the walls with their legs spread apart to examine their anuses for concealed weapons, money and other contraband. They use sharp sticks to probe the prisoner's rectums. In a sense, the guards are more interested in prisoners' buttocks than in the search. They make sexual remarks such as, "Look at this one, his buttocks are two mountains, it is difficult to mount him...and look at this one, his arsehole is sharped like a woman's vagina...This one has a soft arse like his mother..." After the brutal searches, the prisoners are beaten and kicked. These monstrous acts are repeated every morning. It is a humiliating and degrading. A SEASON OF BLOOD- Poems By Maina wa Kinyatti A Prison Notebook has inspired generations and proved a great resource and a handbook in political education in Kenya and beyond. It chronicles Maina Wa Kinyatti’s arrest and detention by the Moi regime and powerfully captures Kenya’s history. Maina wa Kinyatti was then a university professor and foremost researcher on the Mau Mau (Kenya Land and Freedom Army), the liberation movement that engaged the British colonialists in the armed struggle for land and freedom. In 1982, he was arrested by state agents for ‘possession of seditious material’ and detained by the Moi regime. Maina wrote Kenya: A Prison Notebook over the course of the next six and half years he spent in detention – mostly in solitary confinement. Maina’s work and writing remain a constant and painful reminder that the objectives of the freedom struggle the Mau Mau engaged in are yet to be achieved. Kenya is a neo-colonial state. Her economy is in the hands of global capital and imperialism, while constitutionally guaranteed rights and freedoms are everyday blatantly disregarded with impunity. About his work a prison notebook External links