Kofi Awoonor of Ghana, Jack Mpanje of Malawi, Nawal el Sadaawi of Egypt, Denis Brutus ( Letters to Martha) of South Africa and J.M Kariuki of Kenya are others novelists, poets and dramatists that have expanded the scope of prison literature and theatre. During the apartheid era, Die Hodoshe Span (The Island) written by Fugard, the South African dramatist was inspired by a true-life story set in an unnamed prison clearly based on South Africa’s Robben Island prison, where Mandela served his jail term.
Although plays dealing with prison life were interdicted in South Africa, the actors and director, Winston Ntshona, John Kani and Athol Fugard were vast in the tradition of Prison plays. Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom exposes the author’s experience in jail and Soyinka’s The Man Died is a memoir of the Nobel Laureate’s life in detention. Ransom-Kuti, the protest musician was arrested on over 200 different occasions and spent time in jail. The prisoner-dramatist, novelist, musician and poet have come out stronger to narrate their ordeal or to fight against oppression in the case of artists such as Wole Soyinka, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o ( Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary and The Trials of Dedan Kimathi), Ken Saro-wiwa ( A Month and a Day: A Detention Diary) and Fela Anikulapo Kuti. While Antonio Gramsci’s The Prison Notes is a contribution to 20 th century Political Theory, Donald Lowrie’s 1912 book, My Life in Prison captures the author’s experiences in detention.Īlso, Africa has created a wide corpus of prison literature and theatre. Other prison literature writers include Jack London who in 1894 spent a month in the New York State’s County penitentiary, and Socialist writer, Kate Richards O’Hare who spent a year in prison. While Tennessee Williams’ Not about Nightingales establishes the prison genre, John Herbert’s Fortune and Men’s Eyes focuses on the harsh treatment of imprisoned homosexuals. Modernist literature and theatre with its eclecticism saw the upsurge in the prison narrative. Prisoners have produced hundreds of works that encompassed a wide range of literature books describing the prison experience. According to Arnold Erickson, prison has been a fertile setting for Artists, Musicians and Writers alike. Here, the detained locate their experiences and conditions of prison. It is one in which convicts tell their stories from the inside. The exploration of prison is not new in literature and theatre.
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