ABSTRACT
This chapter reads African political prison writing as a site of debates on homosexuality within African political struggle. The representation of same-sex desire or putative homosexuals in this genre is deeply enmeshed with the social distribution of agency, and attention to the regulation of bodies illuminates the genre’s interest in the entanglements of exposure to violence with histories of sexuality within African political activism. The author analyses non-normative sexual desire and practices as interrogatory presences in prison writing from Kenya, Zambia, Malawi, and Nigeria. The chapter focuses on three narratives: Wole Soyinka’s The Man Died (Nigeria, 1972) Sam Mpasu’s Prisoner 3/75 (Malawi, 1995) and Kunle Ajibade’s Jailed for Life: A Reporter’s Prison Notes (Nigeria, 2003). Through close readings, the author expands earlier studies that map out how the contradictory deployments of homosexuality in prison writing indicate a history of queer interrogations that predate the twenty-first-century developments across Africa. If prison writing is the one genre in which the question of sexuality cannot be avoided, its representations of homosexuality codify the limited abilities of authors to accommodate sexual difference in their respective analyses of political hegemony.
